How can you help the whole-organization learn how to take effective action? First, by helping everyone in the organization understand the dynamic interaction of all of its various parts, and then by reflecting on the significance of that understanding for building the effectiveness of the whole-organization.
To learn, we need to feel the psychological safety and support of a community. We act like a learning community when there is a feeling of connectedness among the members, when everyone considers themselves to be members of that community, when there is continuity between generations (eventually new members add to or replace the knowledge of old members), and when there is a common purpose and shared aspirations. Creating a sense of community is the foundation for whole-organization learning.
Therefore, the challenge is to change an organization into a learning community. To do this we must attend to the structure of the organization. Is it a structure that fosters community in the sense of connectedness, membership, continuity, common purpose, and shared aspirations? For example, a rigid hierarchy does not promote a sense of connectedness among employees. The boxes and lines on an organizational chart say more about where the connections are not than where they are.
Organizational structures, by design, determine the results. If we want to achieve different results, we must change the organizational structure. So the question for you is, How can you get a large (or not so large), complex organization to understand how its structure inhibits the achievement of optimal results, and then, how do we get it to agree on high leverage changes to improve outcomes?
Our natural tendency is to analyze—to understand complex entities by separating them into small parts in our thinking and then to make assumptions (informed or not) about the meaning of one of those parts. We try to explain stock-market performance by looking at interest rates. We try to predict U.S. elections from a political party’s position on trade with China. We critique the performance of U.S. public schools by using SAT scores as the indicator of success. If only the world was that simple! We cannot truly understand and learn from these phenomena unless we consider the dynamic interactions of many factors affecting human behavior.
The complexity of the whole-organization is likely to be overwhelming unless you use a coherent learning-based approach to achieve this understanding. The strategies that lead to whole-organization learning focus on the integration rather than the separation of people, units, and information.