The Learning Organisation - my thoughts on

I just completed an amazingly condensed 2-day Learning Organisation workshop. It was conducted by XO in NAS and based loosely on Peter Senge's theory of organisations, 3-legged stool and what have you.

…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

How is this relevant to a military organisation? Well, that's really not important to me. And I most certainly have lots of positive as well as cynical thoughts about such theories and the lofty intention to apply the theories, put them into practice. But perhaps I can better share them later...

The workshop made me go through my core values, my purpose in life and a whole lot of other activites. Now I certainly won't profess to have found my values, sadly. And I certainly don't think I have found my life's purpose. But I suppose what I have done was to really think.

So G was telling me today that during the purpose in life exercise, his finding was that he didn't have any and led him to think that his purpose in life was to find a purpose in life.

That sounded like a cop out. But he really thought so. And I shouldn't think otherwise. I mean, it's his life purpose.

Mine was this belief that the purpose is something about preference to have regretted having done something than to regret not doing anything so as to develop myself in an holistic manner.

Crap. Pure. Bullshit. Refined.

We could share such stuff freely because we were quite comfortable with each other and really his concern was that he really was thinking that a third of his life has gone and he finds himself purposeless (as oppose to purposeful). He starts thinking that he never had such problems in JC when his primary purpose was to be a good canoeist.

It was a well-defined purpose and he felt driven.

But not now.

When we were younger, we definitely had well-defined purposes, straight As for exams, get to Uni, get a gold medal in a sport....And now that we have gone through that phase, we don't know what should be the purpose. It's fuzzy, we know it's not well-defined and it can't be as simplistic as getting straight As anymore.

I think this is all for the better. The purposes we had when we were younger were expedient. Of course they will not apply now. We now know purpose cannot be so simple. So isn't it better now? That we are looking for the true purpose instead of something expedient?

Maybe that's why a large number of my 20-somethings friends found themselves undergoing quarter-life crisis, myself included.