Organisational Learning

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Lecture 6

• Organisational Learning

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Lecture Outline

• What is organisational learning?
• The significance of organisational learning?
• Agyris and Schon (1978).
• Single and double loop learning.
• Levitt and March (1988).
• Organisational memory, recording, conversation of
  experience and retrieval of experience.
• Senge (1996) building learning organisations.
• The leaders new role.

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What is organisational learning?

• The ability to integrate new ideas into an
  organisations established systems to produce
  better ways of doing things.
• According to Agyris and Schon (197829)
  organisational learning occurs when members of
  the organisation act as learning agents for the
  organisation, responding to changes in the
  internal and external environments of the
  organisation by detecting and correcting errors
  in theory in use, and embedding the results of
  their inquiry in private images and shared maps
  of reality.
• Levitt and March (1988) suggest that
  organisational learning involves organisations
  learning by encoding inferences from history into
  routines that guide behaviour.

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The significance of Organisational learning

• Organisational learning is not merely individual
  learning, yet organisations only learn through
  the experience and actions of individuals
• Human learning is understood as the construction,
  testing and restructuring of knowledge.
• Organisational learning might be understood as
  the testing and restructuring of organisational
  theories of action.
• We must understand what it means for an
  organisation to act, and we must show how
  organisational action is both different from and
  connected to individual action - individuals are
  agents of OL.

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Perspectives of an organisation

• An organisation is - a government, an agency, a
  task system.
• An organisation is - a theory of action, a
  cognitive enterprise undertaken by individual
  members, a cognitive artefact made up of
  individual images and public maps.
• Organisational theory-in-use. Organisational
  theory-in -use is to be inferred from observation
  of organisational behaviour - that is, from
  organisational decisions and actions.
• Often tacit because of its incongruity with
  espoused theory that is not discussable.

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Images and maps

• Each member of an organisation constructs their
  own image of theory-in-use of the whole.
• Image is always incomplete.
• Organisational learning must concern itself not
  with static entities called organisations, but an
  active process of organising - cognitive
  enterprise.
• Organisational maps are the shared descriptions
  of an organisation which individuals jointly
  construct and use to guide their own inquiry.

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Organisational learning

• As individual members continually modify their
  maps and images of the organisation, they bring
  changes in organisational theory-in-use.
• Individual members serve as agents of changes in
  organisational theory-in-use which run counter to
  organisational entropy. They act on images and
  shared maps with expectations of patterned
  outcomes which the experience confirms or
  disconfirms.
• When there is a mismatch of outcome to
  expectation members respond by modifying their
  maps and activities to bring expectations and
  outcomes in line.

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Single-loop learning

• Members of the organisation respond to changes in
  the internal and external environments of the
  organisation by detecting errors which they then
  correct so as to maintain the central features of
  the organisational theory-in-use.
• Organisational learning occurs when individuals,
  acting from their images and maps, detect a match
  or mismatch of an outcome to expectation which
  confirms or disconfirms organisational
  theory-in-use.
• In the case of disconfirmation, individuals move
  from error detection to error correction.

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Single-loop learning

• In order for organisational learning to occur,
  learning agents discoveries, inventions must be
  embedded in organisational memory.
• They must be encoded into the individual images
  and shared maps of organisational theory-in-use
  from which individual members will subsequently
  act.
• If this encoding does not occur, individuals will
  have learned but the organisation will not have
  done so.
• From this - it follows that there is no
  organisational learning without individual
  learning and that individual learning is a
  necessary condition but insufficient condition
  for organisational learning.

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Double-loop learning

• Single-loop learning is sufficient when error
  correction can proceed by changing organisational
  strategies within a constant framework of norms
  for performance.
• Primarily concerned with effectiveness
• However, in some cases error correction requires
  an organisational learning cycle in which
  organisational norms themselves are modified.
• The results of the inquiry will require
  restructuring of organisational norms.

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Double-loop learning

• An organisational inquiry which resolves
  incompatible organisational norms by setting new
  priorities and weighting of norms, or by
  restructuring the norms themselves together with
  associated strategies and assumptions (Agyris and
  Schon 1978).

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Deutro-learning

• Organisational learning are not one-shot but
  continuing.
• The organisation must learn how to restructure
  itself at regular intervals. The organisation
  must learn how to carry out single and
  double-loop learning.
• The organisation must learn how to learn.
• They reflect on and inquire into previous
  episodes of organisational learning - discover
  what they did to inhibit or facilitate
  organisational learning, evaluate and generalise
  what they have produced.

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Levitt and March (1988)

• Organisational learning - builds on three
  classical observations
• Behaviour in organisations is based on routines -
  It involves matching procedures to situations.
• Organisational actions are history dependent.
• Organisations are orientated towards targets.
• Within this framework organisations are seen as
  learning by encoding inferences from history into
  routines that guide behaviour.
• The experiential lessons of history are captured
  by routines in a way that make the lessons
  accessible to organisations and organisational
  members who have not themselves experienced the
  history.

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Learning from direct experience

• Routines and beliefs change in respond to direct
  organisational experience through two major
  mechanisms
• Trial and error experimentation
• Organisational search
• Competency traps

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Interpretation of experience

• Stories, paradigms and frames.
• Organisations devote resources to developing
  collective understandings of history.
• Organisations discard ineffective interpretive
  frames in the very long run but the difficulties
  in using history to discriminate among
  alternative paradigms are profound.
• Frameworks for interpreting experience within
  organisations are vulnerable to paradigm peddling
  and paradigm politics.

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Organisational memory

• Routine-based conceptions of learning presume
  that the lessons of experience are maintained and
  accumulated within routines despite the turnover
  of personnel and the passage of time.
• Rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs and
  cultures are conserved through systems of
  socialisation and control.
• They are retrieved through a memory structure.
• These instruments not only record history but
  shape its future path and the details depend
  significantly on the processes by which the
  memory is maintained and consulted.

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Recording the experience

• Inferences drawn from experience are recorded in
  documents, standard operating procedures,
  accounts, files and rule books in the social
  and physical geography of organisational
  structures in the culture of organisational
  strategies and in shared perceptions of the way
  things are done around here.
• Not everything is recorded - organisations
  consider outcomes/knowledge that is important for
  the future.
• Experiential knowledge is recorded in an
  organisational memory.
• Inconsistencies/ conflicting interpretation of
  history are likely to be organised into deviate
  memories (ie) subcultures.

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Conservation of Experience

• Unless the implications of experience can be
  transferred from those who experienced it to
  those who did not, the lessons of history are
  likely to be lost through turnover of personnel.
• Written rules, oral transitions, and systems of
  formal and informal apprenticeships implicitly
  instruct new individuals in the lessons of
  history.
• If organisational experience is not conserved -
  it disappears from an organisations active
  memory.

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Retrieval of Experience

• Only part of an organisations memory is likely
  to be evoked at a particular time.
• Some parts of the organisational memory are more
  available for retrieval than others.
• Availability is associated with the frequency of
  use of the routine, the recency of its use and
  its organisational proximity.
• Availability is also a matter of the direct
  costs in finding and using what is stored in
  memory.
• Technology increasing the retrieval of
  organisational memory - problems in capturing
  unpredictable richness and experimentation of
  unreliable retrieval.

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Learning from the experience of others

• Mechanisms for diffusion
• Three broad processes of diffusion
• Diffusion through single source broadcasting
  information to a population of potential.
• Spread of information through contact between a
  member of the organisation with new information
  and wider organisational population.
• Spread of the information across the
  organisation, remainder of the population.

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Senge (1996) Building learning organisations

• The leaders new work
• Creative tension - creative tension comes from
  seeing clearly where we want to be, setting-out a
  vision and telling the truth about where we are -
  our current reality.
• Principle - an accurate picture of current
  reality is just as important as a compelling
  picture of a desired future.
• Energy change comes from our vision.

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A leaders new role

• The traditional authoritarian image of the leader
  is an over-simplification.
• Leader as designer
• Leader as teacher
• Leader as steward

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Leader as designer

• Contrast the role of captain.
• The first task of organisational design concerns
  designing the governing ideas of purpose, vision,
  and core values by which people live.
• The second task of leadership involves the
  policies, strategies and structures that
  translate ideas into business decisions.
• The creation of key design principles that enable
  learning organisations - leaders are responsible
  for how processes are improved.

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Leader as teacher

• Leaders should help people in the organisation to
  achieve more accurate, more insightful and more
  empowering views of reality.
• Helping everyone in the organisation to gain more
  insightful views of current reality - leaders as
  coaches.
• Starts with the leader bringing to surface
  people's mental model of important issues.
• Leaders as teachers - help people restructure
  their views of reality to see beyond the
  superficial conditions and events - and into the
  underlying causes of problems - new possibilities
  for shaping the future.

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Leader as steward

• The servant leader is a servant first.
• Leaders sense of stewardship operates on two
  levels -stewardship for people that they lead and
  stewardship for the larger organisation.
• Leaders in learning organisations feel part of a
  larger purpose that goes beyond their
  organisation.They are part of changing the way
  businesses operate based on a conviction that
  their efforts will improve the organisation.

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New skills

• Building shared visions
• Surfacing and testing mental models
• Systems thinking