Creating a Learning Organization

Creating a Learning Organization

Learning organization describes an organization with an ideal learning environment which is combined with the organizational goals. In Learning Organizations peoples continuously expand their knowledge & capacity to meet personnel & organizational success.

It is important to identify what is learning & what are the learning styles that can be used to create a learning organization in an effective way.

What is learning?

Transformative process where a relatively permanent change in a person’s knowledge or in behavior due to experience is defined as Learning.

Learning Styles

It is worth enough to study what are the effective learning styles that can be used to create a learning organization in a company. David Kolb explains this by his Experiential Learning Model which represents with four main stages.

Concrete Experience

A new experience or a situation or new interpretation of an existing experience.

Reflective Observation

Study if any inconsistencies between experience & understanding.

Abstract Conceptualization

By observing & reflecting, raising with a new idea or a modification for the existing idea which learned from past experience.

Active Experimentation

Implementing the new ideas in practice & sees what happens.

Kolb further explains that different people naturally prefer different learning styles. This is affected by social environment, education background of an individual.

Depending on how an individual approach a task & how his emotional response (How he thinks or feel about it) Kolb presents four types of learning styles where every individual has to go through.

Learning Style	Characteristics
Diverging – Feeling & Watching	Sees things from different perspectives. Sensitive. Prefer to watch rather than doing. Idea Generation-Brainstorming. Prefer to work in groups, to receive personal feedback & to listen with an open mind.
Assimilating – Watching & Thinking	Logical Approach. Ideas & concepts important than people. Prefer reading, lectures & having time to think through.
Converging – Doing & Thinking	Problem solving, less concerned with people. Prefers technical tasks & best at finding practical uses for ideas & theories.
Accommodating – Doing & Feeling	Hands on style, Relies on intuition rather than logic. Tend to rely on other for information. Attract to new challenges & experiences.

Afterwards, based on the work done by Kolb, learning styles were developed by Peter Honey & Alan Mumford where they again identified four learning styles.

Learning Style	Attributes
Activist	Learn by doing. Have an open-minded approach to learn. Involving themselves in new experiences.
Theorist	Like to understand the theory behind the action.
Pragmatist	Put learning into practice in real world. Trying new ideas & techniques.
Reflector	Learn by observing & thinking, Expect Feedback from others.

           

Later Peter Senge introduced Five Disciplines of a Learning Organization. This describes how to drive an organization towards the success by empowering their employees by knowledge & by also developing themselves in the career path.

Building a shared Vision

Creating a shared vision can be done by compromising the organizations vision with the employees’ vision where the employees who shared the same vision will do tasks more efficiently because they want to do so rather than they are told to do.

This changes the relationship with the organization where it opens space to a learning environment.

Systems Thinking

Focusing on individual actions leads to not seeing the big picture & failing understanding the correlation with each other. Rather than focusing on individual actions an organization have to focus observing the entire system. It enables to see interrelationships & patterns in a particular situation. It drives to figure out the cause & effect.

Mental models

Every individual has to understand what are the organization values & what is the business all about. Having a clear picture on this will lead to achieve organizational goals & employees of the organization will know how to develop further. Organization needs to be much flexible to adopt for new changes/mental models which will run to the success faster than its competitors.

Team Learning

Expressing employees’ real personalities to each other makes a comfort to the set-up of team learning which is an important priority when building an excellent team. The working environment should be safe where honest mistakes are forgiven to expedite the process in order to experience the learnings.

Personal Mastery

Having a clear vision of a goal & an accurate perception of the reality, it drives the employees to practice all the necessary knowledge to realize the vision. Peter Senge explains that employees should train their subconscious mind because it can handle more complex problems quicker than consciousness.  

All five disciplines are interrelated where each discipline can not stand independently. Implementation of these five disciplines will lead the organization to a continuous learning process & will create a strong learning organization within it.

For mare details look what the video says about a Learning Organization. 

Reference

Saul McLeod (2017) Kolb’s Learning Styles and Experiential Learning Cycle, simply psychology. Available at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html.

Honey and Mumford (no date) University of Leicester, Doctoral College. Available at: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/doctoralcollege/training/eresources/teaching/theories/honey-mumford.

Zeeman, A. (no date) Senge’s Five Disciplines of Learning Organizations, Tools Hero. Available at: https://www.toolshero.com/management/five-disciplines-learning-organizations/.

Klasą, F. S. z (no date) The Learning Organization: Characteristics of a Modern Enterprise. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40meQNZl3KU.

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