A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the
learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.
Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern
organizations and enables them to remain competitive in the business environment.
A learning organization has five main features;
systems thinking, personal mastery,
mental models, shared vision
and team learning. The Learning organization concept was
coined through the work and research of Peter Senge and his colleagues.
It encourages organizations to shift to a more interconnected way of thinking.
Organizations should become more like communities that employees can feel a
commitment to. They will work harder for an organization they are committed to.
Development Organizations do not organically develop
into learning organizations; there are factors prompting their change. As
organizations grow, they lose their capacity to learn as company structures
and individual thinking becomes rigid. When problems arise, the proposed
solutions often turn out to be only short-term and re-emerge in the future.
To remain competitive, many organizations have restructured, with
fewer people in the company. This means those who remain need to work more
effectively. To create a competitive advantage, companies need to learn
faster than their competitors and to develop a customer responsive culture.
Argyris identified that organizations need to maintain knowledge about new
products and processes, understand what is happening in the outside environment
and produce creative solutions using the knowledge and skills of all within the
organization. This requires co-operation between individuals and groups, free and
reliable communication, and a culture of trust.
Characteristics There are a multitude of definitions of
a learning organization as well as their typologies. According to Peter Senge, a
learning organization exhibits five main characteristics: systems thinking,
personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision, and team learning.
Systems thinking. The idea of the learning organization developed from a
body of work called systems thinking. This is a conceptual framework that
allows people to study businesses as bounded objects. Learning organizations
use this method of thinking when assessing their company and have
information systems that measure the performance of the organization as a
whole and of its various components. Systems thinking states that all the
characteristics must be apparent at once in an organization for it to be a
learning organization. If some of these characteristics are missing then the
organization will fall short of its goal. However, O’Keeffe believes that
the characteristics of a learning organization are factors that are
gradually acquired, rather than developed simultaneously.
Personal mastery. The commitment by an individual to the process of learning is
known as personal mastery. There is a competitive advantage for an
organization whose workforce can learn more quickly than the workforce of other
organizations. Individual learning is acquired through staff training,
development and continuous self-improvement; however, learning
cannot be forced upon an individual who is not receptive to learning. Research
shows that most learning in the workplace is incidental, rather than the
product of formal training, therefore it is important to develop a culture where
personal mastery is practiced in daily life. A learning organization has been
described as the sum of individual learning, but there must be mechanisms
for individual learning to be transferred into organizational
learning. Mental models. The assumptions held by
individuals and organizations are called mental models. To become a learning
organization, these models must be challenged. Individuals tend to espouse
theories, which are what they intend to follow, and theories-in-use, which are
what they actually do. Similarly, organizations tend to have ‘memories’
which preserve certain behaviours, norms and values. In creating a learning
environment it is important to replace confrontational attitudes with an open
culture that promotes inquiry and trust. To achieve this, the learning
organization needs mechanisms for locating and assessing organizational
theories of action. Unwanted values need to be discarded in a process called
‘unlearning’. Wang and Ahmed refer to this as ‘triple loop learning.’
Shared vision. The development of a shared vision is important in motivating
the staff to learn, as it creates a common identity that provides focus and
energy for learning. The most successful visions build on the individual visions
of the employees at all levels of the organization, thus the creation of a
shared vision can be hindered by traditional structures where the company
vision is imposed from above. Therefore, learning organizations tend to have
flat, decentralized organizational structures. The shared vision is often
to succeed against a competitor; however, Senge states that these are
transitory goals and suggests that there should also be long-term goals that are
intrinsic within the company. Team learning. The accumulation of
individual learning constitutes Team learning. The benefit of team or shared
learning is that staff grow more quickly and the problem solving capacity of the
organization is improved through better access to knowledge and expertise.
Learning organizations have structures that facilitate team learning with
features such as boundary crossing and openness. Team learning requires
individuals to engage in dialogue and discussion; therefore team members must
develop open communication, shared meaning, and shared understanding.
Learning organizations typically have excellent knowledge management
structures, allowing creation, acquisition, dissemination, and
implementation of this knowledge in the organization.
Benefits The main benefits are;
Maintaining levels of innovation and remaining competitive
Being better placed to respond to external pressures
Having the knowledge to better link resources to customer needs
Improving quality of outputs at all levels
Improving Corporate image by becoming more people oriented
Increasing the pace of change within the organization
Barriers Even within or without learning
organization, problems can stall the process of learning or cause it to
regress. Most of them arise from an organization not fully embracing all the
necessary facets. Once these problems can be identified, work can begin on
improving them. Some organizations find it hard to
embrace personal mastery because as a concept it is intangible and the
benefits cannot be quantified;, personal mastery can even be seen as a threat to
the organization. This threat can be real, as Senge points out, that “to
empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive”.
In other words, if individuals do not engage with a shared vision, personal
mastery could be used to advance their own personal visions. In some
organizations a lack of a learning culture can be a barrier to learning. An
environment must be created where individuals can share learning without
it being devalued and ignored, so more people can benefit from their knowledge
and the individuals becomes empowered. A learning organization needs to fully
accept the removal of traditional hierarchical structures.
Resistance to learning can occur within a learning organization if there is not
sufficient buy-in at an individual level. This is often encountered with
people who feel threatened by change or believe that they have the most to lose.
They are likely to have closed mind sets, and are not willing to engage with
mental models. Unless implemented coherently across the organization,
learning can be viewed as elitist and restricted to senior levels. In that
case, learning will not be viewed as a shared vision. If training and
development is compulsory, it can be viewed as a form of control, rather than
as personal development. Learning and the pursuit of personal mastery needs to
be an individual choice, therefore enforced take-up will not work.
In addition, organizational size may become the barrier to internal knowledge
sharing. When the number of employees exceeds 150, internal knowledge sharing
dramatically decreases because of higher complexity in the formal organizational
structure, weaker inter-employee relationships, lower trust, reduced
connective efficacy, and less effective communication. As such, as the size of
an organizational unit increases, the effectiveness of internal knowledge
flows dramatically diminishes and the degree of intra-organizational knowledge
sharing decreases. Some problems and issues. In our
discussion of Senge and the learning organization we point to some particular
problems associated with his conceptualization. These include a
failure to fully appreciate and incorporate the imperatives that animate
modern organizations; the relative sophistication of the thinking he
requires of managers; and questions regarding his treatment of
organizational politics. It is certainly difficult to find real-life examples of
learning organizations. There has also been a lack of critical analysis of the
theoretical framework. Based on their study of attempts to
reform the Swiss Postal Service, Matthias Finger and Silvia Bűrgin Brand
provide us with a useful listing of more important shortcomings of the learning
organization concept. They conclude that it is not possible to transform a
bureaucratic organization by learning initiatives alone. They believe that by
referring to the notion of the learning organization it was possible to make
change less threatening and more acceptable to participants. ‘However,
individual and collective learning, which has undoubtedly taken place, has
not really been connected to organizational change and
transformation’. Part of the issue, they suggest, has to do with the concept of
the learning organization itself. They argue that the concept of the learning
organization: Focuses mainly on the cultural dimension
and does not adequately take into account the other dimensions of an
organization. To transform an organization, it is necessary to attend
to structures and the organization of work as well as the culture and
processes. ‘Focussing exclusively on training activities in order to foster
learning… favours this purely cultural bias’.
Favours individual and collective learning processes at all levels of the
organization, but does not connect them properly to the organization’s strategic
objectives. Popular models of organizational learning assume such a
link. It is, therefore, imperative ‘that the link between individual and
collective learning and the organization’s strategic objectives is
made’. This shortcoming, Finger and Brand argue, makes a case for some form
of measurement of organizational learning – so that it is possible to
assess the extent to which such learning contributes or not towards strategic
objectives. In the work of Peter Senge
= The Fifth Discipline = Peter Senge stated in an interview that
a learning organization is a group of people working together collectively to
enhance their capacities to create results they really care about. Senge
popularized the concept of the learning organization through his book The Fifth
Discipline. In the book, he proposed the following five disciplines:
Systems thinking: Organizations are a system of interrelationships. To become
more successful we need to analyze these relationships and find the problems in
them. This will allow an organization to eliminate the obstacles to learning
Personal mastery: An individual holds great importance in a learning
organization. Continuous self-improvement holds as much
importance as commitment and work for the organization. Employees need to grow
and work on their own goals. Mental models: This is the company
culture and the diverse theories and mindsets that serve as a framework for
the functioning of the organization. Learning organizations look for how
these affect organizational development. Shared vision: A learning organization's
employees all share a common vision. Personal goals must be in sync with the
goals and vision of the organization. Team learning: The importance of
dialogue and group discussion. For a team to learn, they must be in sync and
reach agreement. = Challenges in the transformation to a
learning organization = The book The Dance of Change states
there are many reasons why an organization may have trouble in
transforming itself into a learning organization. The first is that an
organization does not have enough time. Employees and management may have other
issues that take priority over trying to change the culture of their
organization. The team may not be able to commit the time an institution does
not have the appropriate help or training. For an organization to be able
to change, it needs to know the steps necessary to solve the problems it
faces. As a solution, a mentor or coach who is well versed in the learning
organization concept may be necessary. Also, the change may not be relevant to
the organization's needs. Time should be spent on the actual issues of the
organization and its daily issues. To combat this challenge, a strategy must
be built. The organization should determine what its problems are before
entering into the transformation. Training should remain linked to
business results so that it is easier for employees to connect the training
with everyday issues. = Problems organizational learning
addresses = Some of the issues that Learning
Organizations wanted to address within Institutions is fragmentation,
competition and reactiveness. Fragmentation is described as breaking a
problem into pieces. For example each organization has an accounting
department, finance, operations, IT and marketing. Competition occurs when
employees are trying to do better or "beat" others in an assignment instead
of collaborating. Reactiveness occurs when an organization changes only in
reaction to outside forces. Only doing an assignment because it is assigned and
not continually creating. These are deeply rooted in many of today's
organizations as a product of capitalism and the drive to generate more profit.
The change becoming a community and a learning organization is called a
"Galilean Shift". The organization is compared to the Galileo Galilei
heliocentric revolution that changed the view that earth was the center of the
universe. See also
Knowledge management Knowledge sharing
Mental models Organisational learning
Organizational structure Systems Thinking
Team learning References
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