IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION
So what is a learning organization? I don't think it has an accepted definition. It is still a dream in the making. I hope to put some stakes in the ground for those of us in the training business who ought to know.
One intriguing idea is that business organizations themselves are similar to pupils in a classroom. In other words, companies are the ultimate learners. This may strike some as a little spooky. Will muses prowl the halls at night teaching the machines to sing? The instinct is to dismiss the notion as hype or runaway anthropomorphism. Organizations don't learn, people do.
But there is something more than metaphor here if we consider how the corporate training field has dealt with higher levels of complexity over the past decades. For most of its history, the training field considered the individual learner to be the unit of analysis. We focused on teaching low-performing individuals to match the knowledge, skills and attitudes of high performers.
If the learning task was relatively simple, we developed a course or program--so many hours of seminar or self-instruction. In the '70s, we attacked more complex tasks, involving skills that needed to build on one another. We did this by inventing entire curricula, with the emphasis on reinforcement, sequence, system benefits and successive approximation. Courses and curricula remain staples of training.