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 (John Hayes, The Theory and practice of change management, p. 487). The ability to learn is a key enabler to organizational success and competitive advantage. But managing the learning is difficult, 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, including trust and openness, challenge and involvement, support and space for ideas, conflict and debate, risk taking and freedom. Lastly it investigates the barriers to learning as well as the challenges that exist in creating a learning organization, and how to overcome these.

Importance of Learning

Important information and answers to many questions emerge from experiences. So learning organizations manage to work together and help each other in learning, and make sure that a team or individual employee has access to exactly the information that is relevant for them in the specific task.

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

• • Maintaining high levels of innovation within the organization

• • The organization stays competitive

• • Faster response to change and increase the pace of change within the organization

• • With a high level of maintained knowledge, answers most questions are available

• • Improved the 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 Fifht Dicipline, Peter Senge outlines five characteristics that he calles the "learning diciplines":

1 Develop personal mastery

2 Build complex, challenging mental models

3 Promote team learning

4 Build shared vision

5 Encourage systems thinking ...

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 on every level of an organization. Learning does however require some work. Peter Senge says "First, you must realize that the very idea of a "learning organization" is a vision". It should be integreated in the way an organization works.

Individual learning and Collective learning...

Argyris and Schön (1978) distinguish between two types of learning; Single-Loop Learning and Double-Loop Learning (John Hayes, The Theory and practice of change management, ch. 29):

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

A Creative climate

- Trust and openness

- Challenge and involvement

- Support and space for ideas

- Conflict and debate

- Risk taking

- Freedom ...

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. The barriers can be divided 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.

Challenges in Creating a Learning Organization

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Types of Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge is difficult to transfer to others Explicit knowledge can be easily communicated to others

Turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge…

Senge, The fifth Dicipline: https://books.google.dk/books?hl=da&lr=&id=-zBkAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=senge+learning+organization&ots=WFXl8SIJb8&sig=XgdFYM96uUqd8gh7fzjnRhrzoWk&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=senge%20learning%20organization&f=false