I repeatedly hear 3 phrases in my organisation: 'We've done that before', 'what's the problem we're trying to solve?', and 'who shall I ask?' I hear each of them several times a week and have tended to treat them as discrete items. But maybe I'd be better reflecting on them as a collective in order to tackle the challenge I have this coming week of facilitating a session on learning organisations.
A 2011 article on learning histories that states that 'The essence of a learning organization is that it actively identifies, creates, stores, shares, and uses knowledge to anticipate, adapt to, and maybe even shape a changing environment. The driving concern [in doing this] must be reflection, communication, and collective sense making for action across its personnel'. It seems obvious to suggest that if we are to achieve our target of 'business transformation' we need to become a learning organisation.
The learning organisation is not a new management studies concept: Peter Senge was the 'guru' of it when I first came across the ideas. In 1990 he published The Fifth Discipline explaining the term and the thinking behind it. At that point helping organisations becoming 'learning organisations' was taken up by any number of consultants. HBR had an early article on it in 1993 and published several over the next couple of decades. But then the idea seemed to fade from agendas.