The Learning Organization
June 26, 2008
“Knowledge is Power”
Sir Francis Bacon
It has become evident that The United States is becoming a knowledge-based economy. However, like most “buzz” words, most people say it and few actually know how to make it a reality. In order to develop a learning organization, there are 5 disciplines which need to be at the core. The reality is that most people have the ability to learn, but many are stunted by environments that don’t encourage reflection and engagement.
5 Disciplines
- Systems Thinking : A way of seeing the whole, the interrelatedness of things. This means knowing that something you do today, here, can have effects (positive or negative) somewhere else and some time later, and understanding and using the structure.
- Personal Mastery : Grounded in competence and skills, it means living life from a creative, not a reactive, viewpoint. People with personal mastery feel they have never learned enough and it’s from their quest that the spirit of the learning organization comes.
- Mental Models : These are deeply held internal images of how the world works or how someone really is. They affect what we do because they affect what we see. If you think John Doe is not up to the job, you treat him accordingly. He makes his first mistake and you say: “See, he’s not up to it.” Eventually John Doe stops trying, but he’s not incompetent, just nervous. For years, a basic assumption (mental model) at General Motors was that cars were status symbols, so style was more important than quality. Mental models are not bad but they must be acknowledged and examined.
- Building Shared Vision : A powerful force rather than an idea, an answer to the question “what do we want to create?” When people truly share a vision, they become connected, and work becomes part of pursuing a larger purpose. Shared vision is vital because it provides the focus and energy for learning.
- Team Learning : This can be achieved by aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the result its members truly desire. Many minds are more intelligent than one mind and teams learn to think insightfully about complex issues. They develop a mutual operational trust and, if they are senior teams, pass on their practices to foster other learning teams. Open dialogue and discussion play an important part in team learning.
Do you have the diagnostic tool to measure the level of learning in your organization? Contact us today if you’d like to discover how your organization rates on the learning scale.