Society for Organisational Learning in the UK

TITLE: The Evolution of the Coins of British India – A Complexity Perspective
SPEAKER: Dr. Paul Stevens, Vice President, Information Technology, GSK UK Pharma
DATE: Wednesday, 24th January, 2007
TIME: 18.00 – 20.00
VENUE: London School of Economics, Houghton Street (off Aldwych), London WC2

Workshops/Networking meetings are open to all SOL-UK members and Mentors and invited guests. The Workshop is free for SOL-UK members. Non-members may attend up to 2 SOLUK events for a £25.00 fee per event.

One aspect of organizational learning is the ability to generate new ideas. However, our ducation system tends to compartmentalise knowledge into predefined sets, pushing us into stovepipes from which it is very difficult to escape. One way in which new ideas might emerge is by the application of ideas from one discipline to solve the problems of another.

This talk attempts to take knowledge from one area of learning (complexity science) and combine it with another, numismatics (the study of coins and coinage), to see what can be learnt from such a cross-disciplinary approach.

The talk will illustrate how coins and coin designs used by the British East India Company merged from the interaction of different groups of people learning from each other, and will raise the question of how this might be used by numismatists to bring a different perspective to their work.