CHAPTER SIX – THE LEARNING ORGANISATION

Outcomes for this chapter:

1. Explain why organisational learning is important.
2. Explain what a learning organisation is.
3. Explain the link between organisational learning and knowledge management.
4. Explain how organisational learning takes place.
5. Explain how organisations can become learning organisations.
6. Evaluate the learning processes in an organisation

Organisational learning

Individuals learn, not organisations, individuals learn simultaneously whilst applying acquiring
knowledge in management practice, furthermore they transfer knowledge to other members of the
organisation which results in additional learning within the organisation.

Learning organisations lead to 3 benefits:

 Being able to adapt to adapt more quickly to environmental changes through more flexible
and agile strategic responses
 Being able to benefit from opportunities and sensing and reacting to threats earlier than
competitors, leading to superior performance
 Being able to apply newly acquired knowledge to business problems and opportunities
leading to innovation

Some of the key barriers to organisational learning include:

1. Dominant general management logic – if an organisation and its management continue to

view strategy based on one domination viewpoint without factoring in other
considerations, eg: basing future plans on past organisational behaviour without
considering new developments (this can stunt an organisation)
2. Management ignorance – often managers assume they know all there is to know and no
new learning needs to take place
3. Absorptive capacity – this involves the ability of an organisation to recognise the value of
new, external information, to assimilate it and to use it to address business problems.
Elements of absorptive capacity include acquisition of external information, assimilation of
acquired information, transformation of knowledge and applying new knowledge

Individual learning is regarded as a change in behaviour or performance as a result of experience.

Individual learning is made up of 4 different activities, namely concrete experience (when a person
acts in a certain way), reflective observation (involves thinking and reflecting on an experience
which results in learning), abstract conceptualisation (when ideas or theories are extrapolated from
the previous phase of reflection) and active experimentation (when new ideas or concepts are tried
in a new environment or setting).

1
Transferring knowledge to others takes place on a knowledge continuum and may include varied
transfer mechanisms, including:

1. Socialisation (tacit to tacit, tacit knowledge refers to personal beliefs, values and perspectives
that are inherent in people and are difficult to communicate or teach someone) – knowledge is
gained from interacting with others but it is tacit and often involves copying someone else’s
behaviour
2. Combination (explicit to explicit, explicit knowledge is something that can be written down or
told to someone) – it is information or knowledge that is shared with the aim of teaching the
other person what to do
3. Internalisation (explicit to tacit) – knowledge which starts of as explicit, that is, concrete
learning theories, that is becomes tacit to the person who learnt it, in other words it becomes
part of who that other person is
4. Articulation (tacit to explicit) – this would mean that someone with superior personal values,
beliefs or perspectives tries to convey and teach these to others thus attempting to make tacit
learning into explicit learning

How does an organisation become a learning organisation?

 Leaders need to commit to learning

 Leaders need to develop genuine visions, share them and inspire employees
 Leaders also need to encourage diversity
 Leaders need to encourage double-loop learning (plan, try and assess what was
done, go back and assess the basic underlying assumptions included in the strategy
process, ie: dig deeper and understand what issues were at play and what they
meant to the organisation at the time)
 Leaders need to develop systems thinking abilities (ie: seeing the bigger picture,
viewing patterns instead of isolated events)
 Leaders need to legitimise dissent (this means everyone should think and contribute
towards idea generation in the organisation, employees should not be afraid to
question practices and strategies)
 Leaders should encourage experimentation (basically without failure, no real
learning would take place, so employees and organisations should not be afraid to
take risks)
 Leaders must establish communities of practice (this includes people, artifacts and
interaction)
 Leaders also need to develop collaboration between suppliers, customers and even
competitors in order to foster learning
 Further, organisations need to ensure they have knowledge management systems
in place to ensure that the flow of knowledge in an organisation is used effectively
and efficiently for long term benefit to the organisation. Knowledge management
consists of 4 different phases; the discovery of knowledge in the organisation,
capturing knowledge in a way that enables it to be shared across depts., sharing
knowledge throughout the organisation and applying knowledge to solve business
problems and make decisions.