The phrase "learning organization" is popping up all over. It appears in U.S. West's vision statement, in National Semiconductor's values statement and in Chevron's statement of human resource strategies. The company I work for says its middle name is "learning" and has added being a learning organization to its core values.
No doubt the framers of many of these descriptions and visions have been influenced by MIT professor Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization and other pronouncements emanating from MIT's Sloan School of Management. The work of Harvard's Chris Argyris and Richard Tanner Pascale's book, Managing on the Edge: How the Smartest Companies Use Conflict to Stay Ahead, have also persuaded many companies to reexamine their traditional values. They are facing up to the demands of the Information Age--an era in which technology ages rapidly and every worker has to be a hired head as well as a hired hand.
But what exactly is a learning organization? Leading writers on the topic generally start with a demand for an awakening of top management. Senge, for instance, talks about "learning laboratories" in which high-level managers participate in simulations and other activities to develop skills in "shared vision, personal mastery, mental models, systems thinking and team learning."