The presence of “learning as a way of being” is also not found in the organizational learning processes I described in my earlier essay on Essentials (Bergquist, 2024). As an integrative process and integrated outcome, this unified form of learning is found within one’s own personhood. According to Vaill (1996, p. 53), it is not a collective experience.
“Learning as a way of being is not the same thing as either organizational learning or the learning organization. Rather, it is a companion philosophy, at the personal level, to these and other developments involving learning by managerial leaders and by organizations. In the previous chapter, I said that engaging in learning as a way of being is the key to successful institutional learning. Here, I suggest that it is clearly both a basic form of high-quality organizational learning and a prerequisite attribute of men and women who are to lead the way to the new learning organizations. Leaming as a way of being is foundational to all efforts to enhance the learning of managerial leaders.”
This particular emphasis on learning-as-a-way-of-being holds major implications for those seeking to manage in a whitewater environment. Vaill (1996, pp. 53-54) puts it this way:
“Today’s management literature is packed with exciting statements about the new kinds of things the managerial leader of today and tomorrow needs to be able to do. Amid all these ringing calls to arms-and they are an impressive array of qualities and abilities, and probably quite valid—we may quietly ask, “And how is it that a managerial leader immersed in permanent white water is going to develop these sterling capabilities!” That is the question of the decade, perhaps of the next quarter century. Many of us who are educators have been trying to answer this question with institutional learning, that is, we have been trying to design learning experiences for these managerial learners, experiences that will foster the abilities so many thinkers are saying they need. There is a good possibility, though, that we have stumbled onto the limits of institutional learning philosophy and practice in these attempts. Certainly there are hundreds of corporate directors of executive development and many, many M.B.A. program directors who are wondering if their curricula are actually developing the needed qualities in participants. Thinking long range, thinking strategically, handling multiple ambiguous variables at once, staying clear on fundamental vision and values, exuding integrity and steadfastness and interpersonal sensitivity in all one’s affairs, handling stress with relative ease—these are abilities that we are no longer sure can be developed in a three-day corporate retreat for “high potentials” or the introductory M.B.A. course in “management and organization.” If the truth be told, we are not exactly sure how these qualities develop, although it is a nontrivial observation that they are qualities of character as much as they are behavioral skills . . .”
This recognition of character rather than behavior led Vaill to a realization in his original 1990 book (Vaill, 1990/2008) that executive development is spiritual development.” I have already addressed this conclusion reached by Vaill regarding whitewater leadership and the navigation of a kayak on a turbulent river.
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