MIT Sloan Management Review

Leadership and Organizational Studies

 

Understanding Organizations as Learning Systems

By Edwin C. Nevis, Anthony J. DiBella and Janet M. Gould

January 15, 1995

HOW CAN YOU TELL IF YOUR COMPANY IS, INDEED, A LEARNING ORGANIZATION? WHAT IS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION ANYWAY? AND HOW can you improve the learning systems in your company? The authors provide a framework for examining a company, based on its “learning orientations,” a set of critical dimensions to organizational learning, and “facilitating factors,” the processes that affect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur. They illustrate their model with examples from four firms they studied — Motorola, Mutual Investment Corporation, Electricité de France, and Fiat — and conclude that all organizations have systems that support learning.

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With the decline of some well-established firms, the diminishing competitive power of many companies in a burgeoning world market, and the need for organizational renewal and transformation, interest in organizational learning has grown. Senior managers in many organizations are convinced of the importance of improving learning in their organizations. This growth in awareness has raised many unanswered questions: What is a learning organization? What determines the characteristics of a good learning organization (or are all learning organizations good by definition)? How can organizations improve their learning? In the literature in this area, authors have used different definitions or models of organizational learning or have not defined their terms.1 Executives have frequently greeted us with comments like these:

  • “How would I know a learning organization if I stumbled over it?”
  • “You academics have some great ideas, but what do I do with a mature, large organization on Monday morning?”
  • “I’m not sure what a good learning organization is, but you should not study us because we are a bad learning organization.”

Our research is dedicated to helping organizations become better learning systems. We define organizational learning as the capacity or processes within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience. Learning is a systems-level phenomenon because it stays within the organization, even if individuals change. One of our assumptions is that organizations learn as they produce. Learning is as much a task as the production and delivery of goods and services. We do not imply that organizations should sacrifice the speed and quality of production in order to learn, but, rather, that production systems be viewed as learning systems. While companies do not usually regard learning as a function of production, our research on successful firms indicates that three learning-related factors are important for their success:

  1. Well-developed core competencies that serve as launch points for new products and services. (Canon has made significant investments over time in developing knowledge in eight core competencies applied... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
 
 

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