In the 90′s the concept of Learning Organization was a buzz word. 3 decades later, we are witnessing a comeback of the concept embracing new dimensions and new challenges.
This revival is due to the financial crisis started a decade ago and to the emergence of the digital era. Most of the companies have now understood that the economic environment will not go back to a stable situation and that volatility is now structural. Business wise we are living in an environment that is continuously changing, where the pace of change accelerates drastically and where business models disruption can appear anytime. Coming together, these changes imply that companies need to be more and more agile to adapt constantly and to improve systematically the way they perform to be at the cutting edge of the competitiveness. To compete in that world, individuals and organizations
Learning Organization : what does it means?
The concept became famous with the Fifth Discipline in which Senge (1990) described Learning Organization within the field of Organizational Behavior based on a paradigm that sees Learning as a process unfolding over time, links with knowledge acquisition, impacting routines and behaviors and improving performance. A learning organization is an organization able at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. It's a place “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together."
20 years before Senge popularized the concept, Schon already postulated that "the loss of the stable state means that our society and all the institutions are in continuous process of transformation.... We must learn to understand, guide, influence and manage these transformations. We must take the capacity for undertaking them integral to ourselves and to our institutions. We must become adept at learning. We must become able not only to transform our institutions but to invent and develop institutions which are learning system, that is to say, systems capable of bringing about their own continuing transformation" (Schon, 1973). If the word "institution" looks old-fashioned, the link between volatility and continuous process of adaptation has already been established.
In practice, "learning organizations are skilled at 5 main activities: systematic problem solving, experimentation with new approaches, learning from their own experiences and best practices of others, and transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization" (Senge 1990).
Learning Organization: what's up?
If the 5 activities remain the core subject and challenge, current Learning Organizations refer to 4 dimensions: the Ecosystem of the company, its Organization, the Technology/expertise and the individuals.
Nowadays, what makes the concept of Learning organization even more powerful is the porosity of today's companies with their environment and the diversity of stakeholders that they have to manage. When we talk about learning organization we do not only conceive the organization as a defined social entity but also as an ecosystem in which the progress of the organization has not only an impact on itself but has also a collateral impact on its ecosystem and how it perform. In a volatile environment, the more pioneering companies learn and perform, the more its ecosystem is influenced, learns and follows. Learning organization are able to learn from its ecosystem and the ecosystem of communities that it is made of; but it performs in influencing the learning of these ecosystems and communities.
In this VUCA world, companies need to develop the organizational capability to constantly progress and adapt their organization. It looks obvious but it's definitively not the easiest part. Not only it means the company is able to understand foresight of its business and the need of the organization to support this strategy but also it means it is able to adapt smoothly and quickly to this new state of its organization. Building a fully agile organization refers to manage the ego of (senior) managers and could lead to disengagement or to status-quo due to resistant forces. But neurosciences recently stressed-up that it also means being able to unlearn and to explore new opportunities of learning that is not so natural for the human body. That's why it looks better to build a culture of continuous improvement and progress with rituals and values supporting this principle, and to as soon as possible design an agile architecture of the organization supported by a coherence in the process. A Learning Organization is strongly supported by a systemic view of the process, practices and values.
Due to the acceleration of the pace of change in the technologies, it looks obvious to declare that companies, to remain competitive (and even to survive) need to be able to constantly adapt to new technologies and to emerging new business models associated. Looking alike the theory of the dominant design (Utterback and Abernathy, 1975) companies, once again have to adapt, quickly but also create the condition to influence when they pioneer new technologies or if the disrupt the environment. Talking about technology and expertise in a VUCA world, a learning organization is no more only a company able to share good practices but a company able to scale-up its key competencies, expertise or technology. The scalability of learning and the capability that organizations develop to scale and replicate quickly strategic competence is a source of competitive advantage. In other words, defining its core competencies is the foundation for competing, but being able to quickly deploying, replicating this capabilities is the main source of sustainability and define the learning organization as the successful organization. An exponential organization (Ismael 2014) is able to scale in keeping the decision making process lean, in distributing leadership and in continuously learning to improve.
Last but not least, a learning organization is able to create the conditions to develop the competencies and the employability of its employees to sustain the growth of the company. Jobs are more and more changing quickly due to the emergence of digital and competitive disruption but the impact of AI on some of them set a new tone in the way to thing about upskilling and reskilling. A learning organization is able to create a learning system unlocking the learnability of the employees in leveraging a culture of continuous improvement. It unleashes the flexibility of learning in multiplying learning opportunities with a diversity of modalities and different times.
Taking in consideration that progress and continuous improvement are the new fuel for competitivity, sustainability and performance, it looks obvious that the concept of Learning Organization is the buzz word and is a revival paradigm. But with the acceleration of the pace of change, companies must take their ability to learn to a much higher level focusing on the different level of the ecosystem, the organization, the expertise and technology and on the individual.
titsay