A Research into Learning Organizations

In the late 1980’s, Peter Senge, then a relatively unknown professor of management at MIT, USA came to the conclusion that he was perhaps never going to be recognized as a management guru. Senge later recalled in a 1991 interview how he reached this stark conclusion:

“It sort of hit me one morning. While I was meditating, that the learning organization was going to be a hot area in business. I had already watched a fad cycle come and go related to work I had been doing for years with Innovation Associates (his consulting firm). We had been teaching courses in … leadership since 1979, and we all sat on the sidelines and watched as other people wrote about vision, empowerment, and alignment – ideas that we had been teaching for years. That morning as I meditated it dawned on me that it was not OK to sit on he sidelines this time. It's time to write a book on the subject of learning organizations, and I wanted to get it out before the whole world was talking about (organizational learning). 1

So Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Science of the Learning Organization. Published in 1990, it was a loose collection of ideas about change, learning, and communication from various sources. It made the best seller list and turned Senge into
“ Mr. Learning Organization.”

"Brains are in; heavy lifting is out.
That's the essential nature of the new, knowledge-based economy."
- Tom Peters (1994), The Pursuit of WOW!

What Is a Learning Organization?

David Garvin in the August 1993 Harvard Business Review defines a leaning organization as "an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights."

The important component of this definition is the requirement that change occur in the way work gets done. This test rules out a number of obvious candidates such as colleges. We in colleges have been successful in creating knowledge (research) and transferring knowledge (teaching) but have not been successful in applying that knowledge to our own activities.

Peter Singe in his book, The Fifth Discipline, described a learning organization as "a place where people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn."

This definition is very idyllic and abstract. Its focus is on philosophical grand scheme. It is very desirable but what we must do to get there is unanswered.

Ross, Smith, Roberts and Kleiner advocate this definition: "Learning in an organization means the continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into knowledge- accessible to the whole organization, and relevant to its core purpose."
These authors suggest a checklist from this definition:

1. Are you willing to examine and challenge your sacred cows?
2. What kinds of structures have you designed for this testing?
3. When people raise potentially negative information, do you shoot the messenger?
4. Does your organization show capabilities it didn't have before?
5. Do you feel as if what you know is qualitatively different -- "value-added" from the data you took in?
6. Is the knowledge accessible to all of the organization's members?

(Ross, Smith, Roberts, Kleiner, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, p 49.)

Activities of a Learning Organization

1. Systematic problem solving:
• Thinking with systems theory
• Insisting on data rather than assumptions
• Using statistical tools
2. Experimentation with new approaches:
• Ensure steady flow of new ideas
• Incentives for risk taking
• Demonstration projects
3. Learning from their own experiences and past history:
• Recognition of the value of productive failure instead of unproductive success
4. Learning from the experiences and best practices of others:
• Enthusiastic borrowing
5. Transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization:
• Reports
• Tours
• Personnel rotation programs
• Training programs

(David Garvin, "Building a Learning Organization", Harvard Business Review, Aug. 1993, pp. 78-90.)

The Five Disciplines

The core of learning organization work is based upon five "learning disciplines" -- lifelong programs of study and practice:

1. Personal mastery -- learning to expand our personal capacity to create results we most desire and creating an organizational environment, which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward goals and purposes, they choose.
2. Mental Models -- reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.
3. Shared Vision -- building a sense of commitment in a group, be developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.
4. Team Learning -- transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.
5. Systems Thinking -- a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding forces and interrelationships that shapes the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.

(Peter Singe, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, pp. 6-7)

How Do We Assess Ourselves as Learners?
I deliberately seek out learning opportunities rather than waiting to be taught.
I recognize the power of learning through work experience.
I believe I am responsible for my own career and for developing my own career opportunities.
I believe I am accountable for my own development.
I view my education as a continuous, lifelong Endeavour.
I intentionally decide what I need to learn.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find them equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
- Eric Hoffer quoted in Vanguard Management (Quoted by Warren Bennis in On Becoming a Leader. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.)

Individuals must learn for organizations to progress.

An organization's commitment and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.
- Peter Senge (1990), The Fifth Discipline

To succeed, learners and training vendors must move out of the 'traditional training' box. We must each investigate (1) how adults learn; (2) which testing methodologies reflect authentic learning; (3) and which instructional media enhance motivation, inquiry, collaboration, innovation, and a commitment to lifelong learning.

Lifelong Learning

Before we identify how to meet these goals, we must depart from tradition. Whitepapers represent learning tools. As such, they should begin by testing the learner's working knowledge of the subject, pre-established beliefs, and understandings that underlie that knowledge.

Please take a few minutes to think about each of the following questions. Think about how or where you learned the information. How strongly do you trust your knowledge? What concerns do you have after reflecting on each question?

Research indicates that if we want to transfer something from short-term to long-term memory, we should think about it, relate it to other things we know, question it, and transform it into our own words.

Move through the following questions and see how many you can answer and apply to your work environment. Reflect.

How will companies be different in the next decade? How will your job be different in the year 2001?

Do you learn in a different way than you learned as a child? If so, how?
What makes education boring? What makes education interesting?

How can you identify good instructional design? Do the criteria differ with computer-based training?

Which training programs have been your favorites? Which has been your least favorite?

From the last class you attended, how many class objectives can you recite? If you can name a few, how many have you applied?

What did you know nothing about five years ago, though are expert in today? How did you learn that much?

What are your passions? What topics have you always wanted to learn?

Are you looking forward to learning more about this topic? What else have you done to learn about the way you learn?

In 1859 Charles Darwin wrote that evolution requires one to adapt or die. Those who don't adapt become extinct. To stay competitive and make timely decisions we, too, must evolve. We must adapt. We must learn.

Our dilemma is neither new nor strictly a result of more information. John Dewey, an American philosopher, psychologist, and educator at the turn of the century, stated, "Unused resources are human rather than material." Today, we're using technology, but ignoring mental resources.

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major - perhaps the major - stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one-day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
- Jean François Lyotard (1979), The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

With approximately twenty-five billion transactions per second, the brain is more advanced than any computer humans are likely to devise. Why not learn to put those resources to work more effectively?

It's time we move from the information (overload) age to the knowledge age. To do that, we must learn how we learn and do so efficiently. Individuals and organizations must stop viewing education as something that happens only in classrooms. We must re-focus on people, their learning styles, and their needs. It's no longer technology we lack, but the ability to capitalize on brainpower.

Howard Gardner established another way of grouping modalities. He asserts there are at least seven modalities or intelligences those links to our individual styles.

Seven Intelligences

1. Verbal-Linguistic
2. Musical
3. Logical-Mathematical
4. Spatial
5. Bodily-Kinesthetic
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal

Gardner suggests humans can be (1) verbal-linguistic (sensitive to the meaning and order of words), (2) musical (sensitive to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone), (3) logical-mathematical (able to handle chains of reasoning and recognize patterns and order), (4) spatial (perceive the world accurately and try to re-create or transform aspects of that world), (5) bodily-kinesthetic (able to use the body skillfully and handle objects adroitly), (6) interpersonal (understand people and relationships), or (7) intrapersonal (possess access to one's emotional life as a means to understand oneself and others).

While Gardner's work encourages us to think about modality in new and creative ways, a solid grasp of the core modalities applies immediately to everything we do.

Most people retain a dominant and an auxiliary learning modality. We usually rely on those modes to process information at an unconscious level, but we may be consciously aware of which modes we prefer. We access through all senses, but generally favor one. We process visually (by sight), auditorally (by sound), kinesthetically (by moving), and tactilely (by touch).

Motivational Styles

1. Goal-oriented learners: Use education to accomplish objectives.
2. Activity-oriented learners: Take part because of social contact.
3. Learning-oriented learners: Seek knowledge for its own sake.

Adults engage in continual education for various reasons. Our unique motivations help us stay focused and stick with a topic until we solve the current problem and gather enough information to complete our current task.

Cyril O. Houle conducted one of the most famous studies on what motivates learners. He identified three subgroups to categorize motivational styles. (1) Goal-oriented learners use education to accomplish fairly clear-cut objectives. (2) Activity-oriented learners take part mainly because of the social contact. Houle wrote, "Their selection of any activity was essentially based on the amount and kind of human relationships it would yield." (3) Learning-oriented learners seek knowledge for its own sake. "For the most part, they are avid readers and have been since childhood.... and they choose jobs and make other decisions in life in terms of the potential for growth which they offer."

The 10 Challenges of Change

In "The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations," Peter Singe and his colleagues identify 10 challenges of change. Grouped into three categories -- challenges of initiating change, challenges of sustaining momentum, and challenges of system wide redesign and rethinking -- these 10 items amount to what the authors call "the conditions of the environment that regulate growth."

Challenges of Initiating Change

"We don't have time for this stuff!" People who are involved in a pilot group to initiate a change effort need enough control over their schedules to give their work the time that it needs.

"We have no help!" Members of a pilot group need enough support, coaching, and resources to be able to learn and to do their work effectively.

"This stuff isn't relevant." There need to be people who can make the case for change -- who can connect the development of new skills to the real work of the business.

"They're not walking the talk!" A critical test for any change effort: the correlation between espoused values and actual behavior.

Challenges of Sustaining Momentum
"This stuff is . . ." Personal fear and anxiety -- concerns about vulnerability and inadequacy -- lead members of a pilot group to question a change effort.

"This stuff isn't working!" Change efforts run into measurement problems: Early results don't meet expectations, or traditional metrics don't calibrate to a pilot group's efforts.

"They're acting like a cult!" A pilot group falls prey to arrogance, dividing the company into "believers" and "nonbelievers."

Challenges of System wide Redesign and Rethinking

"They . . . never let us do this stuff." The pilot group wants more autonomy; "the powers that be" don't want to lose control.

"We keep reinventing the wheel." Instead of building on previous successes, each group finds that it has to start from scratch.

"Where are we going?" The larger strategy and purpose of a change effort may be obscured by day-to-day activity. Big question: Can the organization achieve a new definition of success?