Are you building a Learning Organisation? Does it matter?

We were recently conducting a workshop for managers of a mid size private Organisation. The session dealt with multiple areas with reference to managerial capabilities. One of the points that got managers into a debate was : Why should I (the manager) bother about creating a learning organisation? Is it not the responsibility of ‘a particular function’ within the Organisation? 

Some of them said that as a manager, the measure of success is different—through the achievements of your team rather than your individual accomplishments. This calls for a different skill set. When you become a manager, your technical expertise remains important but no longer defines your responsibilities. Your job is to get results through the creativity, expertise, and energy of others. 

This means that the individual who is calling herself as the manager needs to learn these skills. Keeping her team members competitive and relevant calls for constantly investing time in developing people. 

Peter Senge, an American systems scientists and founder of Society for Organisational Learning, has done a seminal work on Organisational learning. We think that leaders and managers can take a leaf from his work and use it in their personal and professional journey. Senge says that change is teaming and learning is change. Thus, it is possible for organizations to learn to change because “deep down, we are all learners”. In his book “The Fifth Discipline”, Senge wants to destroy the illusion that the world is created out of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion, we can then build ‘learning organizations’, organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. Managers must learn to detect seven organizational ‘learning disabilities’ and use the “Five Disciplines” as antidotes to them. 

THE FIVE DISCIPLINES OF SENGE 

The five components in the model from Senge are: 

1. Systems Thinking. The integrative (fifth) discipline that fuses the other 4 into a coherent body of theory and practice. 

2. Personal Mastery. People must regard their life and their work such as an artist would regard a work of art. 

3. Mental Models. Deeply ingrained assumptions or mental images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. 

4. Building Shared Vision. If there is a genuine vision, people excel and learn, not because they have to, but because they want to. 

5. Team Learning. Team-members participate in true dialogue. They suspend their assumptions. 

All these 5 disciplines must be employed in a never-ending quest to expand the capacity of the organization to create its future. Learning Organizations are those organizations that can go beyond survival learning, to perform generative learning: a form of learning that enhances their capacity to create. 

We think leaders and managers have a very important role to play in building this culture of continuous learning within the Organisation.