Learning Organization


The Learning Organization could not become a reality until the coming of the World Wide Web and the engines of strategic assessment.

—David H. Miles, 2003

A learning organization is any organization that fosters continuous learning on both the organizational and individual levels, in order to improve performance. The continuous learning is based on twin feedback loops, permitting the organization to learn while individual employees learn as well. (See Double Loop Learning.) Overall, the organization is viewed as a living organism, complete with feedback systems and the ability to adapt to change in its environment.

Fastpaths

1969

Peter Drucker: The Age of Discontinuity. Drucker points out that we are shifting from a corporate culture based on physical labor to one depending on a knowledge society, a transition from an industrial society to an information one. The first inklings that organizations must continuously learn to adapt to change.

1970

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock outlines the shift from industrialism to informationalism, stressing the ability to change and learn.

1971

Donald Schon: Beyond the Stable State. A brilliant, little known book on learning organizations, systems, and processes, twenty years before their popularity in instructional circles. Schon argues that rapidly accelerating change is undermining the stability of our society; institutions must become learning "systems," maintaining flexibility and adapting to situations as they arise. Corporations should organize themselves around functions and processes rather than products and tasks.

1978

Chris Argyris and Donald Schon: Organizational Learning I. Abstract, academic, and difficult to read, but important because it starts to move the discussion beyond training to learning in organizations.

1982

Reginald Revans: The Origins and Growth of Action Learning. The great master of action learning, as it relates to organizational learning.

1983

Rosabeth Kanter: The Change Masters: Innovation for Productivity in the American Corporation. Studies of entrepreneurship and the ability to adapt quickly inside large corporations.

1987

Marvin Weisbord: Productive Workplaces. Prologue is excellent on "learning how to learn" in the 1960s, and on the importance of "lessons learned"—always asking "what did we learn from that?"

1990

The Learning Organization is officially born simultaneously in three separate books:

  • Charles Handy: The Age of Unreason. The British standpoint. See chapter on "Re-Inventing Education."

  • Richard Pascale: Managing on the Edge. The view from Stanford. A superb study.

  • Peter Senge: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. A theorist from MIT, utilizing MIT systems theory.

2000

David Garvin: Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work.

See also Action Learning Lessons Learned Organizational Development




The 30-Second Encyclopedia of Learning and Performance. A Trainer's Guide to Theory, Terminology, and Practice
The 30-Second Encyclopedia of Learning and Performance: A Trainers Guide to Theory, Terminology, and Practice
ISBN: 0814471781
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 110

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