Reflections Volume 1, Number 1 [antikvár]

From the Founding Fditor EDITORIAL Dear Reader, I want to introduce Reflections: The SoL Journal and tell you what our basic purpose is and how we propose to go about fulfilling it. What makes the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) as an organization unique is the effort on the part of researchers, consultants, and practitioners (active managers) to build bridges to one another's domains so that knowledge and skill that is developed in one domain can be disseminated and used in the other domains. We start with the assumption that each of these communities has important insights into how organizations can be improved and how our global environment can be better sustained, but we are highly aware of how difficult it is to communicate across the cultural boundaries that grow up in each of these communities. It is my hope that Reflections: The SoL Journal can contribute in a meaningful way to the creation of a genuine dialogue that will stimulate the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge and skill in all of these communities. To achieve these goals, we will create a journal that is somewhat different in that it will try to draw material from each community and try to speak meaningfully to each community. We will solicit a broad range of research pieces, case histories, essays, interviews, learning histories, and classic articles that illuminate individual, group, and organizational learning. To supplement original pieces, we will rely to a considerable degree on reprinting articles that either have not been seen by our community or that warrant another look. We will also count on communications from you in the form of letters, short articles or think pieces, comments, elaborations, or anything else that you believe will communicate your point of view. The selection of our editorial board reflects our goal of broadening the knowledge base on which we want to draw and, as you will see, our selection of pieces for the journal reflects this same effort to expand. The effort to broaden should not, however, encourage a loss of focus on what SoL represents. To this end, I want to make available to our readers some of the thoughts of our society's first Managing Director Goran Carstedt. The publication program will attempt to speak to the purposes and principles Goran articulates in the next piece and, especially, to work to build knowledge across the boundaries of research, capacity building, and practice. We have a terrific team working on the production end of this enterprise: Karen Ayas will be the managing editor, Judy Rodgers has managed to convince MIT Press to publish the journal, and Stephen Buckley has done a heroic job of managing all of the day-to-day affairs at SoL. In addition, Paula Cronin has done some of the key editing. Otto Scharmer has lent support at all stages. And special thanks should go to Jean LeGwin for the design. This team will continue to work to make Reflections the best it can be. Our goal is to be innovative. None of us wants one more journal in a world in which we already are inundated with written material of all sorts, so we will attempt to evolve a method of publication that will make readers want to read. However, we cannot succeed without your input and feedback. As we embark on this publication venture together, let us know what you think, send in contributions, and involve yourself in any way that makes sense to you. /l Edgar H. Schein