10 dimensions of a learning culture
Our latest Knoco newsletter is now freely available for download, and covers the topic of "the ten dimensions of a learning culture". The ultimate goal of Knowledge Management implementation is for Knowledge Management to become "part of the way we operate" - to become embedded in the culture as well as the business. But what is a learning culture really like? We have looked in detail at the topic, and see potentially 10 different dimensions to the culture. The 10 dimensions are described below, and you can test your own culture against these dimensions using our free online survey. Open vs. defensive.
Peter Senge
Peter Michael Senge (born 1947) is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990, rev. 2006). Life and career[edit] Peter Senge was born in Stanford, California. He is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). He has had a regular meditation practice since 1996 and began meditating with a trip to Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery, before attending Stanford.[3] He recommends meditation or similar forms of contemplative practice.[3][4][5] Work[edit] An engineer by training, Peter was a protégé of John H. Organization development[edit] Too many businesses are engaged in endless search for a heroic leader who can inspire people to change. Learning organization and systems thinking[edit]
Knowledge re-use - the final and most difficult step
I was having a great conversation with a Knowledge Manager today, who was grappling with the final, and most difficult, step in the Knowledge Transfer process, the step of knowledge re-use (what Nonaka and Takeuchi call the Internalisation step). She had a great system of collecting knowledge, and a great system for synthesising knowledge, and when she showed the knowledge to the users they said "Wow, great, that's very useful", but when she asked them later whether they had actually used the knowledge, they said No. We had a look at the reasons behind this. There were several blockers - the knowledge was not to hand when they needed itthey had no time to go looking for the knowledgethey may not trust the provenance of the knowledgethe knowledge did not solve an immediate pain, but was more of a long term benefit (see blog post on why some ideas spread and others don't). they could get away with doing things the way they had always done, even though the new way was better.
The Fifth Discipline
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Senge 1990) is a book by Peter Senge (a senior lecturer at MIT) focusing on group problem solving using the systems thinking method in order to convert companies into learning organizations. The five disciplines represent approaches (theories and methods) for developing three core learning capabilities: fostering aspiration, developing reflective conversation, and understanding complexity. The Five Disciplines[edit] The five disciplines of what the book refers to as a "learning organization" discussed in the book are: "Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively Senge describes extensively the role of what it refers to as "mental models," which he says are integral in order to "focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings" in perceptions. The Learning Disabilities[edit]
Lesson-learning - a lesson is something you teach
Something I often make plain at the start of Lessons learned meetings, is that when identifying and recording lessons, we should think of them, not as something we have learned, but as something we can teach others. This is a subtle shift in emphasis form looking inwards, to looking outwards, and from looking backward, to looking forwards. For much of the lessons workshop, the participants are looking back at what happened. However the facilitator then has to turn the conversation outwards, and ask - "based on what you have learned from your reflection on the client difficulties, what can we teach the organisation about how to better deal with clients". That is a critical value-added step, and it is that step, and the subtle mindset shift from passive learners to active teachers, that allows the participants to turn an observation and the subsequence insights, into a Lesson.
What’s wrong with Lessons Learned? Part 4.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at three of the inherent weaknesses of “Lessons Learned” and the way the label is perceived: Passiveness, Negativity and Ambiguity. We will move onto a more positive note soon, but before we do, I want to introduce one further weakness: Bad Teachers. At this point I want to make it clear that I have seen the Diaz/Timberlake/Segel film of the same name, and that they are 92 minutes of my life that I would like to have back! What do I mean by bad teaching? In the educational sense of the word, a lesson is deliberately crafted and designed in order to teach. Lessons are carefully formulated to take account of learning styles, levels of capability and connections with other parts of the syllabus. Our bullet point lessons look a bit lame now, don’t they? “Ah, but we’re not in the business of education”, I hear you say. There’s a George Bernard Shaw quote which teachers hate – my wife included. Those who can, do. Those who can do, often can’t teach.
Designing a Learning Organization
How organizations can use design to better implement, share, and expand on knowledge. Anyone who regularly attends professional conferences or tries to keep up with the overwhelming volume of relevant published work available in the digital age has experienced the challenges of retention and application. A lot has been written on the subject of “curation” in our modern world—specifically where and to whom we turn to help us find the right knowledge in the sea of information we have at our fingertips. An equally important but less discussed subject centers around how we implement, share, and expand on the right knowledge so that we are building learning organizations. As an avid reader of nonfiction, I thoroughly enjoy detailed and well-researched presentations of subjects that relate to my work. I have written a fair amount on the power of design to clearly explain and widely disseminate insights that might otherwise make their way only as far as a report on an executive's desk.
