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Learning Organizations – notes.

Peter Senge (Senge et al 1990), founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management and co-author of ‘The 5th Discipline, The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization’ The five disciplines that need to be present for an effective learning organization being systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning (Senge et al 1990)., rather cryptically defines learning organizations as those organizations where people continually learn together about how to learn together. The objectives of organizational learning being to expand thinking patterns and create the results that are desired by the people within the organization. Gavin (1993) recognizes three critical issues for a learning organization, the three Ms; meaning; management; measurement. Griffin (2003) also views the learning organization from the perspective of a manager, whereby any learning by the employees is to be put to use in order for the organization to develop. Strauss et al (2003) and Griffin (2003) have similar views on the learning organization as an organization that learns by gathering data and using that data to efficiently adapt to a changing environment. Success in the business world will come from the learning organization model where change is managed more effectively than previously and creates a competitive edge over the competition.

Shell and McDonalds are named as learning organizations because of their learning centers e.g. the ‘McUniversity’ (Griffin 2003). A rather simplistic measure of an organization as ‘learning’ is the addition of learning center. Senge (1990) and Strauss (2003) also give examples of learning organizations in the commercial world; Procter and Gamble; Shell; AT&T. It is noteworthy that the world’s universities are not included in the lists of learning organizations. Jaffee (1998 citing Lawrence and Lorsch 1967 and Thompson 1967) relates Senge’s (1990) attributes of a learning organization to universities,

‘the model of a learning organization would also expect higher education to develop and deploy the capacity for continual assessment, reflection, self-transformation and quality improvement’.

Against expectations that an institution of learning necessarily has the attributes of a learning organization are the conservative work practices of many years standing and learning that is considered separate from ‘the work’, e.g. scholarly activity often has separateness from teaching students (Jaffee 1998). Leading to an attitude where Innovation is viewed as disruptive, change is resisted or ignored and the learning organization does not evolve (Seely Brown and Duguid 1990).

Mark Easterby Smith, Chair of the British Academy of Management, Professor of Management Learning and co-author of ‘The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning & Knowledge Management’ (2003), considers that organizational learning falls into two classifications i.e. technical or social. Describing the technical view, Easterby Smith and Lyles (2003) consider that learning comes from information that is in the public domain either internal to the organization or in the external environment. Data is then processed and interpreted and organizational learning comes from employees jointly agreeing on the sense of the data.

In terms of knowledge management A ‘term for making more efficient use of the human knowledge that exists within an organization’ (Computer Language Company Inc, 2005)., intellectual assets can be reused, shared amongst colleagues and added to by future organizational employees (Hansen et al 1999). The social process contributes to learning through a concentration on the way people make sense of their experiences at work. Experiences that may be explicit e.g. from grading information and tacit, as in the feeling that a skilled educator has that a class has gone well. Tacit experience arrives from observation, emulation and socializing with other practitioners.

Moving away from a top down view of a ‘managed’ learning organization, Stacey (June 2003) argues that organization cannot learn, the learning is the activity and result of interdependent people. Stacey (June 2003) suspects that talk of an organization, as ‘learning’ is to incorrectly anthropomorphize an organization into a person. Through transformative shifts in identity of the interdependent, by way of communication, new patterns of learning emerge. Reflection is a characteristic of a ‘learning organization’ (Limerick et al 1994),

Organizational transformation occurs through ‘action learning’ when learners collaboratively question their actions and thus a learning organization emerges (Limerick et al 1994, Ellis and Phelps 2000):










References

Easterby-Smith M, Lyles M, 2003, The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning & Knowledge Management, (eds) Easterby-Smith, M, Lyles M, Blackwell, Oxford, ISBN: 0631226729.

Easterby Smith M, 2004, Profiles, Lancaster University Management School, http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/dml/profiles/64/

Fullerton J P, Review of the fifth Discipline,
http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/jfullerton/review/learning.htm

Garvin D A, 1993 Jul-Aug, Building a learning organization, Harv Bus Rev.;71(4):78-91, Harvard Business School.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10127041&dopt=Citation

Griffin, R.W ,2003, Fundamentals of Management: Core Concepts and Applications, third edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Hansen MT, Nohria N, Tierney T,1999 Mar-Apr, What's your strategy for managing knowledge? Harv Bus Rev. 77(2):106-16, 187.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10387767&dopt=Citation

Jaffee D, September 1998 Institutionalized Resistance To Asynchronous
Learning Networks, JALN Volume 2, Issue 2, www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v2n2/pdf/v2n2_jaffee.pdf

Lawrence, Paul R. and Jay W. Lorsch. 1967, Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. Boston: Graduate School of Business, Harvard University.

Limerick, D., Passfield, R. and Cunnington, B. (1994) "Transformational change: Towards an action learning organisation", The Learning Organization, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 29-39.

Seely Brown J and Duguid P, 1991, Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation, The Institute of Management Sciences ( now INFORMS)
http://www2.parc.com/ops/members/brown/papers/orglearning.html

Schon D, 1987, "Educating the Reflective Practitioner" paper to the American Educational Research Association Washington, DC. http://educ.queensu.ca/~ar/schon87.htm

Senge P M, Kleiner A, Roberts C, Ross R, and Smith B, 1990, The 5th Discipline, The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization , New York: Currency Doubleday,

Stacey R, June 2003, Learning as an activity of interdependent people, The Learning Organization: An International Journal, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 325-331(7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Strauss J, El-Ansary A, Frost R, 2003, E-Marketing, (3rd ed), Prentice Hall, US.

Thompson J D, 1967, Organizations in Action. New York: McGraw Hill.