BNET Business Dictionary
Business Definition for: Learning Organization
- an organizational model characterized by a flat structure and customer-focused teams, that engenders the collective ability to develop shared visions by capturing and exploiting employees' willingness, commitment, and curiosity. The concept of the learning organization was proposed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön as part of their work on organizational learning, but was brought back to public attention in the 1990s by Peter Senge. For Senge, a learning organization is one with the capacity to shift away from views inherent in a traditional hierarchical organization, toward the ability of all employees to challenge prevailing thinking and gain a balanced perspective. Senge believes the five major elements of a learning organization are mental models, personal mastery, systems thinking, shared vision, and team learning. Because of the requirement for an open, risk-tolerant culture (which is the opposite of the corporate culture of most organizations today) the learning organization remains, for many, an unattainable ideal.
Additional Resources
- Building a Learning Organization
- The Idea in Brief As we all know, to stay ahead of competitors, companies must constantly enhance the way they do business. But more performance-improvement programs fail than succeed. That's because many managers don't realize that...
- Articles 2008-04-01
- Evaluation of Capacity-Building Programs: A Learning Organization Approach
- This article is the first step in designing a learning-based approach to program evaluation. The learning organization approach offers the promise of providing extension educators with mechanisms to demonstrate the value of the work that they are doing in improving the long-term stability and effectiveness of organizations. Many extension programs...
- White papers 2003-10-01
- The Presidency as a Learning Organization.
- The presidency can be interpreted as a learning organization. Jimmy Carter's development of energy policy provides a case study demonstrating the value of the organizational learning approach to the presidency. There is evidence that learning took place. The model of learning by doing may best fit presidential organization, although trial...
- Research articles 1999-03-01
- A learning transformation: the Eglin learning organization
- The words "learning organization" are more than just buzz words at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. They are becoming a way of life for Air Force members at Eglin's Air Armament Center AAC. Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert W. Chedister, AAC commander, is leading the charge. Chedister is focused on...
- Research articles 2004-07-01
- DAU South spearheads learning organization initiative
- Heeding Secretary Rumsfeld's call for continual transformation within the Department of Defense, Frank Anderson, Defense Acquisition University DAU president, assigned the learning organization prototype initiative to DAU South Region (DAU-S). The task was to facilitate an overarching learning strategy that promotes career-long learning and provides members of the workforce more...
- Research articles 2004-07-01
- The Learning Organization In Practice
- Modern business environment witnesses a perennial change. To survive and grow in such environment organizations need to adopt a learning culture. A learning organization is one, which analyzes and evaluates its past mistakes and acts appropriately towards ensuring that those mistakes are not repeated in future. The paper examines the...
- White papers 2000-01-01
- Built to learn: The Inside Story of How Rockwell Collins Become a True Learning Organization
- Built to Learn: The Inside Story of How Rockwell Collins Became a True Learning Organization
- Research articles 2003-08-01
- Using Action Learning
- Reg Revans (1907–2003) pioneered Action Learning as a management and organizational development tool. It's based on the premise that people learn best when they focus on a problem together. By sharing their prior knowledge and experience and by asking good questions based upon what they don't know, people can both...
- Articles 2008-01-03
- Tools for Assessing Your Organization's Learning Capabilities
- Every organization must learn or die -- learn about itself, the competition, the market, the world. A new Harvard Business Review package on organizational learning wraps together an article, assessment tool and video interview to help you judge your own organization's learning capabilities. What does a...
- Blog posts 2008-03-03
- The Competitive Imperative of Learning
- Most managers believe that relentless execution--the efficient, timely production and delivery of offerings--is vital to corporate performance. Execution-as-efficiency is important. But focusing too narrowly on it can prevent your company from adapting effectively to change. ...
- Articles 2008-07-18
- Learning in the Thick of It
- The Idea in Brief Like many managers, you probably conduct after-action reviews AARs to extract lessons from key projects and apply them to others. But in most companies, AARs don?t fulfill their promise: Scrapped projects, poor investments, and failed safety measures repeat themselves?while...
- Articles 2007-09-24
- The Only Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Learning
- Products can be copied. Processes can be copied. Services can be copied. So how does a company create a sustainable advantage over competitors? Former Analog Devices CEO Ray Stata put it simply: become a learning organization. Create an enterprise in which individuals and the organization as a...
- Blog posts 2009-01-02
- Learning & Performance Management
- In a business environment subjected to constant change, an organization has to quickly and efficiently adapt itself to the changed scenario. Learning is a tool, which the organization uses for re-aligning itself according to the change. Learning enables the organizational systems to refrain from committing past mistakes. It helps in...
- Presentations 2003-01-01
- HBR IdeaCast: Learning Organizations
- If your company's rate of learning isn't greater than the rate of change in your industry, you will fall behind. David Garvin and Amy Edmonson talk about how companies can create, acquire, interpret, and retain knowledge, then modify their behavior to respond to those knowledge insights. They also use examples...
- Blog posts 2008-03-10
- The Rise of the High-Performance Learning Organization
- The Accenture Learning 2004 Survey of Learning Executives has delivered a set of compelling insights into today's learning organizations, both in business and in government. The learning functions at most of the organizations participating in the Accenture Learning survey clearly face heightened expectations to deliver value, prove the business impact...
- White papers 2004-10-19
- Project Management as a Knowledge Management Primer: The Learning Infrastructure in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations
- The digital economy is based on knowledge and the ultimate objective is the reinforcement of performance. The business strategy has been shifted from the management of tangible assets to intangible resources and the traditional competitive position of business is based on their capacity for effective action. The conclusion is that...
- White papers 2004-04-20
- Driving Process Excellence In Enterprise Learning Through A Capability Maturity Model Integration
- An important development in enterprise learning, especially over the past half decade, has been a maturing ability to link learning investments to business results. One natural step in this maturation is seeking appraisal and certification from professional-quality organizations for learning development processes. Although world-class processes do not guarantee innovative, high-impact...
- White papers 2008-10-01
- Learning Organizations Challenged to Prove Business Impact, Yet Few Do, Accenture Survey Finds; Report Also Identifies Capabilities of the High-Performance Learning Organization
- NEW YORK -- While the biggest challenge for chief learning officers is to prove the business impact of their learning organizations to senior management, only a small number of learning organizations are delivering measurable value in terms of productivity gains, revenue growth, net income growth and overall industry recognition, according...
- Research articles 2004-11-15
- Organisational Change And Learning
- Organizations are in a constant state of flux or change. Efficient change management strategies are required for overcoming and normalizing the change in organizations. It is imperative for organizations to develop a learning culture for efficient change management. A learning organization is one, which evaluates its past mistakes, takes lessons...
- Presentations 2003-01-01
- Governance: Keeping Learning on Track to Deliver High Performance
- High-performance learning organizations run themselves like a business, and they also are keenly aware of their impact on the business as a whole. But awareness is just one part of it. More challenging is the constant attention to business strategy that keeps the learning organization "locked" onto business outcomes. Good...
- White papers 2004-06-21
