In today’s unpredictable times, organizations require responding rapidly to a constantly evolving context and realign themselves to new realities. To organizations, leaders, and employees, this presents a challenge to quickly realize realities, understand patterns, align their strategy to the purpose and instruct others to execute the new strategy.
Knowledge and information – the core of any organization, needs to be converted into actions more rapidly than before. In this post, we talk about the basics of learning structure and a powerful management philosophy that helps understand the features of a learning organization.
Senge Learning Organization – A Complete Guide
Peter Senge, in 1990, published a book titled ‘The Fifth Discipline’ that conceptualized his extensive research on what organizations do to build learning capacity and why some organizations learn better than others. According to Senge, one-third of businesses disappear in 15 years and the biggest enterprises have an average lifespan of about 40 years.
Senge’s concept tries to address the question of how organizations can experience continuous growth to outperform competitors. Companies should, instead of visualizing a traditional hierarchy, create a learning organization to be able to survive. A learning organization is where people constantly expand their capabilities to create the desired outcomes, where new, expansive thinking patterns are nurtured, and where people learn how to learn together.
Like anything else, the ‘learning organization’ is not a goal but a useful set of guidelines that people and organizations should use to move forward. Every organization creates and uses knowledge; but only a few actually learn to manage, apply, use it effectively and grow with it. There is no right formula to create a learning organization. Different organizations try and implement different sets of strategies and processes to acquire knowledge, share learning and convert it into a capability to re-learn and improve.
Senge Learning Organization Five Disciplines
Senge has codified the best practices to create a learning organization into what he called ‘The Five Disciplines’ that leaders in a learning organization cultivate to innovate constantly. They might not be mastered completely, but organizations, teams, and leaders focused on learning practice them consistently.
The Senge learning organization five disciplines are:
1. Building a Shared Vision
Learning organizations create a vision through interaction between employees. When managers have personal visions, it is difficult to share a common vision.
The most effective way to build a shared vision is to compromise the visions of individuals. Those who don’t share the vision might not contribute much to the organization. Read about the line of sight management to find out more.
2. Personal Mastery
This discipline relates to self-awareness, focusing on how much we know about ourselves and the impact of our behavior on others. It describes the strength to be proactive and learn continuously to achieve what matters to them. Personal mastery has two critical aspects – defining what is important and being able to see reality.
3. Systems Thinking
Systems thinking implies reflecting the process of the complete system rather than focusing on smaller, unrelated parts. It requires managers to understand that every action and its consequence are correlated with one another.
They often focus on individual problems and forget to see the big picture. Once they understand the correlation, it is easy to see the change patterns in different situations.
4. Team Learning
It is when teams start thinking as one, share experiences, knowledge, skills, and insights with one another to do things better.
Effective teamwork brings results that individuals may not have achieved and they learn faster and better as a part of the team. Team members should be ready to change their mental models and be open to learning from their co-workers. Not to be mistaken with Ulrich’s three box HR model.
5. Mental Models
Employees in the organization must know about the company values and the core of the business. An understanding of who we are enables them to visualize the direction and further development. An organization should be flexible enough to accept changes to mental models. Companies that can adapt to new models are often the most successful ones.
What Are The Elements of A Learning Organization?
A modern, agile learning organization can be built with the right tools, techniques, and practices. It is an environment where everybody continuously learns from each other. The key elements of a learning organization are:
Technology – The simplest element to set up, technology solution should be chosen in such a way that it is easy to use and flexible to change with time. Having a common platform across organizational departments is desirable as well.
Culture – The most critical element of a modern learning environment, culture is the most difficult to build. The culture of sharing knowledge is where people can share fearlessly and get rewarded with more sharing by others.
Framework – This means a framework of processes that makes it easy to share and learn. Some of the examples of such processes include periodic forums inviting people to share the latest in their work area, networking groups that facilitate the exchange of ideas, and planned project meetings.
Learning Organization Approach
Applying the concept of a learning organization can be difficult for most businesses. It is generally more appealing to focus on any of the five disciplines. However, since all the disciplines are interlinked, it is important to utilize all of them. For example, when an organization starts building a shared vision with the team, it is also important to have better conversations with the team members.
Moreover, when the organization starts working on system thinking to identify problems, the employees should understand mental models as well. As all the disciplines are related to one another, the starting point does not matter much.
But the organization need not focus on all the principles at the same time; focusing on a few of them and working on others would help the organization gain an edge.
Final Words
The concept of a learning organization and the five disciplines of Senge are all interlinked. While an organization can get started by focusing on one or two disciplines before moving on to others, the interrelation enables it to identify opportunities and complexities existing inside and outside the organization.
This is why the implementation of the five disciplines creates a continuous learning process within the organization.
