Approximate reading time: 4 minutes
Is there now a learning imperative facing organisations? The “learning organisation” was a popular concept a few years ago yet proved difficult to convert into a reality.
There was agonising for example, about whether organisations, as opposed to individuals could learn.
I would argue that learning has now become a major company imperative, that is, it’s now a serious driver influencing how companies adapt and thrive. Today talent expects to learn constantly and strategies and structures need to reflect this.
Peter Senge with his well-received Fifth Discipline tried to bring the “Learning Organisation” to life in 1990. But while popularising the idea, there remained no consensus about what it really meant.
He saw the Learning Organization as where “you cannot not learn because learning is so insinuated into the fabric of life." Also, he defined the Learning Organization as "a group of people continually enhancing their capacity to create what they want to create."
As Senge (1990) remarks: "The rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage."
In Senge’s original approach the drive for learning stemmed mainly from the top, with leaders charged with creating a suitable learning environment.
Now in the 21st Century we see learning being driven from many more places than just a strategic direction set by top management.
Rather than aiming at the hard to define “organisation that learns” we must think in terms of cultures that promote individual and group learning through specific means, such as collaboration, experimentation, networking, social media and so on.
Also, what made organisations successful in the past was their ability to scale up in terms of size and operational efficiencies. In that context “a learning organisation” was indeed a hard concept to even understand let alone operationalize.
21st Century organisations will no longer be able rely on sheer size or the accumulation of long lasting stocks of knowledge that they jealously guardhoping to retain competitive advantage.
For example Procter and Gamble originally kept knowledge of Self-directed Teams to itself so as to avoid giving competitors insight into the success of its new approach. It is hard to envisage that sort of secrecy surviving today for more than a few months.
Rather than stocks of knowledge, technical or in other forms whose value constantly declines, organisations must instead generate learning and new knowledge and what matters more than the stock is how it is put to use.
The learning imperative therefore means an organisation becomes less focused on efficiency and more on scaling learning: ensuring individual insights and experience constantly influence the organisation and how it works and adapts on a daily basis.
In its modern form Senge’s learning organisation is one with far more tools at its disposal for promoting learning. For example, social media is able to enhance talent within or outside a company.
Yet while it has potential to add value many organisations are still wrestling with how to integrate it into their operation.
As one commentator has put it such opportunities for collaboration have encountered considerable resistance creating “fear and loathing of such initiatives.”
While there remains considerable uncertainty as to how an organisation can become a “learning organisation”, to some extent this is being overtaken by events.
The need to focus on talent and exploit it more fully, the power of social networks and the emergence of new forms collaboration mean that the drive to learn is not one you control so much as help orchestrate or influence.
Risk taking, continuous innovation, transparency, open engagement with suppliers, partners and customers means there is a continuous, possibly unstoppable drive to maximise opportunities to learn throughout an organisation.
In Senge’s original view the organisation had to be “led” to embrace learning. In contrast the learning imperative is removing this choice from the hands of leaders and distributing it across a far wider constituency.
Starbucks has made a major strategic shift to create an on-line community where it can learn what customers want and ways to improve existing services
NNIT Employee club, a large corporate training firm in India operating globally tries to circumvent the limits of hierarchical structure and obstacles to innovation by creating employee clubs focused on initiatives for change. One of the first things was an attempt to learn how to improve quality.
Deloitte LLP has taken specific decisions to recognise the ever shortening lifetime of the value of what is learned and that the ability to keep learning is a critical skill for everyone.
SAP created the Community Network (SCN) starting with an online network for software developers working on its products. Its success led starting similar networks for “adjacent communities” including business customers, analysts, and even students.
By mid 2009 SCN had 1.7 million members from 200 countries with some 30,000 new people joining each month. SCN has generated more than six million messages and more than 6000 new messages are posted daily—typically from people with “a quick question seeking a quick answer.” That is an awful lot of informal learning!
B&Q in the UK needs to strengthen how it learns from customers.
It is investing in a specialist person to tap “what the customer is directly telling us” through on line comments and has begun gathering tens of thousands of comments about its products and services every month from its on line discussion forums and chat room.
Steven Spear in Chasing the Rabbit describes companies that are constantly able to respond faster and perform better than their competitors. What these have in common is a “culture of structured continuous learning”—based on
- empowering all employees to call attention to any problem they find
- responding to these problems by “swarming people to them until a satisfactory solution is found.
- ensuring that lessons learned from these experiences are quickly and systematically propagated throughout the organisation
Each company must find its own way to responding to the learning imperative. While the choice of how to do this may vary widely, it seems clear that learning is set to become an increasingly powerful corporate driver.
