Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
what just happened. Agility and intelligence are required to respond to the incessant
barrage of frequent, unplanned changes' (Wheatley, 1999: 38).
Knowledge is often linked with power. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to
link it to life and sustainability. As Wheatley (2001b) writes:
Although we live in a world completely revolutionized by information, it is
important to remember that it is knowledge we are seeking, not information.
Unlike information, knowledge involves us and our deeper motivations and
dynamics as human beings. We interact with something or someone in our
environment and then use who we are - our history, our identity, our values,
habits, beliefs - to decide what the information means. In this way, through our
construction, information becomes knowledge. Knowledge is always a reflection
of who we are, in all our uniqueness. It is impossible to disassociate who is
creating the knowledge from the knowledge itself.
Adaptability to change within communities, organizations and societies will largely
depend on their relationship to new and possibly disturbing information. Wheatley
concludes:
Information must actively be sought from everywhere, from places and sources
people never thought to look before. And then it must circulate freely so that
many people can interpret it. The intent of this new information is to keep the
system off balance, alert to how it might need to change. An open organization
doesn't look for information that makes it feel good, that verifies its past and
validates its present. It is deliberately looking for information that might threaten
its stability, knock it off balance and open it to growth.
(1999: 83)
Open access to information contributes to self-organized effectiveness. Innovation
is nurtured by seeking and securing information and developing knowledge from a
variety of connections that cross disciplinary or institutional boundaries, cultural
spaces and physical and virtual places, from actively participating in a variety of
professional and other networks, and so on. Knowledge will therefore grow within
relationships shared, made meaningful and developed through dialogue, debate and
interaction. Indeed, a living network will only pass on what it believes to be
meaningful.
Changing minds
The process of sustainable development often involves changing attitudes and values
as well as behaviours. The American psychologist Howard Gardner (2006: 1) writes
that, almost by definition, leaders can be understood as people who change minds.
He reviews a number of ways and contexts in which minds change directly within
organizations, intimate family situations or other personal relationships or indirectly
within a culture or within nature. Whatever the case, the key to changing minds is
changing people's mental representations - in other words, the way a person conceives,
perceives, codes, retains and accesses information. This may occur through speech,
discussion, art, scientific discovery or lived experience. It may involve sound, image,
