With change being our only constant in today's economy, the key to
competitiveness is the ability to adapt to changes we don't control and learn
about the ones we do. Either way, learning has become a critical skill to
ensure the viability of any institution. While many organizations today are
trying to become "learning organizations", learning capability has
ensured the success of many, well-known firms. For example, Motorola learned to
design and build paging systems and cellular phones instead of car radios, and
IBM learned how to take someone else's idea about computers (a Univac
innovation) and make it a commercial success.
"Building Organizational Learning Capability" is a program to
enhance the capability of work teams and their institutions to learn from their
own experiences (success and failures) and from the experiences of others. By
using this program, your organization will:
- assess its learning strengths and weaknesses
- recognize team learning styles
- develop strategies to learn and improve performance
- understand how to align its learning portfolio with corporate strategy
- enhance learning and the dissemination of knowledge across the institution
- eliminate the recurrence of identical failures, errors, or mistakes
- increase its ability to adapt to change
The Program Consists of :
A Learning Inventory and Strategies Workbook
A Facilitator's Guide
Customized workshops and interventions
This program was created from research funded by the International
Consortium for Executive Development Research and supported by the Center for
Organizational Learning at MIT. Research began in 1992 with fieldwork at
Electricité de France (Paris, France), FIAT (Torino, Italy), Fidelity
Investments (Boston), and Motorola (Chicago). In workshops and client
engagements, the program has since been tested and used with staff at a wide
range of companies and organizations including Arthur Andersen, AT&T,
British Petroleum, EDS, Exxon Chemical, the Harvard University Library System,
Merck, PacBell, and Unilever.
A principal tool in the program is a diagnostic instrument, the Organizational
Learning Inventory (OLI). The OLI is designed to profile the current and
desired learning capability of an organizational unit, such as a department,
workgroup, taskforce, or a company subsidiary. The OLI is completed by members
of an organization working together with a trained facilitator. The format of
the OLI stimulates group discussion, providing an opportunity for group members
to share knowledge and perceptions about their own learning practices. By
recognizing existing capabilities, the OLI empowers teams to acknowledge the
present and to use that awareness as a takeoff point for desired competencies.
Guided by a trained facilitator, members of a group follow the OLI to create
a "learning profile" which can be analyzed to understand learning
portfolios. The "learning profile" is a template of 17 elements that
either promote or represent social learning processes. The following chart
contains the set of seven Learning Orientations. The other side of the template
consists of ten Facilitating Factors that promote learning.
LEARNING ORIENTATIONS |
| NAME |
APPROACH |
| 1. Knowledge Source |
internal ....... external |
| 2. Content-Process Focus |
content ....... process |
| 3. Documentation Mode |
personal ....... collective |
| 4. Knowledge Reserve |
formal ....... informal |
| 5. Learning Scope |
incremental ..... transformative |
| 6. Value-Chain Focus |
design/make ..... market/deliver |
| 7. Learning Focus |
individual .......... group |
Typical action based on the program consists of the following phases:
Needs Analysis and Organizational Readiness
Analyze
the group or firm's readiness to enhance performance
Program Design
Customize the scope of the intervention
and design a program
Organization Assessment
Prepare profiles of current
and desired learning capability by using the OLI with single or multiple
workgroups
Action Planning
Complete action plans that identify
tasks to move from current to desired capability
Implementation & Monitoring
Implement group action
plans and monitor progress
Your Next Step
Companies can participate in this program either through a consulting
engagement with Organization Transitions, Inc. or through the purchase of a site
license to use the program's copyrighted materials.
For further information, contact:
