Organisational Learning

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What is Organisational Learning ?

Organisational Learning is the process by which the knowledge and values of an organisation are exchanged, leading to improved solutions and the capacity to learn from action.

Indeed, the way an organisation learns reflects its culture and values. It takes place through its individuals and teams with their unique capabilities and personalities. It cannot therefore be simply the sum of the organisation's learning processes. The desire and commitment to learn is embedded in the way people in the organisation work together and support each other's efforts to continuously improve.

This oneness of view is the collective reality, or shared frame of reference which guides people's choices and behaviours. Achieving these conditions requires effective communication, transparency of decision-making and joined-up working.

New experiences and habits have to replace the old. This takes more than training events and road shows. New emotions and achievements have to be experienced that make the ethos of learning and change a natural way of thinking and doing things.

When teams achieve exceptional results it is because they are learning how to act together as a 'community', playing to each other's strengths and cooperating to overcome their weaknesses. Mistakes and differences are seen as learning opportunities. The thrill of doing something with others that everyone really cares about, and puts their heart and soul into, is a rich and rewarding experience.

Those involved learned how to make change happen, learned to value the contributions of others, learned a great deal about themselves and each other as people, learned how to share their knowledge and experience, learned new skills and behaviours, learned how to build consensus and create shared visions, learned how to challenge assumptions and see things from many different points of view. It is the individual learning that takes place is learning teams that generates organisational learning.

What is a Learning Organisation ?

An organisation that finds itself having to collaborate with others to achieve change can benefit from understanding the contribution that learning tools can make to achieving effective change.

A learning organisation is proactive in building its capacity to adapt and change. That is to say it is not just responding to errors in existing processes and fixing them, it is looking for changes in the way other parts of the organisation behave to change the process itself. This is referred to as double-loop learning - it challenges the status quo, deep rooted assumptions and values. The focus is on engineering new solutions not analysing old problems.

Peter Senge, in his book 'The Fifth Discipline', identified five characteristics of a learning organisation (see below). It's an organisation where people put aside their old ways of thinking, learn to be open with each other, understand how their service or organisation really works, form a plan or vision that everyone can agree on, and then work together to achieve that vision.

There exists a shared vision on which everyone agrees
People discard their old ways of thinking and the standard routines they use for solving problems
Members think of all organisation processes, activities, functions and interactions with the environment as part of a system of interrelationships
People openly communicate with each other (across vertical and horizontal boundaries) without fear of criticism or punishment
People sublimate their personal self-interest and fragmented work interests to collaborate to achieve the shared vision.

This approach is particularly useful in getting multi-disciplinary teams to work together more effectively, or when competition between people in the team is undermining the need for collaboration or the focus is on solving problems not being creative. It has to be said that a learning organisation is an ideal state - something to aspire to.

This will require transformational leadership. The structure will have to be flattened, functional departments eliminated or combined and cross-boundary teamworking introduced. Risk taking, openness and growth must be at the core of the organisation's culture. This creates more disagreement as actions and decisions are more openly challenged and disagreements and difficult choices come out. It's what the leaders of change do (promoting new behaviour patterns) that will be more important than what they say (promoting new thinking patterns).

People learn from what they do. The focus is therefore on Action Learning.The benefits come from people learning how to enhance their ability to communicating effectively and work collaboratively to produce a result they all wanted.

What is Organisational Change ?

When organisations want to change employees need to understand why change is needed and how it will affect them. What exactly is it that has to change, what will be needed to make it happen and how will it be done.
Most organisations focus on HOW the change will happen. The main areas for organisational change initiatives tend to be around structure, technology, physical space and people.

STRUCTURE
Changing conditions outside invariably lead to structural change inside the organisation or team. This is because tasks have to be combined in more cost effective ways, any duplication of resources must be eliminated, new initiatives better co-ordinated, bureaucratic procedures reduced to speed up decision-making or linked service processes standardised. The different types of structure are explained elsewhere.

TECHNOLOGY
Changes in automation, electronic information and communication, as well as the computerisation of work processes and management systems, has all led to rapid changes in the way things get done. It has enabled more networked relationships to be established and virtual teams created.

PHYSICAL SPACE  
Both citizens and employees respond better in more comfortable, secure and healthy surroundings. Changes in structure and technology mean that people need to interact in different ways. The arrival of flexible routines, hot-desking and , homeworking are having an impact on the design of work spaces.

PEOPLE  
Changing the way people communicate and relate to each other is now a prime area for change. People are now seen as the asset that can make the biggest differences in performance. The rise of Organisation Development interventions is proof of this.