Surveying
the Concept of the Learning Organization
by Xin-An (Lucian) Lu
This
article intends to give practitioners an overview of the concept of the
learning organization. Based on a comprehensive review of literature, this
paper has the following sections: (1) the concept of learning; (2) difficulty
in understanding learning in the organization; (3) central features of the
learning organization; (4) theoretical underpinning of the concept of the
learning organization; and (5) operationalizing
the learning organization by presenting examples of organizational learning.
The
Concept of Learning
Before addressing the notion of “the learning
organization,” it is necessary to address the concept of “learning”
first. The concept of learning
seems easy for general readers to understand.
As human beings, we all have experienced learning.
We learn at all stages in our life.
A small child who accidentally puts his1
hand into the fire and gets burned learns that he should not put his hand into
the fire. A teenager learns to
wear more clothes when it gets cold, perhaps by previously catching a cold
because of not wearing enough clothes. An
adult learns to stop using certain words with certain people when she realizes
these words offend those people. Besides
humans, animals also learn. Animals
learn to run away from predators when their fellows get caught and killed by
those predators. The main
difference between human learning and animal learning perhaps lies in the
ability for self-reflection. Humans
learn not only through external stimuli, their reactions to these stimuli, and
nature’s reactions to their own reactions, but also through introspection
and retrospection about all these reactions.
In other words, humans also can learn through logical thinking and
compassionate feeling.
The
concept of learning in the living world or the world of organisms is easy to
understand, not only because we all have actual and long experience in it, but
also because we have gotten to know rather well how learning happens in the
living, organic world, or what facilitates learning in the living world.
Humans
and animals learn because they have essential physical faculties.
First of all, they have sensors or information collectors such as eyes,
fingertips, a nose, ears, skin, and tongue.
These physical attributes constantly sense and collect information,
information of both danger and pleasure. In
addition, humans and animals learn because they have an elaborately developed
and omnipresent nerve system. This
nerve system is the carrier of the information collected by those physical
sensors. In the living world, the
nerve system generally functions rather quickly, spontaneous, and accurately.
Damage of one piece, even a tiny piece, of the nerve system may block
crucial information from reaching the decision-maker of the body, which is the
brain. Blocking a tiny piece of
crucial information can easily endanger the very survival of a living body.
Difficulty
in Understanding Organizational Learning
The concept of learning in organizations is not as
easy to understand. One reason is
that we do not yet have an accurate grasp of the complicated informational and
communicative mechanisms of various organizations.
Another reason is that organizations don’t learn so well as to
emulate a living, organic, and constantly self-renewing body.
Thus, in one sense, a prototype is still lacking of an exemplary
learning organization to go with for research.
Because of the difficulty in understanding learning
in an organization, or the concept of “the learning organization,” many
research efforts have been made, and great amounts of literature have become
available. This achievement is
quite a feat because the “learning organization” is relatively a very new
concept in organizational studies.
Central Features of the Learning
Organization
Chris Argyris, a
Harvard professor, may be one of the earliest scholars engaged in the study of
the “learning organization.” Initially,
the argument was merely around the question of whether there is such a thing
as the “learning organization,” “Do organizations learn?” “Can they
learn?” Scholars knew that
individuals learn, a fact that had been well established by advances in
biological and social studies. Yet
many scholars were not certain whether organizations, which possess no brain
and no nerve system, learn. Argyris
and Schon (1978) argue that although the social
organization does not have a physical brain as the human body does, it has a
collective brain that is made possible by the communicative exchange between
and among the brains of the individual organizational members.
Argyris and Schon
(1978) contend that one evidence of the existence of “organizational
learning” comes from such daily statements: “The management decides that…,”
“The company made a serious mistake and should draw a lesson from it,” and
“The R&D department thinks that….”
The establishment of the existence of “organizational learning” or
the “learning organization” helped to pave the long road along which Argyris
and Schon pursue their studies of the “learning
organization.”
It may also be Argyris
and Schon who first introduced the concept of “double-loop”
learning (Argyris & Schon,
1978). A “double-loop”
learning organization focuses on the assumptions underlying its standards
instead of merely trying to improve based on a particular set of standards and
dimensions. In this sense, a
learning organization has a self-reflective capacity.
“Single-loop learning,” according to these scholars, is the type
that only involves the simplistic, reactive learning framework of “stimuli-response.”
Single-loop learning endeavors to improve performance on the basis of existing
rules, tools, and assumptions without checking the rules, tools, and
assumptions themselves.
The definition of the “learning organization”
attempted by Argyris (1996) is, “an organization
may be said to learn when it acquires information (knowledge, understanding,
know-how, techniques, or practices of any kind and by whatever means)” (p.
3). Thus, to Argyris,
information gathering seems to be the central feature of a learning
organization. Argyris (1996) seems to believe that
information should be the basis for organizational action.
Organizational actions which are not information-based are arbitrary
and self-defeating.
Argyris
(1996) terms the process of information gathering in an organization as “organizational
inquiry.” He used inquiry not in
the colloquial sense of scientific or juridical investigation but in a more
fundamental sense that originates in the work of John Dewey (1938): an
intertwining of thought and action that proceeds from doubt to the resolution
of doubt. In Deweyan
inquiry, doubt is interpreted as the experience of a “problematic situation,”
triggered by the mismatch between the desired result from an action and the
actual result from this action (Dewey, 1938).
To make it simpler, inquiry is an attempt to solve a problem by
decreasing doubt. Here, it may be
claimed that inquiry through reduction of doubt is another essential feature
of the “learning organization.”
Weick’s
model of equivocality reduction goes well with Argyris’
concept of inquiry. According to Weick
(1969), the purpose of organization is cooperation with others so that the
cooperative network therein will provide the organization with enough detailed
information to interpret complex problems and develop meaningful strategies to
deal with those problems. For
successful organizational actions, there should be a balance between the equivocality
of the situation and the amount of the needed information.
In other words, the more complex or equivocal the situation, the more
information is needed. Routine
situations simply would find adequate solutions in existing rules and norms.
The process, as defined by Weick, of gathering
enough information to match with the existent components of the situational
complexity, is roughly the same as Argyris’
concept of inquiry. Again, in
terms of essential features of the learning organization, Weick
provides us with a cooperative network, which furnishes the necessary
information to help reduce the equivocality of a
complex situation so that problems could be solved.
The cooperativeness in Weick’s
“cooperative network” is echoed back by Argyris.
Argyris (1996) believes that an organization is
not a collection of separate individuals, but a collection of interdependent
and interlocked individuals (pp. 6-8). Interdependence
between and among organization members distinguishes an organization from a
mob, as contended by Argyris.
Every individual surely possesses various information and knowledge,
much of which is contributive to the solution(s) of organizational problems if
these individuals do form their organization with a collective goal.
Yet in a mob, because of a lack of a systemic interdependence and
networking between and among the individuals, information and “knowledge
held by individuals fails to enter into the stream of distinctively
organizational thought and action, organizations know less
than their members” (Argyris, 1996, p. 6).
In contrast, an organization possesses a
coordinated communication system like the information-carrying nerve system of
a living body, and this coordinated communication system enables the
organizational members to effectively exchange information throughout the
organization. Effective exchange
of information helps to assure that organizational actions are
information-based. In other words,
an effective organization, in order to distinguish itself from a mob, must
possess interdependence among its members to facilitate effective exchange of
information. If Argyris’ distinction between an
organization and a mob holds true, there is cause to doubt how many
organizations at present are effective organizations rather than mobs, despite
their modern buildings, labyrinth-like bureaucratic procedures, computers,
rules, and regulations. Countless
organizations seem to suffer from blocked communication channels that hinder
effective exchange of information.
Other scholars further researched interdependence
as an essential feature of the learning organization. W. Edwards Deming was a
prominent researcher in this area. In
both of his well-known books, Out of
Crisis (1986) and The New Economics
(1993), Deming talked about the distinction between a learning organization
and a non-learning organization, although he did not explicitly use the term
of the “learning organization.” Deming explained this distinction by
introducing two cycles of actions, the old cycle and the new cycle.
In the old cycle of organizational action (please refer to Figure 1,
which is not exactly a cycle), a product is first designed.
Second, the designed product is produced.
Finally, the producer tries to sell this product. In this old cycle of
organizational action, we do not see any interdependence.
At most, we see a sequential dependence.
The third step depends on the second step.
The second step depends on the first step.
This one-directional and sequential dependence contains an obvious
risk. If the design happens to be
bad, everything else will by no means fare well. More importantly, the fluid
changes in the reality of market are not adequately incorporated in this cycle
of action.
In
Deming’s new cycle (which is truly a cycle, please refer to Figure 2) of
organizational action, we do see interdependence.
Plan influences action. Results
of the action are studied. Depending
on the lesson drawn from the study, decisions are made about
the action: adopt, reject, or run the cycle again.
The revised action will feed new elements into another cycle of
planning. This new cycle of
organizational action, unlike the old one, is not a one-time, one-directional,
and self-dependent process. It is
a flowing, non-stop, interactive, and balanced process, a reflection of the
very image of the living life. There
is interdependence among all of the four steps in the cycle.
Deming’s systemic cycle of organizational action represents a
constant processing of information, which finds a supportive voice in Argyris’
concept of “information gathering.”
Corroborating
Deming’s new cycle of organizational action, Cohen (1997) developed the
cycle of “intellectual capital” (please refer to figure 3).
Unlike Deming’s cycle, Cohen’s cycle has a new element in it, the
collaborative infrastructure. This
infrastructure is an information storage and retrieval system.
It contains all the knowledge and information that comes from the
circular process of deciding, acting, interpreting and learning, and applying
knowledge. Cohen calls the
information contained in this infrastructure as “intellectual capital.”
He defines intellectual capital as “content plus action.”
Intellectual content—patents, proposals, or the knowledge in people’s
heads—has no economic value in itself until it is embodied in action.
It is the products based on the ideas that generate revenue, not the
ideas or the patents themselves. Thus,
Cohen seems not only to emphasize the importance of information gathering for
a learning organization, but attaches importance to information storage,
retrieving, and, above all, application.
Peter
Senge is another enthusiastic and prominent
advocate of the learning organization. In
his influential book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization (1990), he
offers five “disciplines” that build a learning organization: (1) Systems
thinking; (2) Personal mastery; (3) Mental models; (4) Building shared vision;
and (5) Team learning.
Systems
thinking, which will be elaborated
further, signifies universal principles and purpose that govern every single
and imaginable component within an organization, be it as small as a family or
as big as a nation. At the same
time, all the components of the system enjoy their own contributive and
autonomous uniqueness. On one
hand, there is much dependence in terms of the organizational purpose.
Every component depends on this purpose as its North Star for actions.
On the other hand, there is much independence within every individual
element. This combination of
dependence and independence is, again, interdependence, which runs as a common
thread in the fabric of the learning organization.
This interdependence blesses the organization with a homeostatic
dynamism, a co-existence of stability and growth.
By “personal mastery,” Senge
(1990) refers to the capacity to clarify what is most important to the
organization members and the ability to achieve it.
In a learning organization, people do not fear their individual, inner
consciousness. Rather, they find
this consciousness as the root of energy for the realization of the
collective, organizational goal. A
learning organization endeavors to decrease personal confusion by striving for
congruence between individual aspirations and organizational ideals.
By “mental models,” Senge
(1990) means the capacity to reflect on our internal pictures of the world to
see how they shape our thinking and actions.
Senge believes that lucid understanding of
mental models or underlying assumptions is the most effective method to solve
conflicts, many of which occur not because of inherent differences, but
because of confused perceptions, biased by clouded mental models.
In terms of mental models, Senge obviously
draws heavily from the work of Chris Argyris,
especially the latter’s work on “double-loop” learning.
“Building shared visions” is connected with the
systemic viewpoint of the learning organization. Shared visioning is the
ability of an organization to create a deeply meaningful and broadly-held
common sense of direction. Too
often, visions are leader-designed instead of collectively constructed.
As a result, they may be visions, but not shared.
The safe order of shared visions comes from the necessary chaos of
free-flowing voices and information. Many
leaders and managers do not understand this point.
They believe that order and structure come from control and
regimentation, which actually produce stagnation.
And stagnation and order are too often mixed up.
For the vision to be shared, the individual sharer must perceive that
she plays an active role and has an imbedded interest in the proper
cultivation and formulation of this vision.
By “team learning” Senge
refers to the capacity for collective intelligence and productive
conversation. This concept is
obviously connected with the previous concept of “building shared visions.”
“Team learning” is actually the process through which team members
build shared visions. “Team”
indicates “integration,” “collectivity,” “converging,” and “dialogue,”
instead of “disintegration,” “isolation,” “egocentrism,” and “monologue.”
The “learning” part comes from an individualistic individual; the
“team” part comes from a “collectivistic” individual.
The integration of the two sides can only become possible through
respect and trust for the team, which, in turn, is a reward from respect and
trust of the individual.
The first discipline of Senge’s
learning organization is the capstone of the architecture of such an
organization. The other four
disciplines are the building blocks of the edifice of the learning
organization. They are different
manifestations of the systems thinking in various aspects of an organization.
Nonaka and
Takeuchi (1995) go a step further than do many scholars in their research of
the learning organization. Nonaka
and Takeuchi (1995) believe that mere information gathering falls short of the
learning organization in its real sense. A
real learning organization not only gathers information, but also, more
importantly, creates knowledge. Knowledge
is a much broader concept than information.
Information is usually mechanistic, standardized, controlled, and
impoverished for easy electronic transaction.
Knowledge, which includes information, can also be intuitive,
subjective, subtle, unexpressed, and yet highly valuable if properly tapped.
According to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995),
there are two types of knowledge that helps an organization to learn, the
tacit knowledge and the explicit knowledge.
An organization learns through knowledge creation, which, in turn,
comes from an interactive conversion between the tacit knowledge and the
explicit knowledge.
The tacit knowledge is usually possessed by
individual organization members. This
type of knowledge is tacit in that it is not easily visible and expressible.
Tacit knowledge includes individuals’ private beliefs,
understandings, unexpressed information, subtle techniques accumulated through
long experience, general feelings, and rough concepts.
Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, can easily be processed and
transmitted, electronically or otherwise.
Explicit knowledge is usually systematically recorded in organizational
documents, regulations, agendas, pamphlets and the like, making this type of
knowledge easily retrievable. “But
the subjective and intuitive nature of tacit knowledge makes it difficult to
process or transmit the acquired knowledge in any systemic and logical manner”
(Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 9).
Nonaka and Takeuchi, in the same book, also
contend that the bulk of the knowledge that an organization can hope to
possess may exist in the form of tacit knowledge.
Nonaka and
Takeuchi support the view that a learning organization is a living organism,
not merely an information-processing machine.
In other words, “sharing an understanding of what the company stands
for, where it is going, what kind of a world it wants to live in, and how to
make that world a reality becomes much more crucial than processing objective
information” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 9). Nonaka
and Takeuchi provide four modes of knowledge creation: from tacit to tacit,
from tacit to explicit, from explicit to tacit, and from explicit to explicit
(please refer to figure 4).
In the socialization or tacit to tacit mode of
knowledge creation, organization members interact/socialize informally and
exchange what they know in a spontaneous manner. What happens in the company
of Honda may serve as one example of this type of knowledge creation.
Honda has “brainstorming camps” where people can have tea and meals
together. In this informal
context, people exchange spontaneously what they know about their own
specialized area, their understanding of some organizational problems, and
their conceived solutions to some of the problems.
“There is one understood taboo in such socialization: criticism
without constructive suggestions” (Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995, p. 63).
The externalization mode of knowledge creation “is
typically seen in the process of concept creation and is triggered by dialogue
or collective reflection” (Nonaka and Takeuchi,
1995, p. 64). The use of
metaphors, analogies, concepts, hypotheses, or models can help transform tacit
knowledge into explicit knowledge.
In the internalization mode of knowledge creation,
individual members internalize the publicly available knowledge through
personal actions and experience. Similarities
among such actions and experience by different individuals will help to form
shared mental models and technical know-how (Nonaka
and Takeuchi, 1995).
“Combination is a process of systemizing concepts
into a knowledge system” (Nonaka and Takeuchi,
1995, p. 67). This mode of
knowledge creation involves exchanging, sorting, adding, combining, and
categorizing between and among different bodies of explicit knowledge.
Channels used for this mode of knowledge creation include documents,
meetings, telephone conversations, or computer communication network.
Obviously now, the defining feature of the learning
organization to Nonaka and Takeuchi is the ability
and mechanism that help create knowledge.
Various other aspects/features of the learning organization have been
researched and described by many other scholars.
These scholars include Bennis (1976, 1989),
Drucker (1986, 1988, 1993), Kouzes
and Posner (1993), and O’Toole (1996). They may not have explicitly used the
term of the “learning organization,” but many of their efforts are clearly
directed toward a discussion of how an organization learns and how it can
learn well.
Before moving to the theoretical underpinnings of
the concept of the “learning organization,” A quick summary of the
essential features of the learning organization is
appropriate. Based on the
literature review, one could define a learning organization as one that has a
systemic and networked mechanism to create, maintain, and retrieve knowledge
and information in order to decrease equivocality
inherent in organizational life.
Theoretical Underpinning of the
Concept of the Learning Organization
From the previous summary of the essential features
of a learning organization, it is not difficult to discern the theoretical
underpinning of the concept of the learning organization.
Without a systemic network of facilities for knowledge creation and
information collection, an organization will have no means with which to
learn. For knowledge and
information within an organization to be useful guides for organizational
actions, they must flow throughout the organization and become a shared
foundation for beliefs, perceptions, aspirations, and mental models.
Researchers of the learning organization borrow heavily from the
concept of systemic functioning of an organism when expounding the concept of
the learning organization. The
general systems theory, as it serves many other scholarly thoughts, seems to
be also the theoretical foundation on which the concept of the learning
organization is based.
Von Bertalanffy (1951, 1952, 1968, 1975, 1981) is considered to be the founding
father of the general systems theory. General
systems theory presents the organization as a complex set of interdependent
parts that interact with each other to adapt to a constantly changing
environment both for survival and for fulfilling its goals. We see the
following key points of the general systems theory when applied to the
organization: interdependence,
interaction between different components, adaptation, environment, and goal.
Since Bertalanffy’s
initial publications on the general systems theory were largely concerned with
biology, perhaps it is easier to offer an understanding of this theory from a
biological point of view, and then apply this understanding to the
organization.
Again, the human body will be used for
illustration. Interdependence
is everywhere within the human body. If
the eye sees the body approaching a cliff, it sends this information to the
head which then offers a directive to the legs. If the legs do not follow this
directive, or the nerves connecting the head and the legs has become somewhat
dysfunctional, there will be no use in the information discovered by the eye.
All physical parts of the human body depend on each other for the
necessary coordination required by any motor goal.
Interaction among physical parts of a healthy human body is almost
always prompt and accurate. What
facilitates this interaction is the nerve system, the skeleton, the muscle
structure, and the tendons. Coordination
that results from the interaction among interdependent physical parts is based
on accurate information of the environment.
Information-collectors on the human body include the eyes, the nose,
the tongue, and the skin. Coordination also comes from one, clear goal.
A damaged mind that directs the hands to turn the tap in two different
directions cannot achieve manual coordination. Prompt and proper adaptation
to the environment is the process through which the human body achieves its
goal—physical survival and health.
An organization that resembles an organism should
be a successful one. No human
organization has become as successful as the living organism in its systemic
functioning. A learning
organization strives to be like an organism.
As explained previously, interdependence
is an essential feature of the learning organization, in that communication
and decision-making in such an organization is fluid and multidirectional.
In a learning organization, every organizational department, feels
needed and necessary to the realization of the organization’s goal.
The single, underlying mechanism of Nonaka
and Takeuchi’s four modes of knowledge creation is interaction between different organizational components.
One might call this process the fluid infiltration.
It is amazing how quickly water can spread on absorbent textures like
paper and cloth. Yet nothing happens if the water stays in its container.
In the context of the organization, every individual member is a
container holding “water”—some useful information and knowledge.
They must have “absorbent textures” to pour their “water” onto,
and to let their “water” spread along.
The only way to establish the “absorbent textures” in an
organization is interaction.
For interaction to occur, a communicative network, like the nerve
system in the living body, is essential.
The learning organization does not simply collect
information and knowledge on anything. It
collects information and creates knowledge about the relevant environment, both the internal environment and the external
environment. The internal
environment is composed of the organizational members, the equipment, and
daily functioning of the organization. The external environment is composed of
the customers, the government, social movements, cultural fashions, social
activists, and technological advances. The
information and knowledge about the environment is essential because it helps
to sketch the map directing organizational adaptations to the environment.
Adequate adaptation forms the basis for the organizational goal of
survival and growth, which, in turn, depends on accurate understanding and
assessment of the environment.
It is exactly by perceiving the organization as a
system that the very concept of the “learning organization” becomes
possible. Or, an organization can
never learn effectively without systemically approaching all its components in
information collection and knowledge creation.
Operationalizing
the Learning Organization
More recent researchers on the learning
organization, instead of studying the major conceptual components or the
essential features of the learning organization, are giving more attention to
the how or operationalization of the
learning organization. That is, they are trying to find the methods,
facilities, and strategies to create the essential features of the learning
organization. This will become more obvious the following illustrations of
some actual learning practices of some organizations.
Schein
(1993) discussed how to start and maintain dialogue, one facility of
interaction that contributes to organizational learning.
Schein believes that the facilitator of
dialogue/discussion groups plays an important role in starting and maintaining
dialogue. The facilitator can engage in the following activities: (1) organize
the physical space so that it is as nearly a circle as possible; (2) introduce
the general concept and ask members to recall relevant experience; (3) ask
people to share their experience with their neighbor; (4) ask the member to
share with the group the experience; (5) ask the group to reflect on the
experiences by having each person in turn talk about his/her reactions; (6)
allow conversations to flow naturally; (7) intervene for necessary
clarification; and (8) close the session by inviting any comments.
Issacs (1993)
introduced a chart (please refer to Figure 5) which contains helpful concepts
to facilitate conversation. Deliberation
of one’s own ideas is needed when there is disagreement and lack of
understanding. Deliberation is
also needed when the member makes his personal evaluation of options and
strategies. When conversation
develops, there will inevitably emerge disagreement, disconfirmation,
challenge, or attack. At such
heated moments, the member needs to suspend
her ideas, and engage in internal listening to be more receptive to
differences and more conducive to building mutual trust.
Discussion usually involves
advocating of one’s ideas, competing for validity for one’s ideas, and
convincing others of one’s ideas. Discussion
is an active or even aggressive form of conversation, according to Isaacs.
Dialogue involves frank
confrontation of one’s own and others’ assumptions, revelation of
feelings, and building of common ground. Dialectic
means the exploration of the opposite side of everything or discovery of
oppositions. Metalogue
is a high form of dialogue, engendering the convergence of feelings and
thinking within the group. Metalogue
helps build new shared assumptions and culture.
Debate is resolving of
conflicts through the battle of logic and “beating down.”
All these concepts can help either to start or maintain the flow of
conversation, which, in turn, facilitates the creation of knowledge, another
essential feature of the learning organization.
An example of a genuinely learning organization is
still hard to find. It appears
there is no organization yet that learns so well as to be able to receive the
complete title of a learning organization.
There is a difference between organizational learning and the learning
organization. An organization that
manifests learning is not necessarily a learning organization, just like a
person that can play some music is not necessarily a musician.
An organization must have so much learning as to make learning an
omnipresent thread in its organizational fabric in order to be worthy of the
title of the “learning organization.”
A computer, for instance, that does not store data cannot be called a
functioning computer even if everything else is working.
The functioning of a learning organization depends on an integrated
system rather than piecemeal practices.
As illustrated earlier, a learning organization
requires, among many other things, a communicative system that is almost as
elaborately developed as the nerve system of a living organism.
Such a system enables an organization to have immediate, constant, and
accurate response to environmental changes, internal or external. Even the
best-run companies in the world cannot match up to this standard.
Human organizations probably still need to evolve for a long time in
order to be able to function to become the learning organization. Today most
organizations not learning organizations.
However, there are some examples of “organizational learning”
although there is not a paragon of the learning organization.
Knowledge sharing and creation is a major practice of organizational
learning. An effective way to
enhance this practice is explicitly reward it.
Rewarding knowledge sharing and creation clearly indicates a sincere
intention to learn from organizational members.
Buckman2 of Buckman
Laboratories says, “We will not promote anyone who does not share knowledge,”
and recommends “cheering those that do share knowledge” (Cohen, 1997, p.
9). In 1994, the 150 employees
identified as the best knowledge sharers in 1993 were each given an IBM
ThinkPadä and invited to a three-day conference with
the company’s planning team. Rewards
and promotion for knowledge sharing make corporate values in organizational
learning real and visible, influencing the organization’s learning behavior
more strongly than mere official statements ever can (Cohen, 1997).
British Petroleum Exploration may serve as another
example of some organizational learning practices.
From the literature review interdependence has been identified as one
of the important features for the systemic functioning of the learning
organization. Interdependence is
coexists between local autonomy and intra-organizational and
inter-organizational connections. A
unit without local autonomy will possess little for other units to depend on.
A unit without connections with other units simply may take away the
means through which other units can hope to depend.
This interdependence built from local autonomy and intra-organizational
connection is manifested in British Petroleum Exploration.
In this company each business unit negotiates its own performance
contract and is free to apply innovative strategies to its work.
This relative autonomy enables them to respond quickly to local
problems and opportunities. Throughout
the enterprise, knowledge concerning partners, suppliers, and even
competitors, is shared. The
mechanism that facilitates this knowledge-sharing is called Virtual Teamworking
(Cohen, 1997).
Virtual Teamworking can
be perceived as an effort to build the organizational communication “nerve
system” through technology. With
the help of computer communication technology, members throughout the
enterprise work together. After an
18-month pilot test, Virtual Teamworking acquired
the capacity to be the standard service line in 1996. Today, the managers of
all 80 British Petroleum business units communicate and collaborate using this
technology. Use continues to grow
and the company believes Virtual Teamworking will
help transform the way people work at British Petroleum (Cohen, 1997).
Yet the more important function of Virtual Teamworking
(a similar term to Senge’s team learning) is its
ability to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, the concept
advocated by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995).
The defining purpose of the Virtual Teamworking
project is connecting existing knowledge with people who need their expertise.
British Petroleum believes that people’s “complex, subtle,
intuitive knowledge is the company’s most valuable intellectual resource”
(Cohen, 1997, p. 22). This kind of
knowledge cannot be fully captured in documents and databases; to be
transferred to someone else or brought to bear on a problem; it must be
delivered “in person.” This
knowledge delivery “in person” is greatly enhanced by computer multimedia
channels in the Virtual Teamworking project,
including videoconferencing, multimedia e-mail, shared applications, a
scanner, and an electronic whiteboard. People
thousands of miles apart can meet and work together.
The richness in multimedia channels gives people a feeling that they
are conversing face-to-face. Being
able to see and hear people at the same time works much better in tapping
people’s tacit knowledge than voice or text alone can achieve.
The following is one example of how Virtual Teamworking
(VT) helped to quickly solve complex problems:
When
equipment failure halted work on a mobile drilling ship in the
British
Petroleum estimates that accelerating learning at individual drilling sites
and then transferring that learning effectively to other sites could reduce
the company’s more than $1 billion annual drilling costs by 50 percent.
Introducing
British Petroleum’s Virtual Teamworking as a
great facilitator of organizational learning, should not give a misleading
notion that technology alone is the most effective way to build a learning
organization. The reason the
Virtual Teamworking project is so successful is
because it is highly personal. As
said by Keith Pearse of the company, “There’s
no such thing as ‘strictly business,’ it’s all personal” (Cohen, 1997,
p.22). To make it possible to
transform people’s tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, consideration
must be given to people’s values, feelings, and understandings because
social and behavioral issues profoundly influence people’s willingness to
share knowledge. An ability to
share knowledge without the willingness to share is still useless.
With this understanding, the Virtual Teamworking
project gives 60 percent of its budget to human issues.
Most of this money is devoted to the educational coaches who not only
teach people how to use the technology, but also educate people how to be “humanly
approachable” to each other.
Personal
mastery is one discipline that Senge (1990)
advocates as a contributor to the building of the learning organization.
The effort to make technology personal and humanly approachable
bespeaks of British Petroleum’s understanding that people will not feel a
sense of mastery unless they feel valued, cared, and included.
To
illustrate the importance of environmental information for the learning
organization, the example of the Yazaki Group at
Nissan Motor is appropriate. The
marketability of the car depends on how much the producer understands the
prospective buyer and how much this understanding is built into the car.
The customers constitute the bulk of the environment for a car
producer. As indicated by Deming’s
(1986) New Cycle of Organizational Action, an organization’s success depends
on its constant and accurate adaptation to its environment.
This adaptation depends, more than anything else, on accurate
information of the environment.
Nonaka
and Takeuchi (1995) term members at the Yazaki
Group as knowledge operators, meaning that they gain knowledge through actual
doing. These knowledge-operators
are test drivers. They live in a
specific country for about one year to get the feel of local driving
conditions and driving styles. They
also learn local lifestyles, habits, customs, and values.
When it comes to designing a new model of car, these test drivers’
experience and knowledge become valuable.
The test drivers provide feedback on the potential problems of the new
model based on their in-depth knowledge of the local environment and competing
models. Through this process, Nissan will have a more tangible and tenable
prediction about how the new model will perform and sell in that particular
country, relative to the competitors (Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995).
Conclusion
The
concept of the learning organization is still a relatively new one.
Although many ideas, much advocacy, conceptual constructs, theoretic
components, and pieces of illustrations have emerged through much scholarship,
there is still not a clear theory of the learning organization.
We clearly know the importance of the learning organization, which
seems to promise bright possibilities for the health of human organizations.
We have developed a rough conceptual architecture of the learning
organization, yet we do not seem to possess all the necessary building bricks
for this architecture.
On
the practical level, we are perhaps facing bigger problems.
We do not yet have a prototype of the learning organization that
actually exists. This poses great
difficulties for research on the learning organization.
The reason why biology has so much to offer in inspiring the systems
theory is that there are plenty of perfectly functioning organic bodies almost
everywhere within our reach. There
is not yet any human social organization that functions as miraculously as an
organic body does. Scholars of the
learning organization still need to depend a great deal on their imagination,
conceptual synthesis, hypotheses, and analogy.
Yet all the practical difficulty does not make the learning of the
learning organization any less interesting.
The mental image of all the possibilities that the learning
organization can bring to the betterment of human welfare is of itself a great
reward.
The
Old Cycle of Organizational Action
Design a product
Produce
the product
Try to sell the
product
Deming’s
New Cycle of Organizational Action or the P D S A Cycle:
Figure 2
Cohen’s
Cycle of Intellectual Capital
Figure
3
Knowledge Conversion Modes
Figure 4
Ways
of Talking Together
Figure
5
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About
the Author
Xin-An
(Lucian) Lu holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication and Leadership from
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He is currently an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Shippensburg University
of Pennsylvania. Besides the publication of poetry, he has published articles
on management, information technology, visual rhetoric, and oppression against
women. His research interests encompass organizational studies, leadership,
visual rhetoric, communication technology, and the "un-economics" of
various aspects in modern life.
1To avoid the cumbersome formality of he/she, his/her…, I will randomly use gender pronouns of the third person singular.