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The importance of learning was first put forward by a Chinese philosopher, Confucius (551 - 479 BC). He believed that everyone should benefit from learning.
"Without learning, the wise become foolish; by learning, the foolish become wise."The underlying cause for recent emphasis on organisational learning is because of the increased pace of change. Classically, work has been thought of as being conservative and difficult to change. Learning was something divorced from work and innovation was seen as the necessary but disruptive way to change. The corporation which is able to quickly learn and then innovate their work will be able to change their work practices to perform better in the constantly changing environment. Change is now measured in terms of months not years as it was in the past. Business re-engineering used to concentrate on eliminating waste and not on working smarter and learning."Learn as if you could never have enough of learning, as if you might miss something."
"A framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things; to see the forest and the trees."
This means that organisations need to be aware of both the company as a whole as well as the individuals within the company. Up until the introduction of this concept, companies concentrated on their own needs not the needs of their workers. Systems Thinking tries to change the managerial view so that it includes the ambitions of the individual workers, not just the business goals.
One of the systems used was called Decision Support Systems (DSS). This was for the use of corporate executives to help them make decisions for the future. It was in fact the building of the models, which defined the systems, that benefited the management rather than the system's operation. This was because the building of the model focused on what the business really was and the alternatives available for the future.
One benefit of DSS was that it made implicit knowledge explicit. This makes extra knowledge available to the organisation and will tend to allow the organisation to learn better because explicit knowledge will tend to spread faster through an organisation. In this respect DSS can be considered as an additional method of communication in organisations. This systems tool was predicted to be necessary for every executive's desktop. But this did not happened.
In the 1970's, the same idea was renamed to Organisational Learning. One of the early researchers in this field was Chris Arygris from Harvard. He published a book on the subject in 1978. Even with this published information the concept still wasn't physically taken on by any companies.
In the 1980's, companies discovered time as a new source of competitive advantage. This lead to `capabilities-based competition' which included the capability of learning. Many other people have continued along this line of research, such as Peter Senge - one of the modern day gurus. Information on the topic has been passed into various companies. These companies are now trying to become Learning Organisations. If the changeover to a Learning Organisation happens overnight, the environment around the workers will be complex and dynamic. There will be agitations and confusion which means learning may not take place because of the chaos caused. So it can only be introduced into a company that is prepared to reach a balance between change and stability, i.e. a balance between the old and the new. Organisations must interact with the environment around them, so the environment must be suitable for that interaction.
Becoming a Learning Organisation seems a logical step for all companies to follow and hopefully this document will give a clear understanding why.
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