At an online conversation at Learntec last Wednesday, I described a few things I had learned about a networked culture that sustained itself again all odds for tens of thousands of years. By dedicating more than half of their resources to intangibles such as learning, relationships, and the technology of eco-farming, the Aborigines of Australia created a society without war, crime, poverty, or taxes.
These people learned through story and ritual kept alive through a pattern of living in one another’s communities. Men moved from one country to another from the age of 14 until the age of 32, learning the culture of an entire continent. Eco-farming produced sufficient food to enable people to devote most of their time to refining and passing along knowledge. Multi-dimensional stories told around community campfires transmitted the law, cultural mores, respect for one another, ecological awareness, and entertainment. Interpreting the stories in all their meanings was each individual’s responsibility. There were no schools. These people had no word for knowledge, for what we Westerners call knowledge was for them simply the way one led one’s life.
The Aborigines had neither kings nor chieftains. Everyone was a leader. When guided by respect for others, deep connections among all members of society, and a culture of sharing, there was no need for hierarchy. Or police. Or government.
My fellow participants in the conversation cautioned me against taking lessons from romanticized versions of distant cultures. They are correct. The Fortune 500 would be ill-advised to implement 18-year job rotation training or to train assembly-line workers through campfire stories. However, I do think other cultures and disciplines can act as catalysts to innovation in how we think about our environment. This is where innovation comes from: mashing up ideas and methods from different realms in order to explore similarities and differences.
European civilization is barely ten thousand years old; Aborigine culture thrived for thirty to fifty thousand years (until it succombed to European diseases). Europe has been plagued with war, inequality, intolerance, torture, and starvation throughout its history; all of these were unknown in Aboriginal Australia. Surely there are some lessons in this.
Questions — not prescriptions — that occur to me as I contemplate learning among the Aborigines and learning in modern corporatios include:
What’s the appropriate balance of learning and doing? Might we do better by dedicating more time to sharing what we know and less to tangile production? In other words, are there opportunities for us to work smarter, not harder?
Should we dedicate more time to learning that takes a while to sink in (like oft-told campfire stories) and less on transferring bare-bones knowledg nuggets? Does “rapid eLearning” really help us become better workers?
Can we integrate knowledge and work so that the distinction between the two disappears? If life is for learning, why would we ever want to separate the two? Why do we need the corporate equivalent of school?
Might mutual respect and a common worldview enable our organizations to do away with rulebooks and management mechanisms? Wouldn’t helping customers be a better use of our time than trying to control one another internally? Doesn’t innate motivation to do what’s right trump the carrot-and-stick variety?
Mashing up concepts from different disciplines is the direction my friends and I are headed with the Learning Irregulars. My hope is that dwelling on questions like these can open our heads to innovation. I’ve just scratched the surface here. (Also, my knowledge of Aborigine culture is appallingly thin.)
What do you think?
Related:
Nancy White: More than conversation
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Jay
Don’t know anything about Aborigine culture, but was reminded by your comment about ‘more time learning than doing’ that we are human beings, not human doings and reflection and learning are a core part of a human being.
From an organisanal perspective, the question must be does this support an improvement in performance and and I’m sure it does and that there is evidence to support this. However, the ingrained organisational view of management and learning needs to evolve and begin to value this approach.
In many places the short-term focus combined with an unquestioned management culture makes conversations about this difficult.
So it will be good to have a debate about these issues, but I would like to see this firmly rooted in the context of performance. Finally, I agree that this requires a mashing of disciplines. The human being in a organisation doesn’t care if the discipline is learning, informal learning, internal communications, knowledge management or HR, they are looking for help and support to do a great job.
I look forward to the debate, breaking down a few barriers and hopefully lots of innovative ideas.
so much to think about here…for many people the joy of learning is gone. perhaps they got the idea that learning was somehow situated outside themselves or that learning was merely the transmission of something from one person to another. i think of paolo freire’s “banking” model of education. one person–the teacher—puts content into the head of another—the student. learning then feels passive. (freire was against this)
i think learning is constructing knowledge with others and self, a much messier process. in this way of thinking, learning is perpetual, ongoing and fulfilling.
i’m not sure how to help people feel like they’re a part of learning. actually, i know how to do this with my students but not always with adults.
do you know the book “Flow” by mihaly csikszentmihalyi? many in literacy education have used his idea of optimal experience to get us thinking about teaching. people feel “flow” when they are doing something that is not too hard nor too easy for them, when they have a sense of control and when they get immediate feedback. as one can imagine, the implications for teaching are significant. do these same conditions have a place within the learning structure of a business?
Peter, I believe that the economic cataclysm as the industrial age gives way to the network era changes the goal of most corporations from profitability to survival. That’s why the Aborigine’s 20,000+ year record of sustainment is apt. Lots of organizations are dinosaurs who will not make it through the next three years. The companies that survive will be knowledge-based, and the Aborigine achievement raises some interesting parallels.
Nancy, I agree that trying to externalize learning wrings the life out of it. As for Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, yes, I revere his work and, in a similar vein, that of his colleague Marty Seligman, the father of the positive psychology movement. As for people enjoying challenge, yes, this must become a tenet of business learning. No flow, lower profits.
I’m so sorry, but this is not actually OK. The things you have said here are factually wrong, and as such, harmful.
1. ‘eco-farming’. While anthropologists suspect that some farming was done in the South, we have no evidence for agriculture.
2. ‘Ecological awareness’. The arrival of people in Australia coincided exactly with the extinction of the megafauna (large, slow mammals). The current theory is that they were hunted to extinction.
3. ‘These people had no word for knowledge’. There are over 500 known indigenous languages in Australia.
4. ‘Everyone was a leader’. While there were 500 + cultures in Australia, all known cultures were/are strongly hierarchical along complex kinship lines.
5. ‘until it succumbed to European diseases’. Active efforts to exterminate Aborigines by white settlers included poison, shootings, alcohol, displacement, and ‘breeding out’.
Romanticising aborigines is common enough, and understandably so. But to do this is also to dehumanise them. Pre-settlement, aboriginal people did what all people do – ate, slept, made some religion, had a laugh now and then. They exploited the resources available to them, just like everyone else who has ever lived.
Reinventing aborigines as ‘magic’ hampers understanding of aboriginal cultures. But it’s worse than that. It cripples the lives of the very, very few aboriginal people that are left.
Is it so disappointing that these are real people?
Well, Zoe, “wrongfulness” is relative. I’m still learning about the Aborigine culture but I do not mean to dehumanize them. In fact, I hold them up as an example for others to learn from.
As to your specific points,
The Aborigine did not practice agriculture. They nurtured the land rather than trying to cultivate it. Sveiby refers to this as eco-farming.
I hadn’t heard the theory that large mammals in Australia were hunted to extinction. Even if this were the case, it doesn’t mean that Aborigines were not ecologically aware during the tens of thousands of years afterward that we do know about.
Australia may have had over 500 indigenous languages but my point was that they did not have a concept of an entity called knowledge as something separate from life.
I’ll go with Karl-Erik’s concept that “everyone was a leader” to mean what happened in practice unless I learn that the hierarchies you refer to were power structures.
I recognize that Europeans destroyed Aborigines in many ways. My understanding is that exposure to Euro diseases was the primary factor, immediately obliterating between 50% and 90% of the population.
Nowhere do I “reinvent Aborigines as magic.” If I did not consider them real people, I would hardly hold them up as an example for us to learn from in today’s world.
I’m really glad that your interest in Aboriginal Australia is so strong. If you would like to learn more, the best book on the market is this one:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Archaeology-Dreamtime-Prehistoric-Australia-People/dp/1876622504/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234869826&sr=1-2
…bear in mind, though, that Aboriginal culture doesn’t store well in books!
In terms of knowledge creation & maintenance, there are some really interesting aspects here that you can explore, and – as you suggest – they do open doors for thinking about knowledge.
1. In community, knowledge is distributed & maintained in accordance with gender & kinship structures. (By convention, this is called ‘law’ in English). Law is different for different people – young boys at initiation will be told law in a men’s place, women get told different law in a woman’s place. It’s all predicated on secrecy – even knowing law that isn’t yours is against law, and punishable. (Obviously, this makes law difficult for westerners to study!)
2. Law (what law westerners know of and are allowed to hear) cannot be differentiated from story. Law is story, story is law. Law is also maps, seasonal changes, family history, sacred places and practices, advice on poisonous food, everything you need to live. Was this what you were aiming for when you said knowledge is not separate from life?
3. Regarding ‘life without poverty/taxes’ – you may find aboriginal approaches to sharing interesting (especially Arrente etc. traditions). As you imply, there is no ownership, which means that everything must always be shared. Sharing (e.g. of food) is done on lines of hierarchy/kinship, so the most important members of the community have the best chance to live. Not sharing is breaking law and therefore punishable (spearing etc). While harsh to Western eyes, this is a big part of what kept the civilisation alive for so long.
4. Regarding ‘life without crime’ – crime in Aboriginal cultures covers the scope from murder to being in the wrong place (e.g. a man in a woman’s place). Aboriginal law is still at work in Australia. Problems crop up when the two laws/knowledges clash – in a lot of places, aborigines who commit crimes face two punishments: first, jail, and later, spearing (this is usually administered by elders to the offender’s thigh). There are implications for reconciling law/knowledge structures in this that are ripe for exploration, and some work has already been done: http://www.lrc.justice.wa.gov.au/2publications/reports/ACL/DP/Part_05B.pdf for an intro.
I do hope you’ll read Josephine Flood – she gives as good an insight as you can get without going to Country for yourself. And as you already know, there is a lot to be learned from aboriginal Australia.
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