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Building Blocks of Learning Organizations - Principles, Implementation, and Challenges

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Naji Ahmed
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85 views3 pages

Building Blocks of Learning Organizations - Principles, Implementation, and Challenges

Uploaded by

Naji Ahmed
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Building Blocks of Learning Organizations:

Principles, Implementation, and Challenges


1. Introduction to Learning Organizations
Learning organizations enact these principles by establishing learning
infrastructures and by ensuring that coherent learning pathways and supportive
learning environments exist. In particular, the learning organization ensures
knowledge transfer and the sharing of skills, so that learning can take place at
individual, group, and organizational levels. Learning organization principles can be
designed into the work group and team by handling individual knowledge, and the
collective knowledge revealed through enactment. However, no recommendations
can guarantee the successful implementation of learning principles and
infrastructures. This article concludes, therefore, with the challenge presented to
organizational learning: the need to create readiness among all stakeholders for the
establishment of the learning organization and possible ways to create that
readiness.

In moving from the passive recipient of knowledge to a more active participant in its
acquisition and its use, the learning organization recognizes the critical interplay
between knowledge, practice, and innovation. But how is this shift in practice to the
learning organization achieved? What are the basic building blocks for establishing
learning in an organization? This paper presents three important learning principles
to be used as the foundation of a learning organization. The recommendations are
based upon insights gained from action research and the systematic study of
teaching/learning processes in corporate environments.

2. Five Building Blocks of a Learning Organization


Second, the organization needs to develop a vision of itself as a learning
organization. To be a learning organization, the organization needs to see itself as
one. It needs to make learning explicit, intentional, and universally available. If any
act is to be taken to teach, then the organization – not some isolated group within it
– needs to take responsibility for learning in a deep and sustained manner. Part of
this can be a communications and information structure that is designed to foster
well-informed learning at all levels, seeks to develop and make widely available
systems for measuring the results of learning activity, and seeks to foster the
organization’s reflective competence.
First, any act or behavior anywhere in the organization – from the smallest team
through the whole system – needs to be taken as something to learn from. How can
the observed actions foster learning – about the actions and about how to do things
better?

It begins with the recognition that the organization as a whole and all its
subdivisions need to engage in all three types of learning – adaptive, generative, and
enthusiastic. Multiple learning processes then become the bones of the learning
organization. We specify five building blocks for such an organization.

3. Selecting and Implementing a Key Building Block


In the real world, potential learning organizations commonly fall short of the
wonder that generally fills the pages of the concept's advocates. Two examples may
illustrate both the prototypical recipe for developing a learning organization and
some sources of dysfunction. The first case is a series of observations on the
operations of 18 mission-driven health and hospital organizations that largely
resemble Argyris and Schon's conception of effective learning systems - that is, all
are well-intentioned, support diligent and well-prepared employees who develop
some sense of ownership in their organizations, use financial accountability systems
that interact with specialist roles and protocols to focus the attention of managers
and clinicians broadly and collectively on the problems of patients and transport
best practice information readily between all layers of the partnership between
management and labor. They were chosen primarily to investigate the relationship
between the social and the technical dimensions of the health care purchase-work-
sickness-wellness chain, but a wonderful side effect of that study is documentation
of very high service quality and a remarkable capacity to consistently keep their
deliveries aligned with any changes in their customer bases or external
environment. The second case elaborates the generic requirements of learning in a
specific industry.

4. Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing Building


Blocks
Organizational pathologies arise when the stress on exploiting existing
opportunities distracts attention from detection and sensitivity to new or existing
opportunities that can guarantee sustainability and vitality to organizations. Not
surprisingly, classic prejudices against the learning ideal play a big role in these
pathologies. It is curious to note that prominent exponents of highly sophisticated
organizational learning techniques, such as Peter Senge, have written significantly
about the several barriers that cloak or negate organizational learning even as they
champion the cause of fuller utilization of these techniques. Here is a passage by
Senge reflecting these concerns.

The preceding discussion notwithstanding, the literature provides a graphic account


of significant problems faced by organizations in their attempts at becoming and
maintaining themselves as learning organizations. Reflecting on this before
summing up the present paper would be particularly instructive. The point that
runs through the several obstacles mentioned in the literature is that they go
beyond simple resistance to or lack of interest in learning, are derived from their
very participation in vigorous periods of change, and stem from a number of
institutional and environmental complexities in the process of trying to leverage the
potential de-biasing effect of learning.

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