Three Critical Issues that must be addressed before a company can truly become a learning organization:

1. Question of meaning – a well-grounded, easy-to-apply definition of a learning organization
2. The second comes management – clearer operational guidelines of practice.
3. Finally, better tools for measurement – can assess an organization’s rate and level of learning

According to Garvin, LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS are skilled at five main activities:

1. Systematic problem solving

Reliance on the scientific method for diagnosing problems (what Deming calls the “Plan, Do Check and Act cycle)
2. Experimentation with new approaches

Xerox’s Problem-Solving Process
• Identify and select problem
• Analyze problem
• Generate potential solutions
• Select and plan the solution
• Implement the solution
• Evaluate the solution
3. Learning from past experience

Companies must review their successes and failures, assess them systematically, and record the lessons in a form that employees find open and accessible.
4. Learning from the best practices of others
• Of course, not all learning comes from reflection and self-analysis.
• According to one expert, “benchmarking is an ongoing investigation and learning experience that ensures that best industry practices are uncovered, analyzed, adopted, and implemented.
5. Transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.
• For learning to be more than a local affair, knowledge must spread quickly and efficiently throughout the organization
• Learning organization cultivate that art of open, attentive listening.  Managers must be open to criticism

5 components of technologies (from the fifth discipline)

1. systems thinking
2. personal mastery
3. mental models
4. shared vision, and
5. team learning

Definitions of Organizational Learning:

A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

Organizational learning means the process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding.

An entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range of its potential behaviors is changed.

Organizations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior.

Organizational learning is a process of detecting and correcting error.

Organizational learning occurs through shared insights, knowledge, and mental models… [and] builds on past knowledge and experience – that is, on memory.

Stages of Knowledge (adapted from work by Ramchandran Jaikumar and Roger Bohn)

1. Recognizing prototypes
2. Recognizing attributes within prototypes
3. Discriminating among attributes
4. Measuring attributes
5. Locally controlling attributes
6. Recognizing and discriminating between contingencies
7. Controlling contingencies
8. Understanding procedures and controlling contingencies

• Peter F. Drucker.  “The Coming of the New Organization” in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 1-19.
• Ikujiro Nonaka. “The Knowledge-Creating Company” in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 21-45.
• David A. Garvin. “Building a Learning Organization”. in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 47-80.
• John Seely Brown.  “Research that Reinvents the Corporation”. in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 153-180.
• James Brian Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein. “Managing Professional Intellect: Making the Most of the Best” in Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. pp. 181-205.