“Developing Organizational Memory through Learning Histories”
by George Roth and Art Kleiner

In: James W. Cortada and John A. Woods (editors).  The Knowledge Management Yearbook 2000-2001. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000. pp. 123-144. 

Summarized by: Ady de Leon
14 August 2001

 

Summary:

Learning History :

  • Document that tells an organization its own story.
  • Intended to bring about change and improve performance
  • Open dialogue
  • Storytellers – catalyst for change
  • Record of their thinking, experimentation and arguments to reflect on their own experience.
  • Primarily a transitional object
  • Main purpose – help generate reflective conversations. It doesn’t offer the answer to the question.
  • Semi-public documents intended for the organization as a whole.
  • Typically commissioned and championed by senior management after a significant change process.
  • People don’t want to know what happened, they want to know what to do next.


Learning History Process:

1. PLANNING – delineates the range and scope of the learning history project. Start by assembling a group of “champions”. Identify noticeable results or business outcome associated with an improvement or learning.
 

2. REFLECTIVE INTERVIEWS – people are expected to talk about their analyses, evaluations, assessments, and judgements. We want to simply know the story of what happened from their perspective. We use time lines and noticeable results. As people talk about their experience, new reflective connections are made and new insights are developed. Interviews build reflective capacity in the organization.
 

3. DISTILLATION – taking volumes of data from  interviews and screening them into a form that will be useful for the organization.
 

Three Imperatives for Organizational Self-Knowledge:

(a) Research – keeping our conclusions deeply rooted in the data after an analysis. Oftentimes dispassionate. Example: Technical/historical analysis of Ford and Motorola

  • Link assumptions and conclusions to the data.
  • Explicitly distinguish between observable facts, the descriptions and interpretations that participants made, and the explanations, conclusions and assessments.
  • Research Reports present the case as logical arguments, each sentence is considered an analytical step on the path to validity.
  • It does not help people change their behavior.


    • (b) Mythic – telling an emotional, compelling, archetypal story, literary. Example: Company’s forebears and their struggles

  • Tacit Knowledge – know-how embodied in an organization’s culture and its employee’s intuitions, ideals, skills, and experience.
  • Made explicit through storytelling – provide teams with the ability to see their own knowledge and make new knowledge actionable.
  • We cultivate a reflective approach rather than an evaluative approach.
  • Exaggerate the facts in service of the deeper truth.


    • (c) Pragmatic – telling a story in a way that can be read, heard and discussed effectively in organizations. It is results-based. Example: Company’s triumphs and vision

  • Requires patience
  • Check the validity of the champion’s concern.
  • Validation and dissemination process plays close attention to the pragmatic approach.
    • NOTE: The three imperatives are not contradictory, they are complementary.


    4. WRITING – Learning histories are presented in two side-by-side columns. In the right hand column would be the narrative and on the left hand side will be the evaluative comments. From here the reader can develop his or her own conclusions.

    5. VALIDATION – This allows the original participants to relive their experience in the company of others – and to observe how it will be seen by the rest of the company.

    6. DISSEMINATION – The learning history manuscript is designed for “discussion” in teams. Workshops, like reading groups are conducted. From reflective conversations, own conclusions about  the meaning of the organization'’ experience come up. More importantly, pitfalls and challenges are appreciated and in the end they have the chance to say “Here’s how we would do things differently”.
     

    Workers
         } Practitioners of organizational learning
    Managers
     

    Three imperatives in putting together a Learning History:

    1. True to the data – everything in the report is recognized as valid
    2. True to the story – report has a compelling, mythic quality that captures people’s attention
    3. True to the audience – pragmatically helps the organization to move forward.


    Three critical elements to a Learning History Approach:

    1. Collaboration of company insiders and outsiders
    2. Beginning with noticeable results
    3. Use of jointly told tale


    Learning Organization:

    • Collective learning to continually gain new talents and capabilities.
    • Encourages people to follow their own aspirations and at the same time boost organizational performance.


    Organizational Reflection – each member of the organization knows some aspect of the pitfalls, the ways in which the organization creates its own problems, impact of changed policies, and the means by which the enterprise could move forward into the future.

    • Rarely put into practice due to time pressures of corporate life.
    • Requires the difficult task of building self-awareness together.
    • Help people learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.


    Different types of concerns that fuel the desire for organizational reflection:

    • Work groups that have gone through a significant business change or learning effort – often want to document their success and learn from their failures.
    • The experience of a successful team offers a platform in which the rest of the organization can build.
    • Sustained conversations about the identity and purpose of the organization as it moves into the future.


    Organizational Memory – store and transfer “actionable” knowledge including tacit theories and assumptions
     

    * In the process of opening themselves to learning, they change themselves and lead the learning that enables their organizations to change.

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