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Organisational Learning

In: Business and Management

Submitted By cazbud
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Organisational Learning

Organisational learning is a continuous process that enhances its collective ability to accept, make sense of, and respond to internal and external change. Organizational learning and is more than the sum of the informationheld by employees. It requires systematicintegration and collective interpretation of new knowledge that leads to collective action and involves risk taking as experimentation. It is an area within organisational theory that studies models and theories about the way an organisation learns and adapts.

Ultimately, the belief is that learning will enable organisations to develop superior strategies – learning to allow firms to gain competitive advantage – behaviour has to change in response to what is being learned.
E.g. Apple.

Argyris and Schön were the first to propose models that facilitate organizational learning; others have followed in the tradition of their work. They distinguished between single-loop and double-loop learning, related to Gregory Bateson's concepts of first and second order learning. In single-loop learning, individuals, groups, or organizations modify their actions according to the difference between expected and obtained outcomes. This is the first type of learning – ‘Adaptive Learning’. This type of learning involves going through a process more than once to become more efficient – errors are corrected and it becomes familiar so the first process is changed to make the second faster. This process is not about imagination, you have the experience – this is what we do, can we do it better?

See lecture notes…

In double-loop learning, the entities (individuals, groups or organization) question the values, assumptions and policies that led to the actions in the first place; if they are able to view and modify those, then second-order or double-loop learning has taken place. Double loop

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