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?