Learning Organizations
The popularity of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline brought legitimacy to organizational learning, and many businesses have used learning to improve financial and operational performance with considerable success. But not all learning organizations are alike. For most, learning is the norm, while a few go on to create conditions for development through daily work.
The popularity of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline brought legitimacy to organizational learning, and many businesses have used learning to improve financial and operational performance with considerable success. But not all learning organizations are alike. For most, learning is the norm, while a few go on to create conditions for development through daily work.
Developmental Learning
Developmental learning is generative; it not only adds knowledge to the learners’ existing way of knowing, it fundamentally transforms their ability to know and to learn. By learning developmentally an individual, community, or enterprise not only adds capacity to handle complexity, but transforms their worldview. Work is developmental when it deliberately encourages the workforce to become more fully human.
Businesses that integrate developmental learning into their organizational culture are designed, structured, and governed to progressively transform the learner’s ability to know. They use business problems educationally, to test their assumptions and core values for high levels of financial return, and also for employees to realize their full human potential.
Such “Developmental learning organizations” (DLOs) make up a new sub-type of business organization – one in which employees produce more effectively and use their experiences to build a better life, daily.
Businesses that integrate developmental learning into their organizational culture are designed, structured, and governed to progressively transform the learner’s ability to know. They use business problems educationally, to test their assumptions and core values for high levels of financial return, and also for employees to realize their full human potential.
Such “Developmental learning organizations” (DLOs) make up a new sub-type of business organization – one in which employees produce more effectively and use their experiences to build a better life, daily.
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A New Paradigm
Senge’s definition of a learning organization; “… an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future,” and the five disciplines he described as core to a learning organization – personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning and systems thinking – are typically used within the existing business paradigm, but they can be used to create a new one. Too frequently the disciplines, guiding ideas, and methods of learning organizations have been applied within the prevailing business paradigm and so lost their true potency. We all know you don’t need to be a particularly moral, developed, or conscious person to make a profit; moreover, while you can build a learning organization within the prevailing business paradigm, the future you choose to create will be limited by today’s orthodoxies, as defined by the current culture. If businesses operating as learning organizations are going to encourage generative learning and creativity, tap intrinsic motivation, and encourage psychological, social and spiritual development at work, then a new set of organizing principles -- a new paradigm – is needed.
DLOs are based in a new business paradigm, one that goes beyond the orthodoxies of the existing cultural paradigms to include new and unorthodox ideas like:
An important difference between developmental and traditional learning organizations is that DLOs turn community-culture-building into a business strategy, as well as an educational tool. In order to do this these organizations have to accommodate multiple stages of human development simultaneously, requiring them to build a culture of pluralism.
DLOs are based in a new business paradigm, one that goes beyond the orthodoxies of the existing cultural paradigms to include new and unorthodox ideas like:
- Learning and development is enabled in community.
- The curriculum for development is the company’s business activities.
- Learning and development is most effective in the flow of daily work activities, rather than primarily in classroom
- or offsite settings.
- Individuals and communities are hardwired for development.
- The full release of human possibility has neither been explored nor enacted in the prevailing business paradigm.
An important difference between developmental and traditional learning organizations is that DLOs turn community-culture-building into a business strategy, as well as an educational tool. In order to do this these organizations have to accommodate multiple stages of human development simultaneously, requiring them to build a culture of pluralism.
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Click on the PDF link to download a copy of the full article from which this was taken: |
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