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A Foundation for the Learning Organization

"An excellent collection of short, concise, and thought-provoking articles that will stretch your mind on how to improve the capabilities of your organization."
-Dan Simpson, Director of Strategy and Planning
The Clorox Company

"Reflections is full of ideas and tools that a practitioner can utilize to help manage organizational change. We have benefited from these ideas in the launch of the new Lincoln Continental. There is so much theoretical and conceptual information printed today but little so powerful and useful that it can be operationalized to provide people with a different way of looking at their situation. Our collective future lies ultimately in how we relate to each other—the ideas and tools in Reflections provide the beginning."
-Nick Zeniuk, Product Planning Manager
Ford Motor Company

"Reflections is a great piece of work. It is a valuable way to encourage people to look a little deeper into their own learning—and a great gift to share with someonewho wants to explore a new way of seeing things."
-B.C. Huselton, Vice President of Human and Business Systems
GS Technologies Corporation

Reflections on Creating Learning Organizations, compiled from THE SYSTEMS THINKER newsletter, is designed to be a catalyst for your own thinking about organizational change. With a strong foundation of theory balanced with case examples, Reflections will help you begin to understand many of the latest systems thinking and organizational learning tools and applications.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Beginning the Journey by Kellie T. Wardman

1. If People Are Assets, Why Do We Treat Them Like Expenses? by Daniel H. Kim

2. Double-Loop Accounting: A Language for the Learning Organization by Fred Kofman

3. Systemic Quality Management: Improving the Quality of Doing and Thinking by Daniel H. Kim

4. Managing Organizational Learning Cycles by Daniel H. Kim

5. Paradigm-Creating Loops: How Perceptions Shape Reality by Daniel H. Kim

6. Unlocking Organizational Routines that Prevent Learning by Robert Putnum

7. Human Dynamics: A Foundation for the Learning Organization by Sandra Seagal and David Horne

8. Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking by William Isaacs

9. The Emergence of Learning Communities by Stephanie Ryan

10. The Spirit of the Learning Organization by Daniel H. Kim and Eileen Mullen

10. How Do You Know if Your Organization Is Learning? by Peter Senge

EXCERPTS

Organizational life is awash with incongruities. In one organization the CEO told the world, "Product X is our top priority," even as the development group was putting it on the back burner. In another company, the unit that tracked product costs didn't communicate with the unit that set prices—although such costs are crucial for making good pricing decisions. In a third, a manager announced an open office arrangement to "improve communication." It was the first time the staff had heard of the idea.

In situations like these, the players are usually acting rationally from within their local perspectives—despite appearances to the contrary. Unfortunately, their reasoning is often not clear to others. Therefore, observers invent explanations such as "All he cares about is the stock price," "He's a typical sales guy," and "She's just trying to please the boss." These assumptions cannot be stated openly, but they influence how people act. Patterns then become established in which players unwittingly conspire to create behavior that is not in the best interest of the whole organization.

One reason these patterns persist is that individuals may not understand the effects of their behavior on the whole. And even when individuals do understand the whole, they may believe that they cannot act differently. A plant manager in the midst of a divisional downsizing program, for example, agreed that success would require redesigning work across several plants, not just within each plant. But he believed upper management would see organization-wide redesign as a delay tactic on his part to put off making cuts in his own plant. Therefore he continued to go along with a downsizing strategy that he believed was unwise.

To create organizations that learn, members must develop a shared understanding of how local rationalities interact to create organizational incongruities. Insight into each other's perspective reduces the escalation of private explanations that so often reinforce counterproductive patterns. It then becomes possible to see how one's own actions contribute to the problem—and to design solutions jointly that no one could implement alone.