Organisational Learning

Question 1

Organisational Learning is an important element of the EFQM Excellence Model. Discuss the key elements of organisational learning as they relate to becoming an excellent organisation with reference to:

• The importance of learning to an organisation

Answer 1

Organisational learning is the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organisation. It should be acknowledged that a learning organisation is a construct, and not a naturally occurring phenomenon, hence it requires conscious effort.

Organisational learning is important to the improvement and achievement of an organisation. Deming stated that “Every organisation is perfectly designed to achieve the results that they do.” This means that the performance of an organisation is down to its processes and most importantly the knowledge behind its processes as it is knowledge and learning that enables the defining and refining of the processes. Further, the environment is always changing, technology evolves and in order for companies to survive the change the rate of learning must be greater or equal to the rate of change; L ≥ C. As mentioned in the knowledge element of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge, learning must be continual in order for a organisation to cope with change which is often unpredictable and further improve its processes accordingly.

Question 2

• Key aspects of an integrated environment to support individual, team and organisational learning.

Answer 2

Creating a learning environment includes the following characteristics, Pedler, 1997:

1) The learning approach to strategy - should not be always fixed but flexible for changing environments.
2) Participative policy making - Not created by top management alone but all people involved, for example Hoshin Kanri (Catchball) approached through effective communication. May increase commitment, ownership and willingness to implement the plan.
3) Informatting - Making information widely available to staff in order to empower them to act on their own initiative, transparency.
4) Formative accounting and control - particular from of Informatting, in which financial mechanisms are designed to assist the people to learns how finance works in the business.
5) Internal exchange - All departments see themselves as interrelated; each others customers and suppliers. Engaging in regular dialogue, results in a flat structure organisation.
6) Reward flexibility - Recognising improvement and contribution without coupling an association of developments and promotion.
7) Enabling structures - All structures, departments, processes etc, provide individual and business development whilst being adaptable and flexible.
8) Boundary workers as environmental scanners - Members of the organisation who have contact with external users bring back information to be shared and used across the organisation
9) Inter-company learning - Organisation learning through joint ventures, training, shared R&D, secondments etc. Also learning through benchmarking and competitors
10) A Learning climate - Promoting and maintaining a culture and climate that encourages learning, top management leading by example by questioning their own assumptions.
11) Self-development opportunities far all - Resources and facilities for self-development available to all members, encouragement to take responsibility for and manage their own learning from their jobs, learning groups, quality circles etc.

This also links to Pedler’s Energy flow model that views a learning organisation as an organic living and changing entity: Policy > Ideas > Actions > Operations… with Collective-Individual, Vision-Action axes, feedback contributing to iterations of policy. Corporate Learning Disabilities can be cased by biases such as excessive strength or weakness in a particular area or complete or partial energy block

Question 3

Discuss the organisational learning cycle

Answer 3

The organisational learning cycle starts is show below:
Generate > Integrate > Interpret > Act
Generating learning first starts with an individual’s experience which is shared throughout the organisation. Examples include discussing an event or an educational session with colleagues.
This experience is then Integrating into the organisational context through reflection at an organisational level. Examples of such action include others sharing their experiences of similar events or sharing their views on the content of the educational session in context of the organisation.
Collective interpretation of this contextualised experience then occurs to create shared concepts and mental models. Examples include the group concluding discussions on these contextualised experience and agreeing on appropriate responses to undertake individually or as a group.
To test the conclusions, action is needed thus providing further concrete experience. Examples of typical actions include acting on the agreed responses and observing the results to either confirm or contradict the models and conclusions established before. This process applies not only for the whole organisation, but also for the teams and departments within it. It also can apply to external partnerships i.e with suppliers and customers. This learning process closely remembers the Kolb’s learning cycle for individual learning which starts from concrete experience leading to reflective observation, then abstract conceptualisation and then active experimentation. This is a continuous process.