How do Organisations Learn

Individuals learn. We go to schools, colleges, universities, complete night courses, pick up learnings from our day-to-day interactions and from the mistakes we make. The same applies to organisations but the methods by which organisations learn is often less obvious.

How do organisations use the brain, memory, instinct like we do in order to learn?

Organisational learning focuses on adaptation and learning from experience.

To do this an organisation will encode past experiences into their organisational structure, their workplace culture, their people, and the technologies that guide employee behaviours. What works well and what is successful is built into rules, policies, practices, cultures and tasks. But it’s through employee behaviour that organisations really learn, not just by blindly following organisational processes or rules.

With practice comes shared knowledge and understanding. It’s important that these practices or activities are collaborative, shared and understood, and that they entail improvisation and are adapted through practical use.

So how do you engineer an organisation that learns? one that encourages improvised practices that become shared knowledge. What are the areas that companies need to focus on?

Learning concepts and cultures should revolve around:

• Valuing improvisational efforts and taking risks
• Creating collaborative and transferable activities that encourage improvisation
• Developing a measure of success for innovative ideas and then putting that knowledge into organisational memory so that employees don’t forget or re-invent ideas time after time
• Creating an environment of informal knowledge sharing with cohesive groups who work on similar tasks and increasing chances for casual encounters (as important knowledge can often be not written down and passed through social encounters)
• Creating networks of practices outside of your organisation to learn from competitors, partners, customers and clients.
• Encouraging meetings to workshop answers to questions and improve shared group understanding of a topic or situation

It’s possible to see how organisations have learned in a wide variety of ways – employee retention levels, profit, turnover, brand recognition. They don’t all have to be financial results based. Improvements in personnel, routines and work behaviours, technology used and the number of issues and problems an organisation comes up against can all be indicators of organisational learning. In addition, the ability to move from one learning plateau to another will show how well an organisation learns.

It’s important to avoid distractions that take away the focus on recording learning, to ensure that if employees leave the knowledge is not lost, and to avoid independent working cultures where sharing does not take place.

Four management strategies to successfully implement organisational learning are:

• encourage communication and create ties among workers so knowledge is passed and transferred more readily and quickly,
• create social learning experiences as a means to retaining and transferring expertise,
• value collective improvisation and risk taking
• retain of longstanding employees with valuable knowledge and expertise that can be passed on to the next generation.

Organisational learning is an important attribute that leaders need to harness to take their business to the next level.

Matthew Woodall is an Energy sector Search specialist with over 20 years in the industry. For further insights and regular industry updates please connect with him on LinkedIn.