Tools for Assessing Your Organization's Learning Capabilities
Every organization must learn or die -- learn about itself, the competition, the market, the world.
What does a learning organization look like? Here is how the article's authors, Harvard Business School's David Garvin and Amy Edmondson, summarize work on the concept done in the 1990s and led by Peter M. Senge:
The result was a compelling vision of an organization made up of employees skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge. These people could help their firms cultivate tolerance, foster open discussion, and think holistically and systemically. Such learning organizations would be able to adapt to the unpredictable more quickly than their competitors could.Getting to that point, however, has proven difficult in practice for most companies. There are three building blocks an organization must achieve on the way to this goal.
- Supportive learning environment. "An environment that supports learning has four distinguishing characteristics: psychological safety, appreciation of differences, openness to new ideas, time for reflection."
- Concrete learning processes and practices. "For maximum impact, knowledge must be shared in systematic and clearly defined ways. Sharing can take place among individuals, groups, or whole organizations. Knowledge can move laterally or vertically within a firm."
- Leadership that reinforces learning. "When leaders actively question and listen to employees -- and thereby prompt dialogue and debate -- people in the institution feel encouraged to learn."
(Image of Second Life lecture by el_aquacil, CC 2.0)