Week 14 Post 2

I started to read the assigned article but then did a Google search for "learning organziation" first. I was surprised to see most of the hits were for research done by Senge who is described in the assigned article. As usual Wikipedia had a good, broad overview of the topic. From this page, I learned that companies use this philosophy to weather stormy business times. The example given was Shell during the 1970s oil crisis. These companies coninutally adapt and change based on both the external environment and individual learning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization


http://www.siue.edu/~mthomec/LearnOrg.pdf

A learning organization is "an ideal, ‘towards which organizations have to evolve in order
to be able to respond to the various pressures [they face]. It is characterized by a recognition that ‘individual and collective learning are key’"

This article is a much more indepth but still readable information than the wikipedia site. Much of the information related to organizational culture change and the idea that executives need to be responsible and responsive to the lower level, in-the-trenches workers. Great information!

The next assigned article was Senge's take on the topic. http://www.siue.edu/~mthomec/LearnOrg-Senge.pdf

This article was organized around the five basic components of learning organizations. This is the five along with my one phrase summary of each.
Systems thinking - interrelatedness of the parts of the system
Personal mastery - people within the organization must be interested in thier own learning and personal development
Mental models - gain awareness of the impact of pre-formed internal ideas on change outside the person
Building shared vision - all members of the organization must see a common goal in order for the whole organization to work toward that goal
Team learning - the individuals who have worked on the previous three steps come together and create a more powerful combined effort. Such team effort can be exponential.

A key part of his vision is that all members of the organization take an active role in creating the learning organization. The organizational leader takes on more of a cheerleader role for the teams than the director.

These ideas are very good in theory but so very difficult to put into practice. At my previous employer, these ideas were taught and modeled from above but the ground level workers could not get past the mental models of the past and held on to their ingrained culture.