What is organizational learning?
Today’s organizations are in the learning business. Years ago, while evaluating a training program in an automobile plant, I was told by a senior line worker that his generation was hired for their backs, not their brains. Now those same front-line, manufacturing jobs require computers kills, advanced math, team decision-making, total quality management, and continuous improvement. Every worker today has to take a constant supply of new information and apply it to his or her job, whether he or she is operating an assembly line, cutting sheet metal for a construction crew, managing a store, supervising a sales district, providing medical services, directing a social service agency, administering a federal agency, or leading a multinational conglomerate. In fact, this learning has become the fundamental nature of work
The complexity and rapid change of our work today requires what we refer to as collective learning. A work team learns how to solve a problem together. A large organization learns how to do strategic planning together. They do not simply complete the immediate task; they develop the capacity to perform these tasks successfully in the future.
Learning is critical to the survival of organizations in these rapidly changing times. Peter Noer had this to say in Breaking Free: A Prescription for Personal and Organizational Change:
Organizations of the future will not survive without becoming communities of learning. The learning organization is no academic fad or consultant’s buzzword. It is absolutely essential for organizations to learn from their environments, to continually adjust to new and changing data, and, just as is the case with the individual, to learn how to learn from an uncertain and unpredictable future.
Daniel Kim defined individual learning in organizations in The Link between Individual and Organizational Learning as “… increasing one’s capacity to take effective action.” This capacity is made up of know how and know-why. The first is the ability to do something and the second is forming concepts and generalizations that explain one’s experience. He defined organizational learning in the same way, saying that it increases an organization’s capacity to take effective action.
All learning occurs first within individuals, but the collective know how and know-why of individuals changes the culture, behavior, and effectiveness of the group or whole-organization. To that extent, we can safely say that the group or organization is learning. You and each person on your team might have learned how to prepare and monitor a budget, but figuring out how best to handle a major reduction in revenue requires the synergy of the entire group. It is not the sum of the individual learning, but the creativity and information from the interaction of the team members that results in a successful outcome.
David Garvin explains organizational learning in this way:
Continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning. How, after all, can an organization improve without first learning something new? Solving a problem, introducing a product, and reengineering a process all require seeing the world in a new light and acting accordingly. In the absence of learning, companies—and individuals —simply repeat old practices. Change remains cosmetic, and improvements are either fortuitous or short-lived.
Garvin argues that organizations learn through five main activities: (1) systematic problem-solving; (2) experimentation with new approaches; (3) learning from their own experience and past history; (4) learning from the experiences and best practices of others; and (5) transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.