I can't believe Jack Welch said.....

I use several of Jack Welch (CEO of General Electric) quotes in my classes. I admire him.
I see him as a great troop motivator.

Today I found this quote (unbelievably) ascribed to him:
"I own the people, you just rent them".

Ready, D.A. & Conger, J.A. (2003). Why leadership-development efforts fail.
Mit Sloan Management Review, 44(3), 83-88.


My first reaction is:
I am really disappointed.
I am concerned that evry time I use one of his motivational quotes, my mind will recall this awful one.

Who do you think owns the workers in a capatalistic society? Don't they own themselves?


Then I remember our conversations regarding managment school graduates and the job of HR
I can refocus.

What are your thoughts on this scenario?

WFED 597E end of week #11

I have been thinking alot about each of the people I interviewed for my project.

Each one believes he/she is doing a great job but is hindered in someway by others.
One believes HR hinders employee development. Can you imagine such a thing?
Another believes the big guy hinders learning and himself needs to learn about learning
One is hesitant to say more than basic answers to my questions
One has ideas but appears not to act on them

Four very diverse realities all in the same organization.
What do you do?
If I were to interview those same people today and ask those same questions, I believe I would get different answers. Reality has changed. Life has moved on.

I am pumped up again about motivational courses and helping people to broaden their horizons
I am also encouraged to be a knowledge enabler and keep going - not quit
Cease the moment!

Thanks for listening.

Make your day great!

What is learning?

Conducting an interview of the Senior Director for my project, I encountered his definition of learning:

"Learning is knowing how to do our jobs and how to do them better".

Would you agree that learning is limited to job knowledge?

What about career development? What about organizational development? If our only concern is for workers to know how to do their jobs better, what will be missing?

Can workers be energized and engaged when the only focus and expectation is doing the job better?

Are you getting the picture that this definition is way too narrow for me? I have been thinking alot about the narrow vision of the Senior Director. While our conversation did include his desire for individual growth and development of the workers and the efforts he is taking to increase their job knowledge, is learning about doing a your job the sum total of desired learning? NO!

I was also reminded of theory-in-use as he talked. His word choices all had to do with growing the worker and equipping them. But his words limited a worker's growth to job knowledge. What about the processes? What about the system? What about the environment? What about whether the way the job is structured is the best fit overall? And yet the SD obviously belivese he has the best interest of tehr worker and the organization at heart.

I remember we talked about learning not happening at once. So I can expect that some seeds I planted will sprout. But I need to contemplate some thought provoking comments I can make when I see him around.
How to help him put his theory-in-use to reality?

Do you have comments or thoughts for me?

WFED 597E end of week #10

Finsihed and transcribed the 4th interview for my Project.

I must review the interview answers from all 4 people.

There are three questions to be answered by this research:
1) What are the major themes appearing in their answers both individually and collectively?
2) What are the similar answers to the interview questions?
3) What are the disparity answers to the interview questions?

Everyone asked me what I mean by the word "learning" in the questions.

Can you relate that question to more than one thing we have studied this semester?

I finished each interview with a question about their childhood career dream. Each one got so enthused, with a lit up face when talking about that dream.

Professionally, I want to help people recapture the essence of their childhood career dream and make it their reality.

What was your childhood career dream?

10th week WFED 597E

My project is to interview 4 people at different levels of an organization to examine the perspectives on learning based on level of position within the organization.

Conducting a limited review of records for ABC Organization (my project) to look for clues about learning.
Expect to do alot of observation of activities this week.


The Senior Director (whom I will interview on Friday) was hired in 1999 from a software/hardware vendor, which with ABC Organization does business.

Since that time a reorganization has been done at least annually! Another one is currently under way. Only this time the Senior Director has asked for any organizational member with an idea to make an appointment to see him.

The Deputy Director, whom I already interviewed, has been with the organization for 25+ years and was passed over for the Senior Director position.

journal entry

conducted and transcribed 3 of the 4 interviews for my project

1 of the interviews was very curious:

The guarded answers from the manager surprised the interviewer. He seemed relaxed and casual but gave substantially less information in his answers than did the others interviewed. He maintained eye contact with the interviewer, didn’t fidget, smiled, seemed relaxed in every way except for his answers. This guardedness did not diminish throughout the interview.

It should be noted that unlike the other interviewees he did not bring a copy of the questions to the interview for reference, although he was given one in advance. It also should be noted that the interviewer has had no work related contact with him to judge whether or not this is his customary way of dialoguing.

If this is not his normal way of dialoguing and the absence of a page of questions for him to reference during the interview was not the cause of the guardedness, the interviewer could conclude his position within the organization requires him to be guarded in what he says. That is a red flag!

What does this sound like to you?

Learning organizations give the freedom to fail. What causes his guadedness? It would be interesting to interview and compare the answers from another manager within the organization. But that was not within the original scope of this project.

week#9 - WFED 597E

completed all required reading!

continued reflecting on what I am learning
working on my reflective paper

3 of the 4 interviews for my Project are scheduled this week

When Managers Become Philosophers: Integrating Learning With Sensemaking (Schwandt, 2005)

What an informative, thought-provoking article!

Thank you, Tom, for bringing this article to our attention!

As I think about the people I meet and my desire to cultivate personal and organizational growth, the fact that learning is not always immediate and the fact that the organization will retain the aftermath of my learning long after I am gone, this handy reference of information blows me away!

The 5 theoretical orientations to adult learning include:

Behaviorist = environmental stimuli evoke responses or behavior changes

Cognitivist – Learning involves reorganization of experiences in order to make sense of
Stimuli. Does cognitive development end between 15 and 20 years of age?

Humanist – relationship of learner and environment is characterized by discovery, value acquisition, control of impulses, continuous concern with the wonder of human potential for growth and fulfillment.

“For the individual, the motivation to learn is intrinsic and leads to self-actualization (Maslow, 1943) to the extent that self-actualization is more th goal of learning than mastery of content (Caffarella, 1994).

Social-Learning = an individual’s knowledge depends on interaction with and
observation of other people in a social context.
I have trouble accepting the validity of this theory. So often people are upset and dissatisfied with group activities in an adult classroom setting. The facilitator must constantly balance the needs of those who do enjoy learning by interaction with others and the needs of those who attend class for information “not games”. Is this theory only valid for certain folks?

Constructivist = experience is the source of meaning for the individual and reflection becomes the method for changing mental frames.

Sensemaking is human interactions or a process that uses prior knowledge to assign meaning to new information.

Basic components of sensemaking (meaning making)
Cues from environment signal that meaning is required
Framework or knowledge structure (rules, values) serves as a guide to knowledge
understanding
script linking new info to framework

Properties distinguishing sesnsemaking from other processes
Grounded in identity construction
Retrospective
Enactive of sensible environment
Social (never solitary)
Ongoing
Focused on and by extracted cues
Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy
Areas of thought
Nature of knowledge and meaning
Action-learning relationship
Social context
Reflectivity

Knowing how one learns requires practice, experience with self reflection and reflective judgement.

Constraints on Organizational Learning During Major Change at a Mental Health Services Facility (Rowe, Boyle, 2005)

Research performed at Sunnybrook, a mental institution in Australia provides information about what not to do and guidelines for better managing major change.

Too many changes at once, in my opinion. Downsizing the number of staff and patients to fit into new facilities and physically relocating; moving to a team approach for patient care; and change in philosophical orientation.

The change was top down, led by the CEO and orchestrated by the Australian government based on an industry wide need. This type of change always magnifies the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty, doubt)

Characterizations of organizations that build learning cultures- (McGill & Slocum, 1993):
Clear and consistent communication
Openness to experience
Encouragement of responsible risk taking
Willingness to acknowledge failure and to learn from it

Constraints to learning faced at Sunnybrook
1. Preoccupation on the change process and less attention to the roles of stakeholders – people want to know how the change will affect them, their daily routines, their wellbeing, what is in it for them

2. staff feared dismissal for making mistakes. This is somewhat understandable because patients can die when mistakes are made, a learning organization puts structures in place so people can proactively examine and improve business practices.

3. avoidance behavior learned through punishment was more stable then behavior learned through rewards. For new learning to occur, a process of de-conditioning to overcome the fear of future punishment must commence.

4.History of punishing rule-breaking. Change necessitates the loss of control by the administration. Common defenses people with learned anxiety employed: a) not to hear the change message; b) deny the message applies to them; c) rationalize that management doesn’t understand the situation

5. communication patterns – before the change, leaders issued orders, workers carried them out

The Relationship Between the Learning Organization Concept and Firms’ Financial Performance: An Empirical Assessment (Ellinger, Ellinger, Yang, Howton

This is a great, down-to-earth article!
It made me to consider again: what are my goals for the participants in my classes? is my objective to equip them to perform their jobs well or is it something much greater? in order to keep fostering their learning I must keep validating the effect on the bottom line.

It is so important because how HR affects the bottom line via performance is crucial to so much more than just job security. People choose HR as a profession usually because they care about people, want to make a difference, enjoy learning.
Yet some of those same skills that make accountants great (meticulousness, ability to affect the bottom line) are needed to validate the outcome of HR.

Watkins and Marsick’s Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
is an instrument with 7 dimensions representing the 7 action imperatives. The DLOQ asks respondents for perceptual assessments of various measures associated with financial performance and knowledge performance.


The seven complementary action imperatives are:
Create continuous learning opportunities
Promote inquiry and dialogue
Encourage collaboration and team learning
Establish systems to capture and share learning
Empower people toward a collective vision
Connect the organization to its environment
Use leaders who model and support learning at the individual, team and organizational levels

3 leverage points emphasized by Watkins & Marsick:
systems-level, continuous learning; 2) that is created in order to create and manage knowledge outcomes; 3) which lead to improvement in the organization’s performance, and ultimately its value, as measured through both financial assets and non-financial intellectual capital.

A major research challenge is to establish the relationships between characteristics of the learning organization and organizational performance.

The theoretical framework guiding this research was the Watkins & Marsick concept;
A learning organization learns continuously and transforms itself.

This exploratory research “suggests” a positive association

WFED 597E 8th week

continued reflecting on what I am learning

finished reading the Dixon text

finalized the interview questions for my Project

scheduling those interviews

downloaded and began to read the outcome articles

WFED 597E 8th week

continued reflecting on what I am learning

finished reading the Dixon text

finalized the interview questions for my Project

scheduling those interviews
downloaded and began to read the outcome articles

thoughts on "Common Knowledge" by Dixon

major themes of Common Knowledge by Dixon
there are many different ways to transfer knowledge
knowledge is transferred most effectively when the transfer process fits the knowledge transferred

It was an easy read and thoroughly enjoyable. I really liked the case studies. I could relate to several of them with experiences and situations I have lived through.

KNOWLEDGE AS A GROUP PHENOMENON (page $156) took me away!
Especially because all through academics we are measured individually and on-the-job performance reviews are most always individual measurements. In our class discussion we talked about performance reviews being a grade of the supervisor/worker relationship rather than performance, didn't we?

This book has planted some seeds in my thinking!

Part of what I really like about grad school is the different things I am learning from the other students in group activities. My life is too short to learn everything by my own experience. I value the learned lessons others share with me and also the varied perspectives they bring to the tasks.

But when in a class my grade depends on the group's effort, getting the grade I want requires a whole different set of skills. Suddenly today, I realize professors giving this kind of assignmnet are trying to foster an appreciation for sharing knowledge and the value of the same. I thought they were just trying to foster getting along in groups skills and working together skills
and diversity skills. But it really is also about learning to share knowledge and to learn from others!

The same would be true on the job. How can I foster an environment where workers will be willing to share rather than horde their work expertise? "Thinking together" may not work in competitive environments but sounds so exciting with unlimited possibilities in team and group efforts!

I aslso liked page #156 the synopsis about communities of practice.

WFED 597E end of 7th week

continued to reflect on what I am learning

finsihed reading the process and tools articles

pressing on reading the Dixon text book

Important kinds of knowledge activities:
creating new common knowledge
leveraging common knowledge across organizational boundaries

A perfect example of this need for knowledge leveraging occurs almost daily here at our institution.
When I did my internship with Continuing Ed I realized that so much of the cutting edge knowledge that organization uses to train and instruct the Commonwealth's organizations and businesses is really needed by other organizations within our institution's community.

Another example is when a staff assistant from Continuing Ed met me in the Women's Mentoring Program. She saw immediately the need for Continuing Ed to address the members of the Program and present info on Continuing Ed offereings. The Women's Mentoring Program is 10 years old!

This need for common knowledge is so big - like blind folks describing an elephant. I only grasp a small part. Do I have the tusk, the trunk, the ear, the leg, the tail? What part do you have? How can we dialogue about our parts?

The bottom line is to press on, keep pursuing what really matters to you, learn from everything that comes your way, make your world a better place. GO!

The Construct of the learning Organization: DImensions, Measurement and Validation (Yang, Watkins, Marsick, 2004)

I apologize to anyone who has been reading my blogs because my typing errors are awful.

I obviously must be in grad school because I can noiot support myself typing!

This study attempts to develop and validate a measure of the learning organization.

Approaches to defining the construct

Systems thinking – Senge’s Five disciplines a learning organization should possess
Team learning – emphasis on learning activities rather than process
Shared vision
Mental models –
Personal mastery - focusing energy, developing patience, seeing reality objectively
System thinking – see inter relationships rather than linear cause-effect chains

Learning perspective – comprehensive aspects of learning at all organizational levels
Strategic perspective – understanding of the strategic internal drivers necessary for
building learning capability
Integrative perspective – Learning is a continuous, strategically used process – integrated
with and running parallel to work


the learning organization is a multi-dimensional construct
This study shows there is an underlying structure that represents patterns of learning
activities in an organization.

Management practices and Tools for Enhancing Organizational Learning Capability

The nine organizational learning sybsystems:
1) Discovering = necessary to build a system to sense & monitor changes
2) Innovating - necessary to find new ways to deal with changes
3) Selecting - necessary to enable right choices
4) Executing - organizational learning can occur only when the newly selcted ideas can be put into practice
effectively
5) Transferring - what's learned by the individual or group must be transfefrrred to the rest of the
organziation
6 - Reflecting - necessary for an organization to learn from past mistakes
7 -Acquiring knowledge from environment - conntinuous exchange of energy, info, knowledge between
organization and environment
8 - Contributing knowledge to environment - give knowledge to outside of organization
9 - Building organizational memory - accumulate knowledge from other 8 subsystems and export knowledge
to those sub systems

Developed propositions
1) Organization Learning Systems is composed of 9 subsystems
2) Each of the 9 is positively correlated with organizational sustainable existence and development
3) Each positively correlates with the other
4) To improve the capability as a whole, the 9 must match each other to achieve synergy

10 steps for conntinuosly enhancing organizational Learning Capability
1) Analyze/list important & urgent needs
2) Analyze/select tools to help meet hose needs
3) do a feasibility study
4) make final choices
5) Assign manager or team to lead implemnetation
6) Prepare and plan financial and human resources before implentation
7) Proviude training course for practices/tools for relevant people
8) Implement practices.tools and reward those who contribute
9) Evaluate the consequences of practioces/tools and determine further improvements
10) Plan next-step practices/tools according to changes inside & ouside organziatrion

Food for thought

in a meeting today regarding my final project, the Vice Provost said he sits on a council, that reports directly to the President of the USA regarding where the American workforce should be focused.

"To compete as an organizataion, our workforce must embrace change and change well.
To be successful, every person should reflect on embracing change".

he went on to explain that every worker will need to retrain and re-invent himself/herself at least 3 -5 times during the career.

Doesn't that sound like exactly what we have been studying in WFED?

Managing Change: Creating a Learning Organization Focused on Quality – Albert (2005)

With my background in total quality in the healthcare field, I really liked this article.

This article presents a case study for applying learning organization concepts to improve practices and performance. The goal was transformation of a medical instruments company from a production mentality to one that systematically embraces quality as a pervasive process to manage.

How does one begin a change process focused on becoming a learning organization? In the study they presented the change as a focus on continual improvement in quality rather than on becoming a learning organization. This change message would be much easier to communicate and more readily received by the rank and file members.

Executives, managers and key staff must have opportunity to dialogue in order to explore the mental models existing regarding organizational issues. What are they? Are they valid? Will they enhance or impede the change process? How should they change? How do we change them?

The five dominant mental models are
●Status quo – quality is not important in our organization
●Quality Control – quality is the process of inspecting and catching mistakes
●Customer service – quality is listening to and solving customer problems
●Process improvement – quality is using tools to understand and eliminate
unacceptable variations in our process
●Total quality – all of us collaborate, optimizing our common purpose

After the Consultant’s initial interviews and data collection, the CEO set up task forces, which generated conversation about the issues. Then a company wide data-gathering, focused on employee perceptions, was done to ascertain past mental models and actions that had shaped the current quality system.

From the results, it became obvious that non-technical issues such as organizational structure, culture and human resources are important factors to consider when managing quality.

Key factors in this change process success:
Top management support
Clear roles assigned to the Consultant (facilitating the process) and management (facilitating discussions)

week #6 - Feb 19

continued answering the questions for the Argyris & Schon text. It's difficult because so many thoughts and memories of situations jump to my mind. But I press on.

reflected on what I have encountered so far

wrote approximately 25% of my reflective paper

began reading the process and tools articles

anticvipating class discussions!

Learning From Samples of One or Fewer, March, Sproull & Tamuz (1991)

The paucity of historical events conspires against effective learning.

Decision processes in organizations lead to overly optimistic expectations and are vulnerable to disappointment with results.

Organizations repeat decisions made previously. They focus on critical incidents.

Optimistic errors in anticipation make the short run lessons of experience more reinforcing than the long-run lessons. The inconsistency in learning is reduced by the tendency for experience to be delayed and ambiguous.

What makes an event critical?
Place in the course of history, place in the development of belief, metaphorical power.

Organizations expand their comprehension of history by making experience richer, by considering multiple interpretations of experience, by using experience to discover and modify their preferences and by simulating near-events and hypothetical histories.

Common criteria include reliability and validity. Organizational learning involves balancing stable, shared knowledge with novel ideas.

Ways organizations increase the validity of learning from history:
Efforts to experience history more richly
Efforts to interpret the experience in more ways
Efforts to experience more of the events that did not happen

Processing what Argyris and Schon say

I am thinking about and processing through my very own mental model and personal filter the things the text authors say.

I find myself in conversations, mentally noting what thoughts, feelings, words myself and others are supressing and asking myself why. I am also considering what learning is taking place in these conversations.

In a larger organization, our US K-12 educational system, everyone knows the results are different than the results we expect. News people are frequently reporting US students score lower in key areas. Yet we continue to invest more dollars than ever before and come up with new initiatives like "No Child Left Behind" rather than addressing why the results do not equal our anticipated results. Perhaps everyone knows why and as a nation we are ignoring the truth.

Dr Rothwell in 572 said the whitehouse has had an OD Director on staff since President Eisenhower (1950s). What benefit to (the apparatus we call) goverment's learning has this position accomplished?

What about whistleblowers? and the ramifications of telling the truth everyone else ignores?

The one word that continues to surface is: balance.

Sorry for these ramblings. Right now I only have questions. I am searching for answers that will work for me.

I am just blogging where I am at today.

Feb 15 (after the snow storm)

mapped out the 1st part of my personal reflective paper -using two situations that occurred when I was the Project Manager for on-site software/hardware implementations for ABC Solutions. one occurrence involved a single customer. the other occurrence involved multiple customers. I want to try applying what I have learned in this course to these two situations from an individual's choices of actions and then from the perspective of the courses of action an OD Consultant would choose.

continued to reflect on what I am learning

WOW! The Argyris and Schon book is finally starting to offer possible solutions and positive steps to take when dealing with these imperfect human beings and their tendencies to defense.
I must be getting to the good stuff in the book! Bring it on!

I so appreciated Maurie's tribute to her friend who lost his battle with disease two years ago. In the middle of my reading about the downside of human nature and the difficulties in orgnaizations caused by humans, this story reminds me that there are great sides to human beings as well.

week #5 - February 12

continued reflecting on the articles, book report and text.

What is the significance of the case study presented in chapter 4 of the text?
At first read the case study is very distrubing and discouraging, thinking about the counter productive defensiveness of individuals. Thoughts and feelings critical for learning to occur are covered up and not revealed. Individuals face difficult, embarassing and threatening issues in ways that do not produce learning. There is a discrepancy between behavior and the individual's voiced desire to learn and to help others learn. Even when individuals realize what they are doing, they are unable to produce behavior that fosters learning. These imperfect human beings, who plan 1 thing and act another thing, distort information and refuse to dialogue in a way that clears up the distortions, don't bring the truth to the surface (especially in times of stress), etc. Diplomacy oftens masks true feelings, thoughts and ideas. The problem looms large. Practitioners may become defensive.

Then I remember our discussion regarding the "glimpses" we might catch of a learning organization and I have hope. An OD Consultant must be self aware and transparent. So as I work on my own self awareness and grow in my understanding and appreciation for the nooks and crannies of human nature, I practicie what I am learning and press on. Sometimes there will be glimpses! Learning is not always immediate!
r

Feb 9, 2007

Turned in my book report assignment

Downloaded the questions from Angel and began searching for answers in the text book. I find the text book to be not an easy read.

Attended a training presentation yesterday at the organization for my project. This office has a lot of inhouse materials and online access materials for techincal and personal effectiveness training. Began formulating questions for my interview in March with the Training Coordinator.

Thought about how I might relate my personal reflective paper to a specific organizational problem I lived through. Gee there have been so many! Which one should I chose? And if only I had this information then how would those situations have turned out differently?

I am thinking of you all today and getting excited about how the members of this class will change the world!
Go!

Thursday, Feb 8, 2007

completed 1st draft of book report
collecting mission statements and other things for project from ABC Services
have a 3 PM meeting about how ABC Services provides training to employees

week #4 - Feb 5

continued reflecting on articles, text, book for my book report
began writing book report
began formulating questions for project interviews
wrote some of my current reflections for the reflection paper

I am so excited! I don't know if my feet will stay on the ground!
Even though a learning organization is somewhat an ideal, there are times we can catch glimpses of a learning organization being realized and it is those glimpses that make me want to get out of bed in the morning and go for it!

Today I might catch a glimpse - as long as I keep striving and looking - today might be the day!

I am pressing on......

end of 3rd week - Feb 2

I just know I want to be part of a learning organization and I realize that with my 30+ years of expereince with multiple employers - I never have!

Learning is reflecting -
tried to spend time each day reflecting on the overview articles, the text, my book for report
How can I implement the concepts that are so important in my day-to-day conversations and decisions?

This quote says it all:
"To care for another person in the most significant sense, is to help him grow and actualize himself". Milton Mayeroff

Pressing on.....

organizational learning: the contributing processes and the literature, Huber (1990)

An entity learns if through processing of information, the range of its potential behaviors is changed.
Learning need not be conscious or intentional
Learning does not always increase the learner’s effectiveness
Learning does not always result in observable changes in behavior

Work on organizational learning has not led to research-based guidelines for increasing the effectiveness of organizational learning!

Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, Wenger (1998)

assumption =learning is part of human nature, life sustaining and inevitable, given a chance, we are good at it!

For individuals, learning is engaging in and contributing to community practices
For communities, learning is refining practices and ensuring new generations of members

Learning can not be designed. Need to design social infrastructures that foster learning
Learning is inherent in human nature
Learning is the ability to negotiate new meanings
Learning creates emergent structures
Learning is fundamentally experiential and social
Learning transforms our identities
Learning constitutes trajectories of participation-builds personal histories relating to community, past to future
Learning means dealing with boundaries (creates & bridges)
Learning is a matter of social energy and power
Learning is a matter of engagement, depends on opportunities
Learning is a matter of imagination (orientation, reflection, exploration processes)
Learning is matter of alignment (connection to social effectiveness of our actions)
Learning involves interplay between local and global

Integrative training scheme focuses on practice and seeks points of leverage for design to support learning

Guidelines:
Construe learning as a process of participants, whether for newcomers or old-timers
Place the emphasis on learning, rather than teaching, by finding leverage points to build on learning
opportunities offered by practice
Engage communities in the design of their practice as a place of learning
Give communities access to the resources they need to negotiate their connections with other practices and their
relation with the organization.

Do my adult learners have a sense that their competence, individual and communal, is valued, recognized and managed as a corporate asset? If not, why not? If not, how can I influence change?

Unlearning the organization, McGill & Slocum

Learning organizations are self-aware, introspective and constantly scan their environments

1- Knowing Organization (example: McDonald's) discover what works, commit it to memory and repeat it
efficiency, predictability and control
design machines so not relying on unpredicatble (imperfect) people
react to their environment
2- Understanding organization= guides strategy and actions via core values (sometimes called ruling myth)
3 - Thinking organization = fix the problem, don't look to prevent the cause )example: Foley's TLC)
4- Learning organization = committed to improvement via experiment. Behaviors such as (openness,
systemic thinking, creativity, empathy, personal efificacy) result from managment practices
that promote learning.
everyone sees opportunities to learn and grow
punishment for failure and dissent are eliminated
selects people for what they are able to learn
regenerating, dealing with new things, coming up with new approaches


structural characteristics of learning organizations: permeability (no boundaries for info flow), flexibility,
network intimacy

unlearning is the necessary precursor to learning

Innovating Our Way to the Next Inductrial Revolution, Senge, Carstedt & Porter (2001),

WHAT AN ARTICLE!

"People are born with intrinsic, motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiousity to learn, joy in learning" W. Edwards Deming (total quality pioneer)

"Humans are learning organisms par excellence. The drive to learn is as strong as the sexual drive - it begins earlier and lasts longer", Edward Hall (anthropologist).

what we do becomes inseparable from who we are.

(unleashing the passion that comes from personal vision, increasing imagination and creativity) How can I incorporate these concepts into my classroom-especially if the learner doesn't want to be there?

creating =make things we care about come into being
problem-solving = make things we don't kiek go away
Is this organization's life about survival or bringing into reality things people care about?

The traditional employment contract = good pay and benefits in exchange for loyalty is vanishing in many industries.

If empoloyes are thought of as free agents, managers must treat them with respect

People stay with an organization wwhen they see an alignment with their personal values and those of the
organization

company is from the latin: com-panis, sharing of bread

Organizational learning, Levitt & March (1988)

This article views organizational learning as routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented.

Organizations learn by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior. (and decision making?) Problems: past does not perfectly predict the future, experience can be incomplete due to complexities and instabilities, the causal systems are complex

Organizations learn from direct experience and from the experience of other organizations. organizations develop paradigms for interpreting expereince.

Learning from experience includes trial-and-error and organizational-search

People are not perfect and make errors in their inferences from events. Conflicts of interest within the organization spawn conflicting interpretations of expereince and success.

The lessons of history encoded in routines are an important basis for the intelligence of organizations

Learning needs to be compared with other serious alternatives not with perfection.

3rd week

read about 1/5 of Von Krogh, Ichijo & nonaka (2000) book. It is everything I hoped it would be. The authors give very practical steps to be take. There is a whole chapter on the caring organization. They define caring as
the concern for a person to grow. That is exactly what I want to do: cultivate personal and organization growth.

thought about the implications of my research project at AIS. The people that I inrterview will be changed by the experience of the interview. I must craft my questions carefully.

Organizational learning is NOT just individual learning with lots of people. Organizational learning occurs through individuals. Organizations influence members' learning and retain past learninjg after members have left

January 26, end of 2nd week

plowing through the introductory articles and Argyris & Schon text

Identified a fascinating area and requested approval for book review on tacit knowledga and innovation.
requested and picked up book from Pattee Library - if book report topic not accepted for this course I still need to master the info in this book for my future endeavors.

Suggested research project with Administrative Information Services at PSU. I will work alone.

Two of the items I must cover in my personal reflective paper are:
the inclusion of decision making with performance as the desired outcomes of training
role is not prescribed behavior but prescribed decision premisis (LET MY PEOPLE THINK!)
This is very much related to my WFED 550 topic Appreciative Inquiry and area I want to research.

How Organizations Learn and Unlearn - Bo Hedberg (1981)

Do organizations only learn and remember through current members? Organizations have cognitive systems and memories, develop world views and ideaologies. For me this means, just as it is important to place the right people in the right positions, I need to consider the organization's identity story stems from all those who have gone before. Removing a person from a position that doesn't fit will not remove the organization's idenity story that person influenced. Organizations retain the sediments of past learning after the original learners have left.

unlearning (discarding obsolete thoughts and information) is as important as learning new knowledge

Organizational learning is the defensive process of adjusting to reality and the offensive process of fitting the
organization to the environmnet.

Cognitive limitations can distort organization's interpretation and block learning cycle

How researchers understand learning:
- learning that cumulates, maintains and restructures knowledge
- learning that enslaves and learning that liberates. Which do I prefer giving?
- learning that changes environemnts-the purpose of learning is to improve performance AND TO MASTER
THE ENVIRONMENT!
-learning as the result of adaptive and manipulative elationship between a system and environemnt (too
much stability or turbulence hinders learning)

Incompletedness in learning cycles:
role-consreined learning - individual beliefs and actions are blocked
audience learning - couplings of individuals' and organization's actions are weak
superstitious learning - individuals' actions affect organization's actions but couplings between organizational
actions and environmental repsonses are ambiguous.
incomplete learning cycles where couplings between environemntal responses and individual's beliefs are
problematic

Environmental benevolence or hostility affects organizational learning

Organizations can to some ectent control their external environment

Learning can be triggered by opportunity or by people

How one conceptualizes organizational development is also a matter of attitude

Unlearning cycles can also be blocked and incomplete.

Organizational unlearning is typically problem -triggered

development ends when one of these is missing: learning, unlearning, relearning

Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning,and innovation. Brown & Duguid (1991)

The purpose of this article is to show that working, learning and innovating must be linked to thrive collectively.

training is the transference of explicit, abstract knowledge from one to another. learning is built out of the materials at hand in relation to the structuring resources of local conditions. To be effective in my facilitation, I need to understand my adult learners as persons and understand the community they inhabit.
One size does not fit all. I must be adaptable.

Legitemate Peripheral Participation is not a method of education but a tool for understanding learning. In LPP learners learn to function in community. The central issue in learning is becoming a practitioner not learning about practices. I must help my adult learners grasp how to use the information presented to them.

Group theory considers groups are bounded entities within an organization and are organized by the organization's view of tasks. Communities are not bound, more fluid and often not recognized by the organization. Consequently, I can not look only at job roles and managment expectations when I assess training needs. I need to know how work and learning are really accomplished. This raises a red flag about forcing a team or work group into the workplace without truly understanding the communities involved.
Employee resistence will occur if I interrupt any process they value.

Legitemacy (how to tasks) and peripherality (manner, technique, producers producing) are necessary so workers are not uncertain about the cause of errors (inevitable or the fault of personal inadequacy.

2nd week - January 22, 2007

searched the Web for key words: explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, emancipatory knowledge,
organizational learning, learning organization

need to make a decision about term project by 2/10/07 - most folks in the class are fulltime employed, will
most likely work on a project by myself

began reading the Argyris & Schon text

Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning Simon (2001)

internal learning - transmission of info from one organizational member or group to another
organizations are best viewed as systems of interrelated roles

role is not a system of prescribed behaviors but a system of presribed decision premises
I find this statement curious. Job roles do not presecribe behavior but decisions! That is total quality!

some organizations desire employees already "indoctrinated" with its values and SOPs (forestry & engineering)
I find this statement astounding! "indoctrinated" has such a negative connotation for me. Why would any organization want a pre-programmed employee?

patterns of communication: circle, members communicate only with two immediately adjacent
wheel, members are arranged and communicate only with the leader or coordinator
expertise is based on extensive knowledge, world-class expert holds 50,000 chunks of info
processes of learning inclujde research, instruction, acquiring knowledge of appropriate constraints
bounded rationality = the limits upoin the ability of humans beings to adapt optimally or satisfactorily to
complex environments

week 1 January 16, 2007

downloaded, perused all the Intro articles

WFED 597C SP07 Week 1

I downloaded the course syllabus, purchased my books, set up a blog, got excited about the course