Today I come to one of the most critical yet one of most mis-understood concepts in modern management -”learning organization”. What is it?
Do overload of training programs, waves of abondoned initiatives, and brain-storming sessions make your’s a learning organization? What if all these still leave customers dissatisfied and employees bewildered and cynical?
Learning must take place at individual level. Most companies do a good job of job specific terchnical training. But what is completely missed out and what can be very frustrating is a total lack of training in self-management. Somehow it is assumed that employees can manage themselves. This can be a huge mistake, given the work pressuress and changing profile of young employees. Lack of creative self management seriously hampers organization development efforts.
Learning must also take place at organizational level. Here too there are problems. Successes and failures are best discussed in the context of business processes, so that the learning can be captured and assimilated in the form of revised business processes. Unfortuntely even ISO 9001:2000 certified companies fail to leverage their business processes in this way. Most important reason for this is processes are not measured properly hence they are very opaque. A comprehensive business process measurement framework is essential for organizational learning.
What is your experience? Do you share these views> Is there anything specific that you are doing?
Original Post: http://exponient.com/blog/?p=21
In large part a agree with your sentiments.
I think there is a real tendancy to make the concept of learning organizations too hard or too complex.
Essentially a learning organization can be defined in accordance with systems theory rules ala Berthalanffy/Merton and other: Systems have parts. Those parts interact. A learning organization behaves in accordance with these rules.
In your post you describe a system which has components that are interacting, however, you cite examples to emphasize your point (and I heartily agree with you) that the interaction is faulty.
To expand, your example; abandoned initiatives reflect interaction between parts of the system that for one reason or another have stopped working.
All learning is intended to engender modification of behavior of one kind or another.
All organizations change, hence all organizations are by definition, learning organizations.
When the changes, as you describe above, are faulty, it is because at some level, the learning did not produce the desired change in behavior.
Every person in an organization is both a learner and a trainer. This must be accepted by the leaders of the organization.
Tnx,
Barry