The Learning Organisation
The idea of the organisation as a living, learning entity was developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon in their 1978 book Organizational Learning. Learning by the people within an organisation becomes learning by the organisation itself. Changes in people’s attitudes are reflected in changes in the formal and informal rules that govern the organisation’s behaviour.
A learning organisation, wrote Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline, the book that popularised the idea, is “an organisation that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future”. It is continuously learning new ways of doing things and also (necessarily) involved in a continuous process of unlearning, of forgetting old ways of doing things.
Organisations work as a set of interconnected subsystems, says Senge, so decisions made in one part of the business have implications for the other parts. Managers, therefore, need to embrace the complexity of organisations rather than embracing what he calls “the pervasive reductionalism” of western culture, whereby simple answers to complex questions are always sought. Senge says that a non-threatening dialogue needs to be carried out among the employees of an organisation in which some sort of consensus is reached as each employee comes to see the points of view of all the others, and begins to learn from them.
The idea of the learning organisation has been developed rather differently by Arie de Geus, a Dutchman who worked for Royal Dutch Shell for 38 years before becoming a visiting fellow at the London Business School. De Geus starts with a model of the company as a living thing. Like other living organisms, it exists in order to survive and to fulfill its potential. But to do this, organisms must be constantly learning how to adapt to their environment. Companies are no exception. They must become learning organisations that change and adapt to suit their changing business environment. There are a number of radical consequences of thinking of companies as living organisms. Living beings, as opposed to dead things, have character and will and can make choices.
In particular, they are:
- goal-oriented;
- self-aware – they know who is a member of the company (a subsidiary) and who is not (a supplier). Most importantly, the shareholder is not a member of the living company, it is an external stakeholder, much like a trade union or a customer; s
- ubject to disease – the threat of a takeover, for instance, can damage a company’s health; and
- mortal – eventually they die.