Defining and Implementing the Learning Organization: Some Strategic Limitations

ABSTRACT The concept of the learning organization has gained increasing currency in the management literature. However, the concept has not received much attention in the public sector. This analysis discusses the idea of the learning organization and its applicability in one public organization, the Office of Information Resources in South Carolina. Both the substance of the concept of the learning organization and its methodological implications are considered. The focus of this particular effort was on using technology as a catalyst for change and capitalizing on "deeper learning cycles" as strategic devices in a process of organizational transformation. The successes and the problems of efforts to implement the learning organization are recounted with the intent of suggesting initiatives that might be undertaken by other public agencies interested in incorporating more systematic learning processed into their operations. INTRODUCTION It is easier to say what this article is not than what it is. It is not a case study nor a prescription for what should be done to improve management in an organization. It is not a prediction of what might happen should certain initiatives be adopted. It is not a learning history, at least in a technical sense. It is not a report on the strategies employed in a learning organization initiative in one public agency. Given that modest perspective, the intent is not to prove that a certain technique or set of techniques will work but to suggest strategies that might be tried elsewhere to see if they improve organizational performance. As we shall see, this is true to the spirit of the learning organization with its emphasis on continuous innovation, experimentation, feedback, and adaptation in the organization. The authors will proceed by discussing some reasons for adopting a "learning" perspective in guiding organizational change, addressing some of the ambiguities of the meaning of the learning organization, outlining the strategies employed in their own experience, and reflecting on lessons learned therefrom. WHY THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION? By now it is commonplace to observe that we are living in an age of rapid change. Only the adjectives vary. From an environment once characterized as merely "turbulent" (Waldo, 1971) we have moved to more descriptors such as "chaotic," even "crazy" (Peters, 1987). The pace of change, in large part, has been stimulated by rapid developments in the field of information and communications. As information pipelines, processing speeds and memory capacity increases at exponential rates, it is argued that the only limitations of the information age will be the speed of light and the length of a lifetime (Gilder, 1997). Theories of management seem to have been changing nearly as quickly as the environment. It is estimated that the life span of a management idea has dropped from ten years to little more than a year (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996). Many of the new proposals for management reform have been energized by the development in information and communications technology. New technology has made it possible to implement changes, particularly in decentralization and decision-making which were hitherto difficult, at best. The proposals come under a variety of labels-reinventing (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), reengineering (Hammer and Champy, 1993), quality management (Deming, 1986), and liberation management (Peters, 1992). They are drawn from some ideas of the 1960s and 1970s (participation and decentralization) with a 1990s spin (customer service, quality, and empowerment). Underlying the apparent diversity of these proposals is a general agreement that flexible and responsive organizations are needed to cope with the chaos and complexity of the organizational environment. Although in agreement on intent, management reforms have had only limited success in enhancing organizational performance (Beer and Eisenstat, 1996). …