The Path to a Learning Organization
What prerequisites must be in place for an organization to be able to call itself ‘learning’?
Studies show that organizations that meet these four criteria have the possibility to achieve this:
1. Not Running in the Same Track
2. Accepting Mistakes
3. Recruiting Individuals with the Right Attributes
4. Building an Organization for a Learning Organization
1. Not Running in the Same Track
Organizations with inherent resistance to change have the least prerequisites for building a learning organization. Always ‘staying on the same track’ is a guarantee for impeding transformation and hinders initiatives to analyze and improve.
The qualities that hinder this are often ingrained in the corporate culture, where management repeatedly honors the organization’s routines and traditions, and where initiatives to propose changes are suppressed as a threat to this culture.
Creating a New Culture
Therefore, in order to create conditions for building a perpetually learning organization, this stale culture must be dismantled. Initiatives for change are the very foundation of what drives analysis and are the hallmarks of a continuously learning organization.
The path forward from this tradition-bound organization involves a deliberate effort to introduce studies and analyses, continuous improvement work, and a new culture that, instead of being conservative, invites these changes.
Download the guide: “3 Steps to Motivate Your Course Participants”
2. Accepting Mistakes
An organization that punishes mistakes and rewards success instills a fear of change. All change is accompanied by mistakes before the right way forward is discovered. Punishing those individuals who represent the group of employees driven to try to bring about change casts a shadow over the organization and prevents a learning organization from taking shape.
Implement Fact-Based Change
Instead, the organization’s leadership should invite engagement in the change process and recognize and communicate the value of the insights that failures provide for ongoing change efforts. There are several ways to initiate this work, where once again a continuous quality improvement approach involving analysis of the current state, proposing improvement measures, and implementation can drive the organization to learn.
The foundation lies in the analysis work that provides the prerequisites necessary to have a fact-based foundation, which in turn should be openly communicated. This communication about shortcomings and opportunities for improvement initiates the organization to take initiative.
3. Hire Individuals with the Right Attributes
The learning organization recognizes the value of individuals who possess the right attributes to drive analysis and improvement efforts.
It is not common for these attributes to be included in the standard recruitment of new personnel, who are instead expected to fill the gaps that have become vacant. In recruitment, the focus is often on the individual’s skills and experience in doing what the predecessor has done.
Dare to Think Differently
It’s a conservative approach to bringing in new personnel that, instead of creating conditions for change, leads to an organization without ambitions to accomplish anything other than what it has always done.
Individuals who can admit that they are not afraid to make mistakes and who are analytical and willing to seek information that forms the basis for improvement are the ones who drive a learning organization forward.
4. Build a Learning Organization
We often observe the ambition to create a foundation for education. However, it is an entirely different matter to build a learning organization that generates its own basis for genuine learning. The top-down approach of an ‘educational organization’ assumes that the top management knows best and that the courses distributed to employees come from an elite that knows best.
It also accentuates the conservative organizational structure where each training is a message of ‘how we want you to do it’ and is often accompanied by a certifying test that truly cements this. It doesn’t get better either when the courses are not updated, so the messages they contain are one or more years old.
Learning brings about change
All of this, combined with the organization’s inability to manage its LMS systems and its courses, solidifies the organization in a dangerous way within an ever-changing and competitive world. Instead, the organization should invite learning as a complement to real change efforts.
When both mistakes and successful initiatives are carried out, these results should reach the employees who are affected to gain full power in these initiatives. Sometimes it can be a larger group, and sometimes just a few. To ensure that both the educational platform and course content align with this change effort, there must be an organization that manages this incredibly important information and knowledge work.
Don’t get stuck in technology
Most importantly, this group should have an understanding of how the continuous learning of the learning organization works, that they are ‘good clients’ of content, and that this work includes both themselves as requirement setters and the personnel and experts who possess the knowledge that the message and content should reflect. We often see that this work falters and that the LMS system is managed as an IT tool without focusing on the most important work of managing course content and developing new courses.
Patrik Löfvin
NXT Learning
