Jack Welch once said, “Change has no constituency.” He is so right. No one truly jumps easily on board as a willing constituent of change. One of the most attractive elements of the learning organization to me is that a true learning organization has the potential to eliminate the “episodic” nature of change, the action of having to implement any change process formally, and instead, creates an environment where change occurs naturally in response to uncovered need and ongoing learning.
Let’s first consider a traditional change model in this first diagram. You can see the external forces and aspirations of the organization, the three primary organization anatomy structures and forces (Business Strategy, Structure & Process, Action) that lead to Outcomes and Consequences. You can also see the two types of transformational influences at work. Leadership and Business Strategy transform the business through mission, strategy, planning, values, and the creation of structure, roles, systems, and processes. There is then a transformational influence working where individuals and groups work within that culture and those structures and processes and management practices in finding motivation and accomplishing their tasks and gaining their own outcomes as well as producing the outcomes and consequences for the organization. As I said, this is a traditional model.
This second diagram drills down on just one specific part of the traditional model and renames those three primary forces. Business Strategy is now “Leadership Behavior and Actions”, Structure & Processes is now “Accepted Information & Routines”, and Actions is the virtually the same, but clarified as “Individual & Group Actions.” What difference does this make? These new force titles better represent what is actually occurring in terms of the forces at work within the organization and form the heart of building a Learning Organization (represented by the center circle).
As you start building a Learning Organization, these are the three areas that require attention, new knowledge, new skills, and a common understanding for an organization to truly learn.
Leadership Behavior & Actions
Leading a learning organization requires creating a safe and accountable environment for learning, demonstrating leadership behaviors that reinforce learning, structuring the organization in a way that promotes learning, insisting on and creating transparency and openness within the organization, and active participation in the learning process.
Accepted Information & Routines
Culture, structures, processes, and management practices are all about the accepted norms and structures for processing new and old information and determining the way in which an organization responds. Some are healthy and some debilitate the organization’s ability to respond in a new way. A learning organization must ensure the creation and/or gathering of all meaningful information, and share and interpret that information by facilitating interactions (throughout the whole organization) that challenge the known, evaluate the previously unknown, and confront the “undiscussable” (the sacred cows – always used methods – past-proven routines – etc.).
Individual & Group Actions
The organization must then act on new or newly understood information through an actual change in behavior, skills, outcomes, and consequences. In other words, the learning organization sees visible and ongoing change due to the process of ongoing learning and this results in the acquisition of necessary new skills, new and changed routines, new opportunities, new outcomes, and new consequences, which are then tied back to evaluating what the organization is learning.
MBD’s Definition of a Learning Organization
This leads to the working definition that I have developed for use in my business related to building learning organizations:
A Learning Organization . . .
. . . takes clear, deliberate steps to create a safe, yet accountable environment . . .
. . . that ensures the creation and/or gathering of all meaningful information, whether known or previously known . . .
. . . and shares and interprets this information by facilitating interactions that challenge the known, evaluate the previously unknown, and confront the “undiscussable,” . . .
and then acts on this information through change in behavior, skills, outcomes, and consequences.
