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INTERESTS AND PERSPECTIVES
I am a teacher, researcher, and consultant. As Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, for more than a decade I directed the School's Master's degree program in Organizational Learning from its inception (the program was recently renamed Organization Development and Knowledge Management).
My main interest, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, is our changing world and how to bring about deep and lasting change in the way we organize, to enable organizations to meet the challenges of twenty-first century values and problems.
In both the private and public sectors, people continue to organize around principles and values that were dominant in the nineteenth century. Those do not stand us in good stead today. People in work organizations - public, private, and non-profit - are not fully engaged. We don't bring out their creative capabilities. Those are essential for 'knowledge work'. Organizations continually under-achieve: doing things less effectively than they are capable of doing and they waste resources.
My interest in organizational change is not confined to work organizations. The problems there have parallels in the public sphere around the world, where similar models of organizing are used. Operating within that framework, political leaders at different levels often end up serving their own interests, or those of a small minority, and, at worst, are corrupt.
In the Organizational Coaching and Learning Group, we believe that both the problems and their solutions are intimately linked to accountability. The question that organizations can address on either a large or small scale is how to shift from a mindset of compliance to one of accountability. We know that the shift to accountability involves profound changes, not least in people's relationships with one another. I believe that those changes are needed in a world where people have the potential to exercise enormous - even god-like powers - over others and where human kind faces incredibly complex problems. My main interest is in helping to address these issues on a small scale, in the context of how we organize our work.
I came to the U.S. from South Africa where I was born and raised. As a naturalized American, South Africa and the people are in my blood. I have an abiding interest in the enormous issues that they and other people on the continent face and in finding and developing alternative, effective ways of dealing with their problems, as well as in learning from African people. |
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Mark Addleson, Ph.D.