Is Your Organisation Really a Learning Organisation?
April 29, 2021
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash
Some years ago, Peter Senge wrote his seminal work, ‘The Fifth Discipline’. It was subtitled The Art and Practice of The Learning Organisation. I am not entirely sure what a learning organisation is but I think I will know one when I see one!
To me a Learning Organisation will have at least most of the following features:
- An investment of time and resources in developing their people in a variety of learning opportunities.
- Learning will be considered an essential part of everybody’s job.
- Learning will be aligned to both the Organisations Strategic Objectives as well as aligned to an individual’s career objectives.
A number of organisations would claim to tick the three points above but how would they go with the fourth and arguably the most critical point!?
4. The Organisation builds on previous learnings rather than ‘dump’ them for the latest fad, determined by the new CEO or People or other members of the Senior Leadership Team.
Learning is a cumulative* activity where layers of learning add to previous layers of learning in order to ensure no valuable previous learning gets lost. It can also involve unlearning to ensure past mistakes are not repeated.
The true Learning Organisations, rare in my experience, gain maximum value from cumulative learning and are more likely to be more effective than their non-learning counterparts.
My first ever client, in 1987, was very much a Learning Organisation. The CEO from that organisation, today remains a client and is still on the learning journey 3 organisations later. He takes his learnings from one organisation to another and builds on the learnings each time.
One wonders whether the organisations he has left behind have retained much of the cumulative learnings?
- Cumulative – ‘increasing in quantity, degree or force by successive additions’