Is Your Company a Learning Organization?

In today’s dynamic business environment, the ability to adapt to changes in the market place is key to maintaining a competitive advantage.

By Bryan Leach, P. Eng. | Chartered Managers Canada

Tobin, in his book The Knowledge-Enabled Organization: Moving from Training to Learning to Meet Business Needs, notes that the source of a company’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to know what it knows, to know how to use what it knows, and knowing how to rapidly know something new. This involves a company being able to change from simple adaptive learning necessary to ensure its survival, to generative learning essential to create a new future. The transformation from adaptive to generative learning needs to take place at the individual, team and organizational level within a company. Furthermore, the transformation is a continuous learning process. It is strategically important, must be integrated with, and run parallel to the company’s normal work. That is, companies needs to become learning organizations.

Kransdorff in his book Corporate DNA: Using Organizational Memory to Improve Poor Decision-Making notes that a learning organization has to be skilled at systematic problem-solving, experimenting with new approaches, learning from its own experiences and past history, learning from the experiences and best practices of others, and transforming knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization. It is important to emphasise that organizations do not learn, rather individuals within organizations learn. Accordingly, a learning organization is a collection of individuals that learn. The lessons learned at the individual level must be shared and used by the organization so that a collection of individuals working together can change the way an organization responds to challenges within and outside the organization.

Peter Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, identifies five disciplines or “component technologies” that are necessary to help an organization “learn”. These five disciplines are personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision, team learning and systems thinking. Tobin notes that the “Five Disciplines can be valuable tools, but are not sufficient in and of themselves, to create a knowledge-enabled organization”. Tobin provides five characteristics of the knowledge enabled organization focused on recognizing, locating, promoting, sharing and using the knowledge and skills of its employees. Marsick and Watkins, in an article titled ‘Adult Educators and the Challenge of the Learning Organization’, note that “creating a learning organization is as much an art as a science”. They identified Six Action Imperatives for building a learning organization:

• Create continuous learning opportunities
• Promote dialogue and inquiry
• Encourage collaboration and team learning
• Establish systems to capture and share learning
• Empower people towards a collective vision
• Connect the organization to its environment

Several years ago, the Canadian arm of an international consulting engineering company made its first explicit statement regarding learning organization in a company news letter: “(the company) continues to distinguish itself as a learning organization, and that is continuing to give us a competitive advantage”. Independent of the company, the author undertook a study to investigate the employees’ perceptions of the company as a learning organization. A simple questionnaire was circulated to 28 employees in a major office of the company’s Canadian operation. The employees were asked to respond to two questions for each of the Six Action Imperatives:

1) comment with respect to the company’s performance regarding the Imperative, and
2) rank the company’s performance with the Imperative on a scale of 0 to 100 percent.

The company had a two-level system used to classify employees. There were nine professional levels ranging from entry level graduate (Level 1) up to operating company president (Level 9). There were five levels of technical and support staff ranging from an entry level position (Level A) to an experienced technician (Level E). The survey solicited responses from the full range of employees, from the operating company president to the mail room clerk.

The written comments of the respondents varied from simple phrases or no response at all, to thoughtful paragraphs extending onto additional sheets of paper. Furthermore, the extent and thoughtfulness of the responses was not confined to a particular level, and extended comments were received from employees at all levels.

The feedback from, and the results of the questionnaire are summarized in Table 1, with the key issues identified for each of the Six Action Imperatives, and the recommended actions to move the company towards becoming a more effective learning organization. The average ranking, and the range in rankings for each Imperative are also shown on Table 1. The overall ranking by the employees of the company was that its current reality was 69 percent of the way to achieving the vision of becoming a truly learning organization. The actions required to bridge the reality – vision gap noted in Table 1 require the senior members of the company to take a leadership role by embracing, promoting, encouraging and articulating the need to share knowledge and continually learn to all employees.

Leadership in learning organizations requires leaders and managers at all levels, and particularly those at the top, to develop a learning culture through:

• demonstrating that they value learning and sharing knowledge
• participating in learning activities for their own learning, and sharing their knowledge with employees
• recognizing individuals and teams for their efforts in broadening the knowledge of their entire teams
• empowering employees at all levels to use and share their knowledge
• implementing organizational structures, policies and procedures, measurement and reward systems that support and promote individual learning

Finally, Marsick and Watkins suggest a Seventh Action Imperative ‘Strategic Leadership for Learning’ in which the focus is on leaders building long-term learning capacity that transforms employees and the organization. In short, leaders of learning organizations need to be “keepers of the flame of life-long learning”.

About the Author:

Bryan Leach is based in Calgary, and is a P. Eng. in Alberta and a C. Eng. in the UK. In addition to his technical training in geology and geotechnical engineering, he has a Certificate in Adult and Workplace Learning and a Masters in Continuing Education specializing in Leadership and Development in Organizations. Bryan has over 40 years of professional experience, much of which has involved managing multi-disciplinary project teams. He has lived and worked in England, Hong Kong, Canada and Italy. On taking early retirement in 2009, Bryan established his personal consulting practice specializing in knowledge management, organizational learning and facilitation. During his career, he has published papers and articles on a range of technical and management subjects. Bryan has also been an invited speaker to technical organizations and companies both in Canada and abroad.