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THE LEARNING
ORGANISATION
Since
Peter Senge
outlined it in 1990 the concept
of the learning organization has received mixed reviews. Organisational
learning seen as a subset of organisational development as propounded by
Chris Arggris and Donald Schon has been more positively received.
Certainly the US and UK governments embraced the idea: their respective
establishment of PICs and Learning and Skills Councils (and latterly
Business Links) was testament to a firm belief that organizations can
‘learn’ and be developed, and that structural and financial
intervention could speed up the process. Now, that initial enthusiasm
appears to have cooled. Where does this leave the learning organization?
One school of thought is that collective learning is more successful on a
small scale, in teams or cells, where experience can realistically be
shared and knowledge pooled. Large-scale collective knowledge is too
unwieldy to be managed or moulded into controlled learning: sceptics point
to the Internet as the perfect illustration. The more data grows and the
group expands, the smaller collective learning becomes. Innovations in
communications technology conferencing and groupware do however facilitate
the sharing of knowledge and experience between dispersed groups. Moreover
they provide a means of organizing that knowledge, and offer various
stimuli for developing and extending the experience of a group.
It is instructive to re-visit Senge’s vision of organizational learning,
and to assess the extent to which it has been applied. For instance, of
the five integral disciplines he proposed, the idea of ‘mental models’
is now key to Neuro-Linguistic Programming; ‘building shared vision’
is now a familiar management buzzword; while ‘systems thinking’ has
largely remained the province of technical specialists. The point is that
objective assessment of the success of his complete model is not yet
possible: parts of it have been seized upon, but the whole is rarely
applied.
Perhaps the idea of the learning organization has ceded to a new vogue for
knowledge management, but the two have a
similar rationale. Both are concerned with establishing systems which can
efficiently bring appropriate expertise to bear on business problems. Both
emphasize the contribution of individuals or small units to a greater
whole. Both are essentially about sharing information and experience in
pursuit of strategic objectives.
| POINTS TO
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