Learning Organization - Key Principles

The level of the organization's commitment to the process.

The organizational readiness towards the change.

The degree of the organizational openness to reflect on the current reality. Without being able to speak and listen to the truth and really hear it, there is no way for an organization to move into the learning process.

Good to know

We are talking about a change, moving from a 'surviving organization' to a 'learning organization' culture.

People do not resist change. People resist being changed.

In order to stimulate openness and generate commitment, people must first feel safe and secure. The level of security and openness are interconnected. If the organization is to change, people in it have to change, too. This is a critical point, since many of us think that organizations can change without changing the organizational core, the human resource. Moreover, if employees are facing change, their managers need to change first...

The first phase of change is to evaluate and diagnose the current reality, the organizational atmosphere towards the change. It's a little bit like the blind 'field of vision' when you are driving. Mirrors do not cover everything and if you rely totally on what you see in the mirrors, it is just a matter of time till you have an accident. Well, organizational accidents are just a matter of time in this process, if we do not identify those parts of the visual field that we do not see.

So we start by assuming that the management does not have a full vision of the current reality. Actually, this "working assumption" is one of the most significant in developing learning capabilities. We then can open an organizational dialogue in which we discover the current reality and the truth as different people in the organization see them.

In order to understand the conditions needed for a LO to emerge, it is good to know the conditions in which a LO cannot thrive.