The Organizational Learning Cycle

How We Can Learn Collectively

Nancy M. Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317022145
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Organizational Learning Cycle was the first book to provide the theory that underpins organizational learning. Its sophisticated approach enabled readers to not only understand how, but more importantly why, organizations are able to learn. This new edition takes the original concepts and theories and shows how they might, and are, being put into action. With five new or completely revised chapters, Nancy Dixon describes the kind of infrastructure organizations need to put in place; there are examples of knowledge databases, whole systems in the room processes and after-action reviews originating from organizations that are making real progress with these ideas. A clearer relationship between organizational learning and more participative forms of organizational governance is drawn, along with responsibilities that employees need to take on to enable, and partake in, collective learning. With new case material from BP, the US Army, Ernst and Young, and the Bank of Montreal, for example, this book shows how you can make use of the collective reasoning, intelligence and knowledge of the organization and channel it into its ongoing and future development.

1 Introduction

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We have entered the Knowledge Age, and the new currency is learning. It is learning, not knowledge itself, which is critical. Knowledge is the result of learning and is ephemeral, constantly needing to be revised and updated. Learning is ‘sense making’: it is the process that leads to knowledge. Thurber once said, ‘In times of change learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned are beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists’. Organizational learning requires learning rather than being learned.

Unfortunately, the term ‘learning’, perhaps because of early school experiences, for most of us has come to mean to ‘thoroughly grasp what an expert knows’. For example, when we want to ‘learn about’ quality we study the processes that someone far more knowledgeable than ourselves, such as Deming, Juran or Crosby, has devised. If we want to ‘learn’ how to lead, we turn to Bennis, DePree or Blanchard to learn how the experts suggest we lead. We may modify the expert’s processes to fit our own situation, but when we talk about learning we are essentially talking about finding and comprehending someone else’s answer. The premises of this conception of learning are that:

1 There is a right answer.

2 The answer is known.

3 If we can identify the ‘knower’ and comprehend those ideas, we can apply the answer to achieve our goals.

These are not false premises, but they are limited ones, useful with some types of issues, but inappropriate for others. These premises are most useful when the answers are known and when the problems are stable. The caveat is that for most of the problems that organizations face there are no known answers: they are problems that have never before been experienced, and those problems exist within a context of great turbulence, so that even if we had answers that had worked before, it is not clear that they would fit our changed situation.

Organizational learning is based on a very different set of premises:

1 There are many right answers, as in the concept of equifinality; there are many ways to reach the same goal.

2 People who are concerned about and affected by a problem are capable of developing useful knowledge to resolve it.

3 Learning occurs in a context of work and praxis, and results from intentional effort.

The relationship between learning and change

A formula borrowed from ecology states that in order for an organism to survive, its rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change in its environment. The formula is written L ≥ C. Considering organizations as organisms, it is apparent that organizations are going to have to increase their rate of learning to survive in these times of unprecedented change.

The formula, however, does not acknowledge our human ability to change the environment as well as adapt to it. It is commonly held that change is caused by forces over which organizations have little control. However, the reality is that we create much of the change to which we must then adapt – for example, we create technological change, alter gender relations and create multinational organizations. We are unique, of all creatures on the face of the earth, in that we can not only respond to, but also alter, our environment (Botkin et al., 1979).

Not only can we physically change our environment, we can alter it by reframing or reconceptualizing it. Weick (1979) uses the term ‘enactment’ to indicate the reciprocal influence between organizations and their environment. In part, the concept of enactment implies a self-fulfilling prophecy: the perceiver tends to see what is expected. But the concept of enactment goes further, to suggest that the organization implants meaning on the mass of data available and thereby creates the environment in which it will function.

Knowledge that we create through learning allows us to change our environment, whether by reframing it, physically altering it or both. The two factors, learning and change, reinforce each other. The faster the rate of change the more new knowledge we must create to deal with the change; the more knowledge we create the faster we change our world. Friedlander (1983) says, ‘Learning is the process that underlies and gives birth to change. Change is the child of learning’ (p. 194).

It is certainly possible for change to occur without being preceded by learning. A hurricane, a hostile takeover or new government regulations can all necessitate organizational change. When such change occurs it is followed by organizational learning, even when it was not preceded by it.

Change is preceded by organizational learning when, for example, an organization learns from its customers that product change is needed; it comes to understand that its reward structure is not effective; or it envisions a desired future toward which it chooses to strive. Organizational learning can lead to change which can lead to more organizational learning.

Organizational learning then, can lead to the continuous transformation of an organization and its environment. However, that transformation is not the familiar one-step process of moving from state A, which has been deemed insufficient, to state B, the better way. Organizational learning does not define an end state, but rather is the process that allows the organization to continually generate new states, as in A to B to C to D, and so on. No organizational problem stays solved for long, because each solution engenders a new problem. The key to organizational learning is not only the ability of the organization to transform itself and its environment, but to do so continuously (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Planned versus continuous change

The changing nature of work

Whether the Knowledge Age began with the popularization of the personal computer, as Zuboff (1988) would have it, or with the creation of the GI Bill (that sent returning soldiers back to universities), as Drucker (1992) assumes, it is certain that it is here. In the 1990s, to work in an organization is more likely to mean manipulating information than raw materials. The vast majority of jobs require individuals to interpret, analyse, and/or synthesize information. Where in the past such requirements were asked only of high-level managers, they are now demanded of workers at all levels. The terms ‘interpretation’, ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ are often used as synonyms for learning; thus learning and work have become synonymous terms. ‘As noted by Howell and Cooke (1989; in Goldstein and Gilliam 1990), smart machines increase the cognitive complexity of the tasks performed by the human being. Instead of simple procedural and predictable tasks, the human becomes responsible for inferences, diagnoses, judgment, and decision making, often under severe time pressure’ (Goldstein and Gilliam, 1990, p. 139). Rather than learn in preparation for work, employees must learn their way out of the work problems they address.

The role of the person who supervises such ambiguous work has also changed; managers can no longer rely on control, but must find leverage in jointly establishing direction and goals. Learning creates equals, not subordinates, and thus work is increasingly conceived as a team effort. In past decades it was possible to teach workers how to do a specific task and then set them to doing it. Managers were responsible for making sure the workers were following the procedure they had been taught, a control task. It is, however, not possible for managers to provide such specific instruction for the task of interpreting, synthesizing and analysing information. Rules, to the extent they can be provided at all, are more useful as a heuristic that offers guidance but cannot provide answers. In this sense, knowledge workers more closely resemble the self-employed than they do a conventional workforce (Drucker, 1992).

Perelman (1984) notes: ‘By the beginning of the next century, three quarters of the jobs in the U.S. economy will involve creating and processing knowledge. Knowledge workers will find that continual learning is not only a prerequisite of employment but is a major form of work’ (p. xvii). Zuboff (1988), in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine, explains that information technology has altered basic assumptions about the relationship between work and learning. She says:

Learning is no longer a separate activity that occurs either before one enters the workplace or in remote classroom settings. Nor is it an activity preserved for a managerial group. The behaviors that define learning and the behaviors that define being productive are one and the same. Learning is not something that requires time out from being engaged in productive activity; learning is the heart of productive activity. To put it simply, learning is the new form of labor. (p. 395)

It is customary to think of learning and work as being separate activities, the former preceding the latter. Zuboff suggests that more often learning is the work task. Zuboff considers ‘intellective skills’, which are the ability to make meaning and exercise critical judgement, as the organization’s most precious resource. The organization’s investment in upgrading and maintaining those skills is comparable with that of investing in technology itself.

It is the recognition of these two factors, the changing nature of work and the increased rate of change itself, that prompts organizations to view learning as a more critical variable than it might have been in the past. Organizations are trying to figure out how to improve their processes, transfer best practices from one part of the organization to another, more quickly incorporate new technologies, make collective use of what their subsystems know – all learning tasks.

Defining organizational learning

For the purposes of this book I shall define organizational learning as ‘the intentional use of learning processes at the individual, group and system level to continuously transform the organization in a direction that is increasingly satisfying to its stakeholders’.

The complexity of this definition suggests some need for decoding. The definition begins with the term ‘intentional’. All organizations learn to a greater or lesser extent; they adapt to environmental constraints, prevent the repetition of past mistakes and generate innovative, new ideas. Although such organizational learning examples occur, equally typical are situations in which learning is not achieved, that is, organizations repeat their mistakes, fail to adapt to customer needs, and are unable to improve their processes to meet rising competitive standards. Even when organizational learning does occur, it is often accidental rather than as the result of intention. Lacking intentional processes at the individual, group and system levels to facilitate organizational learning, most organizations are inefficient learners and much that could be learned is lost or missed.

In common usage the term ‘learning’ has two related but very different meanings. It is often used as a noun, as in ‘What did you learn from your experience?’ Its meaning in this context could be equated with knowledge, that is, the result of an effort of comprehension. At the collective level, in using the term in the context of knowledge, we might ask ‘What has the organization learned from past experiences?’

The second way the term ‘learning’ is used is as a verb, as in ‘to learn’. Here the reference is to processes, as in ‘She is a good learner’ or ‘I am learning a new word-processing program’. At the collective level we might use the term ‘learning’ as a process to ask, ‘What do we need to do to be able to correct our mistakes as we go along?’ or ‘How might we go about understanding this better?’ In the definition provided above, and indeed throughout the book, I am using the term in the latter sense rather than the former. Organizational learning, as I am using the term, is the processes the organization employs to gain new understanding or to correct the current understanding; it is not the accumulated knowledge of the organization. This is a nontrivial differentiation from my perspective. A main premise of this book is that learning is the construction and reconstruction of meaning and as such it is a dynamic process. Accumulated knowledge, then, is of less significance than are the processes needed to continuously revise or create knowledge. Those processes can be viewed as a cycle that starts with (1) the widespread generation of information, (2) integrates the new information into the organizational context, (3) collectively interprets the information and (4) then authorizes organizational members to take responsible action based on the interpreted meaning. The fourth step then feeds into the first to generate new information.

The first step includes the process through which the organization acquires information, including whose responsibility it is, and the diversity of the sources of information from which it is gained. This step also involves building learning processes into any organizational action or event so that organizational members learn through it as well as accomplish it. It implies experimentation and self-correction. The second step deals with the speed, accuracy and extent of the dissemination of information; who receives what information and when. The third step comprises the processes that are in place to facilitate organizational members interpreting information. Receiving information and making sense of it are very different processes. Learning has not occurred until organizational members make sense of the information. Because organizational learning involves collecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A theoretical framework of individual learning
• 3 The hallways of learning
• 4 The organizational learning cycle
• 5 A theoretical framework for organizational learning
• 6 Infrastructure for organizational learning
• 7 Measuring organizational learning
• 8 Developing managers for organizational learning
• 9 The responsibilities of members in an organization that is learning
• 10 Defining a culture that supports learning
• 11 Organizational learning and beyond
• Appendix A: Definitions of organizational learning
• Appendix B: Glossary
• Index