Learning Organization

Conceptual Overview

The literature on the LO is a colorful mosaic of diverse perspectives from academics and practitioners. The essence of LOs is effective organizational learning, but relevant academic disciplines, such as economics, anthropology, and social psychology, all entail different assumptions about what this might actually mean. Assorted analytical approaches such as population ecology and sociotechnical systems theory offer distinctly different vocabularies for describing what the LO might be or what it might do. The various business functions such as operations management, marketing, information systems, and human resource management, along with the field of strategic management, all emphasize different aspects of the LO.

Despite there being so many different perspectives on the LO, practitioners, consultants, and change agents tend to converge upon a common set of ideals and aspirations for the LO. They typically seek to create learning climates that are characterized by experimentation, risk taking, collaborative inquiry, dialogue, and open sharing of feedback, expertise, knowledge, and ideas. They tend to prefer that organizational structures be flat and organic and based on the principles of teamwork, flexibility, empowerment, and an absence of boundaries. They acknowledge the roles of human resource development and Total Quality Management in driving continuous improvement of all the organization's operations. They tend to regard company strategies as adaptable and provisional in the light of environmental scanning and timely market intelligence.

Ideas about the LO first developed during the 1960s and 1970s as optimistic, humane, and dynamic alternatives to traditional bureaucracy and hierarchy, aspiring to offer all organizational members opportunities for participation and development.

David Philip Herbst's pioneering account of crew organization on board the Norwegian ship M/S Balao was written in 1974 and was subsequently reprinted in 1993 under the title “A Learning Organization in Practice.” The M/S Balao experiment was guided by the Tavistock Institute's sociotechnical systems theory and involved a reversal of several standard characteristics of traditional hierarchical and compartmentalized work organization. Features included total crew member involvement in the organization of change; the planning, implementation, and evaluation of organizational change as a learning process; participative planning of work tasks, taking into account impacts on other tasks and other persons; sharing the lessons of experience; development of a learning community with mutual respect between the ranks; and creation of open and joint territory throughout the ship.

Bob Garratt wrote in 2000 that the origins of the LO may be traced to a still earlier source—the work of scientists at the Intelligence Unit of the National Coal Board in the United Kingdom following the Second World War. Among them, Reg Revans developed the idea of action learning, which Garratt describes as the engine that drives the LO. In 1969, in [Page 809]a paper that was subsequently published in The Origins and Growth of Action Learning, Revans envisaged some conditions under which an enterprise could develop as a learning system. The CEO would assume major responsibility for bringing this about and would have an approachable style. Maximum authority would be delegated to subordinates within parameters that would be clarified through ongoing dialogue with superiors, and there would be good quality information systems to inform decision making. Experimental deviations from standard procedures would be encouraged and would be framed as learning opportunities. Subordinates would not be allowed to refer a problem to their superiors without (a) explaining why that problem could not be resolved at their own level and (b) proposing how systems should be changed to rectify the problem or prevent its recurrence. All teams would be encouraged to make regular proposals to investigate and reorganize their own systems of work, and such proposals would lead to discussion with other teams up, down, and across the organization.

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