Change is a constant. Intense global competition, the explosion of information technology, and the strong trend toward a knowledge-based economy are continually reshaping the global business environment. The only way to survive is to be a LEARNING ORGANIZATION, one that continually adapts, reinvents the present and the future, and transforms itself. The excellent organizations of the future will be those that understand how to gain the commitment of people at all levels and expand their capacity to learn.
A company's ability to increase revenue, profits, and economic value is directly related to its capacity to learn and innovate. Achieving new and improved products, continually increasing operational efficiency, and creating greater perceived customer value requires the ability to learn. Penetrating new markets and achieving sustained leadership requires applied learning.
To prove this, we need only know that two-thirds of the American firms that made the Fortune 500 list in 1960 no longer exist. Large organizations with strong market dominance but lacking the ability to learn and adapt quickly failed to establish sufficient conditions even to survive.
Organizational learning is increasingly recognized as a critical factor in organizations' ability to create sustainable economic value for their stakeholders. However, the processes for successfully developing the organizational capabilities and competencies that will transform the enterprise into a learning organization are not clearly understood.
The term "organizational learning" is, when you analyze it, a misnomer. In fact, the organization itself doesn't learn. People learn. Any given condition in an organization is affected by the application of knowledge by its members. In order to understand how organizations learn, we must understand how people learn and how they share that knowledge, the processes that support the attitudes and behaviors essential to learning, and the psychological components that underlie resistance to learning.
The attributes of learning
If we try to demarcate the attributes of true learning we can say that they are:
- A state of curiosity and wonder.
- An experience of opening up to new possibilities.
- The intuition that the process of searching for an answer is more important than the answer itself.
- An approach to the individual environment characterized by experimentation: accessing information, analyzing that information, and seeking new connections and interrelationships.
The way children learn and receive feedback is a model of how living systems function. They pay careful attention to the environment's response to their behaviors. They learn very quickly to build cause-effect relationships. They maintain a playful and open relationship with their environment and don't get discouraged when an experiment doesn't work. On the contrary, they try again.
Let's contrast these behaviors with our own experience of how people in organizations behave in relation to new possibilities, other points of view, and feedback. As adults, we are poor learners, and to understand why, we must examine the influences that affect our relationship to learning as adults.
The resurgence of learning
The incredible speed of change combined with what's happening in our economy has plunged businesses into unprecedented crises. Organizations can no longer afford to conduct business as usual. They must learn to adapt and change in order to survive. The result is an unprecedented openness to finding positive responses to the competitive challenges we face. This set of conditions is increasingly becoming the driving force behind the learning renaissance.
The challenge for executives is to continually learn from themselves, their organizations, and their environments in order to lead improvements in the performance of individuals, teams, and the organization.
The starting point for learning in the natural world is curiosity. The learning process in an organization must therefore begin by reawakening curiosity, motivating people to move from a state of "unconscious incompetence" to one of conscious incompetence, allowing them to explore their own limitations and foster learning.
Organizational conditions for building a learning organization
There are some conditions that can be considered critical success factors and that must be created within an organization to provide an environment in which people feel stimulated to enter into a new relationship with learning:
- Management committed to transforming the ability to learn into a key part of its current competitive advantage.
- A challenging vision of the desired organization, in which people feel an important part.
- Stimulation and recognition of experimentation, collaboration and innovation.
- Different channels for learning.
- Permanent and multiple feedback.
Conclusion
If the learning problem really has two sides, and both individuals and organizations must change, the latter will not change until individuals do.
Probably the greatest difficulty in transforming into a learning organization is that we live in an era of instant gratification. To change the fundamental paradigm from which a person and an organization operate, it is essential to reorient them toward learning, and this is not a quick undertaking.
We must not forget that organizations only learn through individuals who learn. To achieve organizational goals, we must understand the needs of learners. And while individual learning cannot guarantee organizational learning, without it, no organizational learning can occur. Individuals must learn for organizations to progress.
A learning organization is a place where, through this learning, people continually re-examine their world and their way of relating to it, discovering how they themselves create their reality and their future. A learning organization focuses its efforts on identifying and changing existing paradigms, values the product and the skills necessary to achieve it, rewards not only action but also thinking, commitment to the vision and values, and the performance of its employees at all levels, providing growth opportunities and accepting and valuing mistakes. It leverages the spontaneous learning of its members and encourages open debate and questioning in order to remain flexible over the long term.
The cornerstone of a learning organization's success is its ability to be reborn and re-created again and again, in a process of active and constant feedback with the environment.
