Beat Your Competitors With Organisational Learning

image credit wikihow - teams and organizational learning

I started to get interested in the learning organization and organizational learning following several years in business management in the games and gaming industry. Standard management training at the time emphasized the need for rational objective analysis and the need for careful planning.

Whilst there were benefits to this approach, it became clear to me that success didn't come from this alone. Conventional strategy and marketing approaches tended to airbrush 'people' out of the picture.

It was OK doing loads of research and setting out a course for action, but experience showed that 'how' the research was interpreted and 'how' plans were implemented were the things that made a difference.

Organizational learning struck a chord because it looked at how people in organizations learn and how that learning improves performance. The observations of some key writers really connected with me.

"The learning of the people who comprise an organisation is critical in determining its survival" Bob Garrat - Creating a Learning Organization

"Competitive success is a function of organizational excellence...the only competitive weapon left is organisation" D.Ulrich - A New Mandate for Human Resources - Harvard Business Review -1998

"Learning is the key to survival and development of companies today" Pedler Burgoyne & Bodell - The Learning Company

image credit Daily Telegraph


Learning Organizations are where "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire" Peter Senge

"individuals and organisations that are incapable of escaping the gravitational pull if the past will be foreclosed to the future" Gary Hamel

image credit royalty free photographs


"an organisation that is able to discover what is effective by re-framing its own experiences and learning from that process; by developing the skills of its people it continuously transforms itself" Pedler Burgoyne & Bodell

"an organisation skilled at creating, acquiring and transfering knowledge and at modifying its behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights" D.Garvin

image credit royalty free photography


L>=C... the rate of an organisation's learning needs to greater than or equal to the rate of change in its environment.

L=P+Q...the quality of an organisation's learning is made of P its current and past knowledge or programmed knowledge PLUS Q its ability to keep an open mind and question its assumptions about the world.

Reg Revans is famous for inventing the idea of Action Learning

If Peter Senge is the Prince of organizational learning then Chris Argyris has to be the King

One of his key ideas is the notion of Double Loop Learning This is where people in organizations are able to 'think outside the box'. Single loop thinkers try and improve the system they've got, double loop thinkers invent a new system!

Another key theme of Argyris's writing is the the topic of Organizational Defence This is a crucial aspect of organizational learning because if people are too defensive they will hold onto past ideas and not listen to new information.

Argyris talks about undiscussables the stuff that people learn NOT to mention in a meeting. He then points out that you are really in trouble when the undiscussables become undiscussable. In other words you can't even bring up thorny and difficult subjects such as how poor the company's products and services are!

Management authors Paul Tosey, Peter A.C. Smith say that "headway in substantive wide-scale learning organization development is seriously jeopardised unless individual organizations objectively measure their progress"

This model can be found in: Journal:The Learning Organization 1999.Vol 6 Issue 3 pp 107 - 116

ISSN:0969-6474

Like any management initiative OL seems like a good idea until you try and measure its effects. Effective needs to be tracked on the individual, group and organizational level.

Join the SOL group here.