It must be 15 years ago that I went to a seminar by Peter Senge in Brussels to learn about the then new concept of the ‘learning organisation’. Actually, the first writer on the subject was the UK’s Bob Garratt in 1987, but it was Senge who popularised it with his ‘Fifth Discipline’ (recently republished in a new edition.¹Bob Garratt focused on the importance of directors receiving multiple information flows internally and externally, and using these to direct the organisation intelligently.² Senge described five disciplines of the learning organisation: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and the all-important ‘systems thinking’. He and his team have gone from strength to strength and have recently become very popular in the Middle East.

I came away from the Senge seminar intellectually enthused but not sure how I would describe the practical evidence of such an organisation. Together with my colleague Elizabeth Lank, we put together a book which followed the format of the then popular European Quality Model.³ We identified nine constituent areas of the practical learning organisation and made up a final checklist of 187 questions to benchmark against.

There is no shortage of help in understanding the nature of an organisation that is continually learning from its own experience and that of others, and maximising the learning of each individual and team. And yet when people ask me to give examples of true role models, I struggle. I can quote examples of excellent practices here and there. Perhaps Buckman Laboratories (see www.knowledge-nurture.com) comes the closest to a whole organisation totally committed. There is a good reason for that. Bob Buckman, the CEO, has personally driven the creation of a learning culture over many years as a real evangelist. McKinsey, BP, Siemens, the World Bank and many other well-known names can describe excellent practices. But the business logic is so unassailable that one has to ask why every organisation does not give this more attention?

The truth is that there are many practical factors working in the opposite direction. In an action-centred world with constant initiatives, time is always at a premium. Taking time for reflection and sharing of learning requires real discipline. It is not that people do not see its importance. I find the attention span of line managers on the subject to be fairly low, because it all seems so obvious and sensible. At the workplace, however, it is a question of competing priorities.

That is where leadership comes in, and all the examples I have given have been driven by a leader who not only believed in the value of a learning culture but was prepared to invest time and effort into developing it. They let everyone know that learning is an investment like any other business investment, and do not send counter signals like cutting the training budget when times are hard.

Alas, trainers are often part of the problem rather than the solution. They may be more interested in encouraging people onto their training courses than helping people evaluate their learning needs and exploring various options to meet them.

Whoever is leading the learning and development function has a pivotal role. That may be helping senior management with their own understanding of what a learning culture should look like, and managing the slow and steady implementation of it. Cultural change – for this is what it is – requires majors in consultancy and facilitation skills and patient organisation development work. I very rarely see such a person with a detailed long term plan for building a learning organisation. And when champions depart for new positions, the momentum often departs with them – undoubtedly a major reason for the piecemeal picture we observe.

Interested organisations can join the Society for Organisational Learning, founded by Peter Senge in 1997.⁴ It is a lively network with many communities and a regular programme of crossmember learning. ‘Knowing’, however, must be matched by ‘doing’.

References
1. Senge P, The Fifth Discipline, Random House, 1990, new edition 2006.
2. Garratt Bob, The Learning Organisation, 1987, new edition, 2001.
3. Mayo A and Lank E, The Power of Learning, IPD 1994.
4. Society for Organisational Learning, www.solonline.org

Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, specialising in people and organisation development. He can be contact on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew.mayo@mayolearning.com or visit www.mayolearning.com

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