ASSIGNMENT ON ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

SUBMITTED TO PROF. SHALINI SUBMITTED BY ANKITA SHETTY ROLL NO 1203.

1)

What is Organizational Learning?

An Organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. -Jack Welch

Organizational learning is the process by which an organization gains new knowledge about its environment, goals, and processes. Herbert Simon (1997) posits three ways in which organizations learn: (1) Individuals within the organization learn some new fact or procedure, (2) The organization ingests outsiders with knowledge not already in the organization, (3) The organization incorporates new knowledge into its files and computer systems. As broader organizations, governments and policy-making communities also learn. (Smith)

2) Relevance of Organizational Learning:

1) It provides competitive advantage 2) It provides a buffer between the organization and its environment to stop a reactive response to every event. 3) Brings in flexibility so that an organization has the ability to respond to the environment, and predict emergent opportunities. 4) Human beings are designed for learning

Single and Double Loop Learning Model:

According to Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, who originated the terms, singleloop learning is correcting an action to solve or avoid a mistake, while double-loop learning is correcting also the underlying causes behind the problematic action. Underlying causes may be an organizations norms and policies, individuals motives and assumptions, and informal and ingrained practices that block inquiry on these causes. Double-loop learning requires the skills of self-awareness and self-management, and the willingness to candidly inquire into why what went wrong did so, without sliding into defensiveness, blaming others, making excuses, trying to be nice and positive to each other, protecting each others egos, and other automatic or unconscious patterns of behavior that block honest feedback, inquiry and learning. Single-loop learning looks at technical or external causes; double-loop learning also looks at cultural, personal or internal causes.

A sample problem: delays in completion of work.

Sample questions that lead to single-loop learning:

Which step suffers most from delays, and what delays that step? How can the work process be simplified to reduce completion time? What better technology can be used to reduce delays?

Sample questions that lead to double-loop learning:

What are the bases for setting the standard or expected completion time, and are these bases still valid in this situation? If the delay had been noted earlier or it has been recurring or persistent, what prevented those who noted them from reporting or doing something about it? What prevented them from taking the initiative? Does it happen often that employees notice a delay but hesitate for some reasons to do something about it? If so, what are those reasons? If it is difficult for employees to talk about those reasons, why so? Does it happen that a delay occurs so often that employees tend to no longer notice or talk about it? Why? Or, what led to this pattern of unspoken group behavior? If the delay often occurs with a specific employee, what prevented his manager or colleagues from doing something about it earlier? Is there an unwritten agreement or practice to avoid embarrassing co-employees, or to always be nice and positive to each other?

Double-loop learning requires three skills: a) Self-awareness to recognize what is often unconscious or habitual, b) Honesty or candor to admit mistakes and discuss with colleagues to discover and
validate causes, and c) Taking responsibility to act appropriately on what is learned. According to Argyris, today, facing competitive pressures an earlier generation could hardly have imaginedleaders and subordinates alikemust all begin struggling with a new level of self-awareness, candor, and responsibility.

3) What is a Learning Organization?

A Learning Organization is one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about. -- Richard Karash

A Learning Organization is an ideal state, a vision. A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern organizations and enables them to remain competitive in the business environment A learning organization has five main features; systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. The Learning organization concept was coined through the work and research of Peter Senge and his colleagues. It encourages organizations to shift to a more interconnected way of thinking. Organizations should become more like communities that employees can feel a commitment to. They will work harder for an organization they are committed to.

Importance of Learning Organizational:

Learning is essential to provide rapid continuous change. The competitive advantage of learning quicker than competitors. Increasing the rate of change. Increase in creativity. Organisations success depends on engagement and learning at all levels of the organisation.

Peter Senges 5 Disciplines Model:

The 5 Leadership Learning Disciplines in brief are: Shared Vision: The key vision question is What do we want to create together?. Taking
time early in the change process to have the conversations needed to shape a truly shared vision is crucial to build common understandings and commitments, unleash peoples aspirations and hopes and unearth reservations and resistances. Leaders learn to use tools such as Positive Visioning, 'Concept-shifting and Values Alignment to create a shared vision, forge common meaning/focus and mutually agree what the learning targets, improvement strategies and challenge-goals should be to get there.

Mental Models: One key to change success is in surfacing deep-seated mental models beliefs, values, mind-sets and assumptions that determine the way people think and act. Getting in touch with the thinking going on about change in your workplace, challenging or clarifying assumptions and encouraging people to reframe is essential. Leaders learn to use tools like the 'Ladder of Inference' and 'Reflective Inquiry' to practice making their mental models clearer for each other and challenging each others' assumptions in order to build shared understanding.

Ladder of Inference: A tool for examining your mental models

Chris Argyris developed the ladder of inference in 1990 as a tool to understand the thinking process. To comprehend the power of this tool, you need to start at the bottom and climb up the ladder. It can help you to understand how and why you think as you do about an issue. It can also aid your team in understanding why they think differently about an issue and assist them to better empathize with this thinking. The ladder of inference is a powerful tool for helping people to recognise their tendency to make claims about the world that they assume to be true, and, therefore, expect others to accept without question...The pool of information at the bottom of the ladder represents all the information that could be relevant to this situation. The rungs of the ladder represent the various types of claims that can be made about information. The further the rung is up the ladder, the more it involves an interpretation or inference about the meaning of the information at the bottom. Thus, the further up the ladder one goes, the more likely it is that people will disagree about the correctness of the claim. That is why they need to be careful about how they climb the ladder of inference. The first rung of the ladder represents the way we select from this pool. This is not a bad thing it is simply impossible to notice everything. What is important is to recognize that you have been selective and that other people will take different information from the pool. The second rung represents the process of describing what is happening. The third and fourth rungs represent the way people interpret and evaluate what they have noticed and described the context of the conversation and peoples prior assumptions are powerful influences on how people interpret and evaluate what they notice. The fifth rung represents how people seek consistency between individual interpretations and experiences by weaving them together into a coherent theory of action. The sixth rung shows how theories provide conclusions about the situation and what to do about it.

Personal Mastery is centrally to do with self-awareness how much we know about

ourselves and the impact our behaviour has on others. Personal mastery is the human face of change to manage change relationships sensitively, to be willing to have our own beliefs and values challenged and to ensure our change interactions and behaviours are authentic, congruent and principled. Leaders learn to use tools like 'Perceptual Positions' and 'Reframing' to enhance the quality of interaction and relationship in and outside their teams.

Team Learning happens when teams start thinking together sharing their
experience, insights, knowledge and skills with each other about how to do things better. Teams develop reflection, inquiry and discussion skills to conduct more skillful change conversations with each other which form the basis for creating a shared vision of change and deciding on common commitments to action. Its also about teams developing the discipline to use the action learning cycle rigorously in change-work. Leaders learn to use tools like the 'Action-Learning Cycle' and 'Dialogue' to develop critical reflection skills and conduct more robust, skillful discussions with their teams and each other.

Systems Thinking is a framework for seeing inter-relationships that underlie complex

situations and interactions rather than simplistic (and mostly inaccurate) linear cause-effect chains. It enables teams to unravel the often hidden subtleties, influences, leverage points and intended/unintended consequences of change plans and programs and leads to deeper, more complete awareness of the interconnections behind changing any system. Leaders learn to use 'Systems Thinking Maps' and 'Archetypes' to map and analyse situations, events, problems and possible causes/courses of action to find better (and often not obvious) change options/solutions.

Garvins Prescriptive Model:

Systematic Problem Solving- Use of data and statistical tools. Experimentation- Systematic searching for and testing of new knowledge Learning from Past Experience
Learning from others- Benchmarking

Transferring knowledge Measuring learning- audits Each is accompanied by a distinctive mindset, tool kit and pattern of behavior.

Pedler and Pearns E-flow Model:

According to Pearn definition of Organizational learning cannot exist as it is a process not a state and that the possession of a number of characteristics does not necessarily entitle an organization to be called the learning organization. They suggest that a learning company is a vision of what might be possible, and have developed a list of 11 features of that vision.

The proposed set of eleven characteristics, fostering organizational learning and its outcomes, is as follows:
1. Learning approach to strategy: It enables that formation, implementation and improvement of company strategy are consciously structured as a learning process instead of implementing set solutions. Holmberg (2000) writes that learning strategy is an appropriate alternative to the programmatic strategies (like, for example, is TQM) what are characterized by imitation, imported methods, topdown decision-making and limited focus. Deliberate small-scale experiments and feedback loops are built into the planning process to enable continuous improvement in the light of experience McGill et al. (1993) look at a strategy as an outcome of the learning process. 2. Supportive leadership and participative policy: Making ensure that all members of the company have a chance to take part, to discuss and contribute to major policy decisions. Supportive leadership means showing concern for everybodys needs and problems. Through better involvement accompany increasing commitment and satisfaction with work that lead to better results. 3. Shared vision and values that unify individual efforts to achieve both personal and organizational goals and guide people. According to Senge shared vision is vital for the learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning. While adaptive learning is possible without vision, generative learning occurs only when people are striving to accomplish something that matters deeply to them. In fact, the whole idea of generative learning -expanding your ability to create- will seem abstract and

meaningless until people become excited about some vision they truly want to accomplish (Senge 1990, 206). 4. Free vertical and horizontal flow of information enables a continuous information exchange, needed for organizational learning and empowering people. Free flow of information and knowledge inside an organization is an important prerequisite to encourage new ideas and innovation. 5. Supportive organization structure that enables flexibility and speed in organizational learning and implementing its outcomes. The organization's structure is based on the need to learn. As tasks, needs, and people change, the structure changes so that customers and employees alike face minimal inconveniences (McGill, 1993). Supportive organizational structure means decentralized hierarchies, loosely formal job roles and existence of internal customers and suppliers. Departmental and other boundaries are seen as temporary structures that can flex in response to changes (Pedler et al., 1991). Sensible amount of strategic rotation of employees between various divisions and functions must foster effects of the free flow of information within the organization. 6. Supportive corporate learning culture facilitates and fosters efficient organizational learning. It includes opportunities for education, training and development of the whole workforce at all levels. Garvin (1993) suggests starting to build a learning organization from fostering an environment that is conducive to learning. He stresses the importance of time for reflection and analysis, to think about strategic plans, dissect customer needs, assess current work systems, and invent new products. Supportive learning culture includes training in brainstorming, problem solving, evaluating experiments, and other core learning skills (Garvin, 1993). 7. Teamwork and team learning as the critical link between the learning individual and the learning organization. With continuous learning and an ongoing reflection on results, a team can shift its orientation from knowing to learning, thereby increasing its ability to produce the desired business results (Ober et al. 1996). Huber (1991) formulates the outcome of team learning as a

change in the range of the teams potential behaviors. Edmondson et al. (2001) describe three essential characteristics, which are typical for teams that learn the new procedure most quickly. They were designed for learning; their leaders framed the challenge in such a way that team members were highly motivated to learn; and the leaders' behavior created an environment of psychological safety that fostered communication and innovation. 8. Experimenting and risk taking is activity that involves the systematic searching for and testing of new knowledge. Garvin (1993) suggests that experimentation must be motivated by opportunity and expanding horizons, not by current difficulties (Garvin, 1993). To encourage experimentation, fear of failure must be eliminated and management must be committed to continuous experimentation as a means of institutionalizing learning (McGill, 1993). 9. Learning reward system that keeps organizational learning a systematic process that recognizes and reinforces learning. Intellectual diversity and dissents are not only accepted but also encouraged in order to improve experience (McGill, 1993). Punishments for failures are also eliminated. 10. Environmental scanning to observe changes and trends in external environment, learning from best practices of other companies (including competitors) in the same and also other industries. Customers and suppliers are engaged in learning activities. 11. System thinking is a tool to guarantee systematical approach and seeing existing processes, activities and functions in mutual interactions. It enables to see the structures that underlie complex situations (Senge, 1990, 69). Systems thinking means organizing complexity into a coherent story that illuminates the causes of problems and how they can be remedied in enduring Ways (Senge, 1990, 128). Roos et al. (1997, 14) also warn that managers should learn not to concentrate too much on the visible aspects of the company, just because they are easily recognizable.

SUMMARY

REFERENCES:

1. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jackwelch173305.ht ml 2. http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Organizational_learning 3. http://apintalisayon.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/d17-single-looplearning-versus-double-loop-learning/ 4. http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/loo/loo.cfm 5. http://www.thechangeforum.com/Learning_Disciplines.html 6. https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/proflearn/der/htmods/thinking/ladde r.html 7. https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/bitstream/1826/113/5/Chapter% 203%20.pdf