Anecdotes and Antidotes: Organizational Learning Through the Ages

Berglund Authority Level 4

by Tom Cockburn <tomc529@hotmail.com>

Legends of the beginning of organized and organizational learning:

In some parts of the world apparently, there are folk tales of how grandmothers used to be very skilled at sucking eggs in olden times. Don't ask me why or how they acquired such skills. That story is lost in the swirling mists of antiquity. The actual process of sucking eggs involved manually removing the egg yolk. You first make a small hole in the top and another in the bottom of an egg. Then, by blowing (not sucking) the yolk and albumen or 'white' of the egg can be removed. I suppose you might also remove the contents by sucking them out but then you'd only need one small hole and strong cheek muscles. In either case, once the insides of the egg have been removed the hollow eggshell is retained for some nefarious purpose best left undiscussed by menfolk, I think. These grandmothers did not need further enlightenment in the 'egg-sucking' arts. They were held in high regard for such learning in this esoteric activity. However, they jealously guarded these secret craft skills even from younger women nevermind any men seeking enlightenment. The tale is told below.

Once upon a time long ago, in an age when grandmothers sucked eggs, apprentice grandmothers learned the secret skills of the wise women at their own grandmother's knees. Basically that was how learning a trade or profession occurred way back then for all kinds of apprentices in all industry types. Egg-sucking, like all the others, was a cottage industry at that time. Then along came the industrial age and mass-produced factory egg-suckers required a different form of training. Training and learning in egg-sucking workshops across the land occurred by trainees watching their mentor, an experienced egg-sucker. That's where the old adage "don't try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs" began. The grandmothers had a union—Egg-sucking Craftswomens' United (ECU).

That old system didn't train enough people fast enough to produce the amount of sucked eggs demanded. So the egg-sucking factory owners hired an expert to 'scientifically' improve the process. So the expert, one Edward George Gilbert Taylor ('Eggy' to his friends and 'stinker' to the ECU) divided up the egg-sucking into several simpler tasks and was able to reduce training time. The owners began to keep notes on how they trained people and they trained new trainers the 'Eggy' way. These people and those notes became part of the 'organizational memory' of each egg-sucking factory and pretty soon other organizational learning occurred and all this knowledge needed managing.

Introduction and Overview

If I look as if I am trying to teach my (metaphorical) 'grandmother' to 'suck eggs' in this article, I apologize. However, since I don't have any evidence that my grandmother—or anyone else's grandmother— is actually reading this, I'll continue. I think its best not to assume familiarity too soon in any relationship. So, I'll begin with some basic stuff and a global overview of the topic of organizational learning and then some data on the geographic spread of the activity. I won't provide a comprehensive literature review but I will suggest some extra reading for those interested and would be more than happy to get some feedback from readers. I will leaven this flippancy with some more 'serious' stuff in the next article when I will discuss my own research interests in emotional regimes in communities of practice.

There is no arguing—even from grandmothers—with the view that change is the common element in most societies in the 21st century. Arguably, those resisting change are simply delaying the inevitable. Hence, the business of business is now learning and organizing the organization as a learning vehicle. Thus, once that learning organization ideal is accepted all else will follow. Professor Reg Revans famously observed that, "Learning inside an organization must be equal to or greater than change outside the organization." The alternative to that level of learning is, of course, that the organization fails to evolve in time and in sync with the world and, inevitably, dies out.

What sort of changes and how will such changes occur, who might be able to control or influence these changes and who will become the new 'top dogs'? These are all key questions that are exercising minds in governments, organizations and societies across the globe [1]. These are big, important, hairy questions and there is no easy answer to them. However, in the network age, knowledge is a key commodity in short supply. Getting knowledge and then keeping it updated is becoming increasingly difficult to do. So attention to how we learn, and especially how people and organizations learn, has become a critical field of study.

Learning occurs in all organizations to varying degrees. The learning may be seen at an individual level, a team/departmental level, or it may be at a corporate or even a sectoral level within an industry. Such learning may be positive or negative, deliberate or accidental. The organization may be a private corporation, Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), a public university or a small startup business. Organizations may even be virtual entities.

Virtual Organizations (VO) are coordinated groups of individuals and institutions who collaborate towards a common purpose or shared business goal. Members of a VO can be geographically distributed and can access the organizational resources at any time. Some organizations aim to deal with the complex and turbulent changes in the world by becoming a virtual organization and reducing, if not eliminating, physical structures such as company premises, in favor of virtual offices.

In fact, some [2] have defined the four key ways learning in organizations as:

  • Adaptive learning, which occurs when an individual or organization learns from experience and reflection on that experience. Adaptive learning may be either single-loop (focused on gaining information to stabilize and maintain existing systems), or double loop (questioning the system itself and why the errors or successes occurred in the first place).
  • Anticipatory learning arises when an organization learns from how it expects the future to emerge or evolve.
  • Deutero-learning occurs when the organization learns from critically reflecting upon its taken-for-granted assumptions and paradigms.
  • Active learning involves (a group/team) working

Organizational learning, therefore, as the name implies, means that the learning is a collective accumulation of knowledge or skills and occurs across the organization in some way. There are many definitions of organizational learning. For instance, one way to define Organizational Learning is as an organizational process undertaken to acquire, access, and revise organizational memory, thereby providing direction to organizational action [3]. However, that doesn't give us much detail on the process, distribution or salience of organizational learning across the hierarchical levels and structures involved. Others define organizational learning as an interacting set of four processes—intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing [4] or socializing, externalizing, combining and internalizing (SECI) in a conversation between explicit and tacit learning components [5]. The last two connect the individual, group/team, and a number of hierarchical, organization levels. Thus individuals, teams, groups and the whole organization are who is learning, the set of four processes explain how learning is taking place.

Organizational learning therefore can be episodic, cumulative, culturally or historically mediated, socially constructed, emotional, physical, 'political', 'spiritual', aesthetic or sensual, emergent, programmatic, reductionist or holistic. In whatever form, there is a clear need to balance the learning needs of individuals within organizations with the perceived learning needs of the organization. Thus, it is easier said than done.

The learning 'content' and delivery may be explicit— structured into the processes and policies of the organization like job descriptions and standard operating procedures. Or, it may be tacit— part of the informal and unspoken assumptions that 'socialize' people into the culture and helps make the specific organization 'tick'. Organizational learning may therefore be targeted at individuals (orientation and induction for instance), teams (bonding and rites of passage), departments (sales training, budget-consciousness) or the complement of staff for an organization (motivation, esprit de corps and pride in excellence) depending on the purposes, relationships or resources.

Organizational learning is a necessary precondition for establishing a learning organization as defined by Peter Senge [6], but on its own, organizational learning is not sufficient to create a 'learning organization'. That is because learning organizations go beyond routine monitoring of performance and correcting their mistakes and begin to challenge their own thinking. They move beyond single loop learning and engage in double or even triple loop learning; challenging the basis for their own modes of thinking, beliefs and values. They begin a spiral process of learning to learn and critically evaluate their own paradigms, systems, practices, 'sacred cows' or 'taboos' in order to elevate their business practices. Thus emotions are a key component and these emotions crop up in various ways.

Such organizational learning as described above may also be seen by some managers, at certain times and in certain organizations or sub-units, as 'subversive' or 'counter-productive'. That is particularly the case when such learning is seen as occurring at the expense of other 'legitimate' activities. That is, the learning is perceived as taking up time and effort employees might otherwise spend on core production tasks or key service activities.

Learning in organizations and organizing to learn:

Issues and problems often arise with the organization of learning. That is, the modes of learning, learning styles, content and curriculum design, implementation and assessment of organizational, as opposed to individual, learning. Under modes of learning, there is an increasingly diverse range of non-traditional, non-classroom forms such as interactive e-learning. That is often referred to under the catch-all name of 'Web 2.0'—not, incidentally, simply an upgrade on 'web 1.0' as such, but indicating the higher level of interactivity and engagement sought by staff and students today.

E-learning in organizations has become much more than just an alternative to traditional face-to-face learning today. The functions and capabilities of e-learning systems have increased and expanded far beyond expectations, and are increasingly being considered a necessity within the training and education space in organizations. The smart use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) over the last few decades has shifted the concept of the teacher from being a broadcaster of information to an off-stage facilitator and co-learner. Although development costs of e-learning materials are high, delivery and maintenance costs are relatively low and, unlike some other traditional models of delivery the per-user costs decrease each time a course is used. The supporting e-environment needs to change too; teachers need to become aware of their changing roles. That is often difficult, especially at higher levels of the education system such as universities.

Many organizations, including colleges and universities, non-governmental organizations, charities and private corporations, seek a blended approach. That is some mix of synchronous face-to-face or videoconferencing with e-learning because staff cannot always be spared for days at a time to physically attend traditional programs or the organization uses virtual teams, which are widely dispersed geographically. The e-learning is asynchronous rather than synchronous usually since this mode allows for self-paced learning at a convenient time for the participant who may be in a different time zone. Thus a blend of face-to-face, self-paced and asynchronous e-learning is seen as more flexible and ultimately more sustainable for staff training and development.

A lot of organizations still approach organizational learning as if all that is needed is an e-learning system and some minimal technical or training support. It is often assumed that all you need to be a learning organization is to 'plug and play' and that will provide the optimum e-learning resources to increase productivity, performance and job satisfaction.

The questions asked by many corporate buyers of e-learning systems are often about what things they can do and what they costs to buy, install, run and maintain. Consequently, organizations are increasingly checking out the latest learning initiatives such as wikis, blogs, RSS and mobile learning. They are really looking for a 'silver bullet'— the one 'killer application' that will be a panacea for all their perceived problems and put them ahead of their competitors. In the course of (metaphorically) 'keeping the wolf from their door', in this way they often tend to ignore the business case. That is, they do not deal with key strategic aspects of organizational goal-setting, differentiation, quality, performance management and cultural as well as organizational alignment.

Organizations of all kinds are now realizing that generic e-learning systems are not satisfying the specific needs of their organizations in the network age. They are coming to terms with the realization that strategic learning systems, that are aligned with strategic performance goals, positively enhance organizational capability and learning, and effectively utilize their staff.

Around the globe:

There are also a number of problems with how networked organizations cope with learning. For instance, the flexibility of network organizations to add and subtract (discharge) members creates several organizational learning problems. One is the problem of diffusing existing information and interpretation to new organizational members. A second problem is the issue of safeguarding organizational knowledge and maintaining experience in-house after members leave. There are also hidden costs or penalties due to decentralization.

Decentralization disperses some learning, especially tacit forms of learning. Thus, it comes with a learning penalty, but on the other hand, it also means there is potentially a chance to avoid some of the mistakes of the past [8]. As markets or partnerships shift, and when knowledge and know-how are their key differentiator or main competitive advantage, organizations risk losing wealth in two senses. Firstly, there is loss of wealth in the sense of the loss of a strategic asset for innovating and differentiating products and services. Secondly, wealth is lost in 'opportunity cost' terms; i.e. due to difference between the lost opportunities or gains that they might have obtained and what revenue streams they end up with [8].

Epilogue:

Generic global strategic trends to watch include the following three [7]:

  1. Increasing emphasis on integrated access to teaching and learning resources, ubiquity in the United States, of course management technology and the increasing use in other areas such as the UK, EU and Australasia [7].
  2. Increasing self-directed learning programs, which include an instructor in the loop for entry-level education or domain-specific learning. This instructor-led paradigm is still the dominant form in the various higher education forms of organizational learning.
  3. Evolving forms of collaborative learning such as The "Web 2.0" phenomena of social networking, blogging, video sites, wikis, texting and instant messaging replacing email are taking off. Wired has indicated that a number of US universities are looking into the use of sites such as Second Life for teaching and learning developments. Because of the recent development of Web 2.0 and social software, e-learning is moving beyond utilization of the internet for knowledge management, as a store of information, or for course management. Now, the internet may be used for participation, communication, sharing and collaboration. Within organizations, these new e-learning tools offer opportunities to create informal learning environments in which learning and development are integrated into organizational practice. Such a ubiquitous integration of e-learning in organizational development moves beyond blended learning towards pure e-learning.

(Next article will be on emotional capital, sustainability and organizational learning.)

References

[1] McMaster, M. D. (1996) The Intelligence Advantage—organizing for complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann: Boston

[2] Marquardt, M.J. (1996) Building the Learning Organization: A Systems Approach to Quantum Improvement, McGraw-Hill: New York, NY.

[3] Robey, D., Boudreau, M. & Rose, G. M. (2000) Information technology and organizational learning: a review and assessment of research, Accounting, Management and Information technologies, Vol.10, pp 125-155.

[4] Crossan M.M., H.W. Lane & R.E. White (1999), An organizational learning framework: From intuition to institution, Academy of Management Review, Vol.24 (3), pp522-537.

[5] Nonaka I. & H. Takeuchi (1995), The knowledge-creating company - how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[6] Senge, P (1990), The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization, Century Business, Random house: London

[7] Abel,R., Humes, L., Mattson, L., McKell,M., Riley,K and Smythe, C. (2007) Achieving learning impact in 2007, IMS Global learning Consortium,pp10-18, last accessed, 29th August 2007 at http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2007/li2007report.cfm

[8] Alstyne, M. Van The State of Network Organization: A survey in Three frameworks, Journal of Organizational Computing (1997), 7(3)