Creating a Learning Organization

A learning organization manage evaluation of projects to capture and interpret information that can benefit future projects. Organizational learning includes both individual and collective learning, which are both important determinants of organizational effectiveness. The ability to learn is a key enabler to organizational success and competitive advantage . But managing the learning is difficult and time consuming, which is why many organizations often fails to do it or completely neglects it.

Organizations can apply methods, theories and tools to better their skills in learning. This article describes the importance of learning in an organization, and how information is created, captured and interpreted, and used in future projects. It also outlines the requirements for creating a learning organization. Lastly it investigates the barriers to learning and how to overcome these.

Importance of Learning

Important information and answers to many questions emerge from experiences. So learning organizations create an environment where employees continuasly seek new knowledge to share with co-workers. They manage to work together and make sure that teams or an individual employee has access to exactly the information that is relevant for them in the specific task .

Benefits of Learning

There are several benefits to having a learning organization. These include:

• With a high level of maintained knowledge, answers to most questions are available
• High levels of innovation in the organization
• Competitiveness in the industry and market
• Fast response to change
• Increased knowledge and skills
• Improved work methods and routines
• Improved quality of outputs at all levels

Relevance for Project, Process and Portfolio Management

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Principles for Creating a Learning Organization

In his book The Fifth Dicipline, Peter Senge outlines five characteristics for a learning organization that he calls the "learning diciplines":

1 Develop personal mastery

How much we know about our selves and is aware of the impact that out behavior has on others is called self-awareness . Developing personal mastery focuses on learning to expand our self-awareness and personal capacity to create desired results. Individual learning is acquired through training and encouragement of continuous self-improvement. But learning cannot be forced on an individual, and it is crucial that employees are willing to learn . Therefore organizations needs to make learning part of the culture, while creating an organizational environment in which organizational members are encouraged to develop skills and disciplines that can help in reaching their goals and purposes.

2 Build complex, challenging mental models

The assumptions or "internal pictures of the world" held by individuals and organizations are called mental models. These are part of shaping the way people think and act. To be a learning organization, these mental models need to be reflected upon and continually challenged. Organizational members have to clarify their mental models for each other, while challenging each others' assumptions in order to build a shared understanding .

3 Promote team learning

When teams start thinking together by sharing individual experiences, insights, knowledge and skills it is called team learning . When teams to team learning they are able to develop greater intelligence and ability than the sum of individual members', which in the end will make an organization more competitive and faster responsive to a changing environment. Team learning is done through openness when team members engage in dialogue and discussions, and through shared meaning, understudying and visions. Excellent management structures that allow development, reflection and challenging of knowledge is required .

4 Build shared vision

Creating a sense of commitment and common identity in a group to work towards common goals means having a shared vision. Teams need to take time early in the process to build common understandings and commitments, and create shared visions in order to work effectively .

5 Encourage systems thinking

Systems thinking is a conceptual framework that describes the language and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. It helps teams to unravel the often hidden subtleties, influences, leverage points, and intended or unintended consequences plans and programs. It leads to deeper, more complete awareness of the interconnections behind any system . Mapping and analyzing situations, events and problems, can help organizations to detect causes of problems, and plan courses of action to better solutions .

Integrating Learning in an Organization

When an organization fails to manage learning, valuable knowledge is thrown away. Learning can and should be implemented in all parts of a process, and on every level of an organization. Integrating learning in a organization requires time and commitment. Peter Senge says "First, you must realize that the very idea of a "learning organization" is a vision".

Individual learning and Collective learning

To create a learning organization, managers need to realize that an organization consist of many individuals who have different ways of working, different ways of reflecting and communicating and different levels of resistance. Managers need therefore to understand both individual and collective learning, particularly in terms of the extend to which individuals are viewed as autonomous and distinct from social and cultural groups in work activities .

Individual Learning

Learning is characterized as an individual human process of consuming and storing new concepts, skills and behaviors. The challenge is to draw out this learning and translate it to capabilities that can be useful for the organization .

Individuals often hold much more information than they share, because it can be very challenging to communicate. The kind of knowledge that is hard to transfer to another person is referred to as Tacit Knowledge or "know-how", and is highly experience based and context dependent. Though being hard to communicate, tacit knowledge is considered being the most valuable knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in an organization. It is found in the minds of human stakeholders, and include cultural beliefs, values, attitudes and mental models, as well as skills, capabilities and expertise. Focus on the form of knowledge will have impact on the organization's ability in innovation and competitiveness . The challenge is to communicate and translate this information into something useful for others.

Knowledge that is easy to communicate and standardize is referred to as Explicit Knowledge or "know-what". This type of knowledge is easy to identify, store and retrieve. The challenge here is to ensure that people has access to exactly the information that is relevant to them, and it should therefore continuously be reviewed, and updated or discarded .

Collective Learning

Knowledge that is locked to an organization's processes, culture, routines, experiences, artifacts, or structures is called Embedded Knowledge. Knowledge is embedded either formally such as through management initiatives to formalize a certain routines, or informally as the organization uses and applies tacit and explicit knowledge. Embedded knowledge can therefore exist in both tacit and explicit forms, and exist in manuals, rules, processes, and organizational ethics and culture. Embedded knowledge is analyzable in the relationships between, for example, technologies, roles, formal procedures, and emergent routines, and is capable of supporting complex patterns of interaction when there are no written rules . The challenge in this type of knowledge is that culture and routines can be very hard to understand, communicate and change, but effectively managing embedded knowledge can give an organization competitive advantage.

Singe-loop and Double-loop Learning

Argyris and Schön (1978) distinguish between two types of learning; Single-Loop Learning and Double-Loop Learning :

Single-Loop Learning Engaging in Single loop learning means reflecting on what is happening now or in the past, and focus attention on detecting errors. Corrective routines are then developed from this feedback, to modify future actions and behaviour. This includes both goals, values, and operating frameworks. Single loop learning can be very useful and is a good tool in continuous improvement, but will never create path breaking behavior.

Double-Loop Learning Re-evaluating the deeper variables that make us behave the way we do is called double loop learning, and happens when leaders are able to think outside the box. It challenges the accepted ways of thinking and behaving, and thereby provide the possibility of developing new understandings of situations and crucial path breaking behavior. Double-loop learning only occurs when leaders are able to deeply reflect on outcomes. This is done by identifying the assumptions that underpine decisions and actions that lead to the achivements, and also identifying those assumptions that defines the definition of satisfactory outcomes. These assumtions should be reviewed and challenged, and where appropriate, modified.

Requirements to create a learning organization

In order to learn, an organization needs a creative climate. This means to have:

• Trust and openness
• Challenge and involvement
• Support and space for ideas
• Conflict and debate
• Risk taking
• Freedom

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Barriers to Learning

Even though there is a lot of potential in disseminating know-how between projects, many companies fails to do so. This is because there are several barriers to learning in an organization. Zedtwitz (2003) divides barriers into four categories :

1 Team based barriers include poor internal communication and reluctance to blame.

When team members have different backgrounds and work in different locations, it can be difficult to communicate effectively and fully understand each other. There exist both professional and personal relationships within a team. While personal relationships can help build a stronger team, it also creates a barrier for co-workers to go against each other in situations where it is needed .

2 Physiological barriers include memory bias and inability to reflect.

The human brain has limitations. Our memory is biased and we tend to remember the more positive or negative experiences, and forget the indifferent or common experiences, which can often contain just as useful information. It also tends to suppress complex problems, which are actually often the most important problems to understand and reflect on. Additionally, the brain is from nature not capable of reflecting completely on the past, either because it is hard to link outcomes of previous actions or simply because we do not like to reflect over our own failures .

3 Managerial barriers include time constrains and bureaucratic overhead.

In vast majority of all projects, time is a constraint and teams constantly work under a performance pressure. So often there is no time of reflect on the process, team work and outcomes, even though this might be a big help in future projects by eliminating possible questions or time spend on the same problems. Another managerial barrier is that not all stakeholders in a project is asked to reflect or give feedback to the process. It is most often only the top management that runs checkpoints on time, budget and quality of deliveries, and the root of possible problems are not detected on lower levels where they actually occur, which is a huge barrier to organizational learning .

4 Knowledge utilization barriers include difficulty in generalizing information and tacit knowledge.

Sharing knowledge in a systematic way is difficult and you can end up with immense amounts of information which is pointless to navigate in for future projects. People also know more than they are able to express. It is difficult to express feelings and impressions .

Overcoming the Barriers

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