BUILDING BLOCKS OF A LEARNING ORGANISATION:
Awareness: Organisations must be aware that learning is necessary before they can develop into a Learning Organisation. This learning must take place at all levels; not just the Management level. Once the company has accepted the need for change, it is then responsible for creating the appropriate environment for this change to occur in.
Environment: Therefore a more flexible, organic structure must be formed. By organic, we mean, flatter structure which encourages innovations. The flatter structure also promotes passing of information between workers and so creating a more informed work force. It is necessary for management to encourage openness, reflectivity and accept error and uncertainty. Members need to be able to question decisions without the fear of reprimand. This questioning can often highlight problems at an early stage and reduce time consuming errors. One way of over-coming this fear is to introduce anonymity so that questions can be asked or suggestions made but the source is not necessarily known.
Leadership: It is the leader’s responsibility to help restructure the individual views of team members. For example, they need to help the teams understand that competition is a form of learning; not a hostile act. Management must provide commitment for long-term learning in the form of resources.
Empowerment: The locus of control shifts from managers to workers. Workers become responsible for their actions; but the managers do not lose their involvement. They still need to encourage, enthuse and co-ordinate the workers. This is unlike traditionally learning that involves a top-down structure (classroom-type example), which is time consuming.
Learning: These aims can be achieved in Learning Labs. These are small-scale models of real-life settings where management teams learn how to learn together through simulation games. They need to find out what failure is like so that they can learn from their mistakes in the future. The managers are then responsible for setting up an open, flexible atmosphere in their organisations to encourage their workers to follow their learning example.
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