Dada Adefolami:
“In the more traditional top-down bureaucratic structure, leaders tend to determine what should be done and how it should be done; with the enterprise approach, the outcome tends to determine what should be done and how it should be done via the combination of people, processes, systems and structures. These should be aligned again with the overall business strategy to ensure that the appropriate learning occurs.”
By Dada Adefolami.
Organizational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization. An organisation improves over time as it gains experience. From this experience, it is able to create knowledge. This knowledge is broad, covering any topic that could better an organisation.
An organisation is a structure that formalises a connection between individuals; the boundary within which people complete tasks to reach an end goal. The organisation as the whole is the sum of the individuals. The learning of an organisation is determined by the learning of the individuals. Organisations need to continue to learn and retain that learning, their skills and abilities, to sustain their position in the dynamic marketplace.
Learning organisations can be described by their skills, which have to be developed, the skills in systematic problem solving, experimentation, learning from past experience and best practices of others and transferring this knowledge quickly across the organisation. The individual learning leads to organisational learning and there is a need to ensure this contributes to sustainable competitiveness.
The learning organisation or learning needs of the organisation can start to evolve and be driven from the early stages of strategic analysis. When the opportunities in the SWOT model are identified it highlights areas where new knowledge, intelligence or insight has to be created or combined in order to take hold of these opportunities. Threats indicate what knowledge areas the organisation is leaving itself open to and learning can help to reduce the threats.
Threats are events or activities that occur in the macro and microenvironments. Competitors, consumer changes, and economic trends are examples of sources of these threats to the organisation. Identifying threats at an early stage places the organisation in a knowledgeable position to counteract, minimise or convert the threats. Weaknesses identified in the SWOT can be viewed and handled similarly.
Strategic and Organisational Learning
In exploring organisational learning, a strategic and operational view is taken. At the strategic level, the identification of the strategic organisational goals as drivers for learning have to be aligned with those of the individual to ensure value to both, as the individual will tend to learn faster if there is benefit to them as well as benefit to the organisation. Learning within the organisation helps to expand the ability of the organisation to maximise its opportunities.
The questions for any organisation exploring where they are becoming a learning organisation, are:
1. What do individuals learn in the organisation?
2. What determines how they learn?
3. Which mechanisms are used to help learning?
4. Which individuals are going to do the learning and how is this learning facilitated?
In addition, who will influence all of these factors – will the owners dictate what is to be learned, the internal leaders or managers, the group or team structure. The strategy of the organisation should be the driver of the learning and through goal alignment will guide this learning.
At the strategic level the leadership perspective on learning is to influence not interfere. Leaders should establish the environments, culture and facilities for creative learning without interfering with the learning processes. Transformational type leaders, as considered under change management classifications, are the ones that tend to be able to create a learning organisation. These types of leaders are suitable for this as they are leaders who are there at a time of change, when the highest level of learning is required.
At the operational level, time and effort has to be put in to network development. Network development is the identification and facilitation of social networks in the organisation. This should result in the creation of networks of people and an understanding of how people really communicate and share knowledge within the various areas of the organisation. Methods should then be identified as to how these networks can crossover, integrate and share each network’s knowledge. For the networks to perform – i.e. for the individuals in the various groups or social networks to be able to learn – problem-solving activities, learning events and integrated systems are required. These activities or learning processes help to incorporate the knowledge into the social networks and embed it in the organisation.
Managing Learning
For learning to be effective, the learning process and its outcome can be perceived as a capability or resource. As with any capability or resource it needs to be managed. To optimise this learning we can categorise the issues to manage as soft and hard issues. The hard includes policy and process; the soft includes mainly people and social networking. These hard issues that require management start with the use of the analytical tools, mechanisms and facilities through which learning can occur.
The first tool to use is a stakeholder analysis, such as classifying stakeholders as internal, connected or external. For this we can identify who has the most significant influence on the thinking of individuals and can influence them to think differently, an essential part of the learning process –learning from the customer via customer feedback, the manager learning via performance management and the board from their strategic success and failures.
Feedback is the most freely available, continuous source of efficient and effective learning that exists in organisations, when used positively and productively. Some feedback mechanisms are: appraisal systems – for instant, 300-degree employee appraisals, performance metrics, such as using the balance scorecard. Feedback and its effect on organisational behaviour needs to be considered when implementing any feedback method as it can be used as contribution to the no-blame culture or the opposite that would create an insecure environment.
At the operational level, meetings and technology are the general practical methods employed to allow people to get work done. The issue with these types of methods is their level of formality or inflexibility and the other issue is the level of system integration that exists. If the systems are not integrated – i.e. they are silo systems – there is no platform for learning or sharing. For example, at the level of reporting, the integrated reporting systems, by design, ensure that various sources of information from across the enterprise and the people within it are connected and the information then shared.
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