Index of Links to Learning Organization Websites.

Some ideas for getting started in learning about Learning Organizations.

Table of Contents for this page:

See Also: corresponding indexes of articles for E-Learning, Self-directed Learning and Knowledge Management web resources.

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Preface

This page contains an index of websites providing information and resources describing how oranizations learn, and the components of a Learning Organization from several authors' perspectives. It is adapted from the content of a similar index posted on the internal intranet at Alberta Learning.

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Learning Organization Websites

The CyberCity Initiative aims to help Grande Prairians to learn about and prepare to participate and compete in the Information Revolution that is sweeping the developed world.

Below is a preliminary index of websites and articles on the "Learning Organization," a term coined by Peter M. Senge in his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. The application of Learning Organizations to local government may be seen in the "Learning Towns and Cities" entry. If you have suggested additions to this list, please let us know.

• "A knowledge worker needs one thing only: to learn how to learn."  --  Peter F. Drucker.

See also - the CyberCity article "Learning: The Critical Technology for Today" in the digest of 1 April 1999 for a discussion of learning preferences and techniques, how adult learning differs from child learning, how teacher-centered learning differs from learner-centered learning, and the significance of the latter in the Information Age.

Most of these references are outside the City of Grande Prairie website, and are therefore linked so as to open a new window in your browser. To return here, just close the new window.

[Note: Since one of the means used by Learning Organizations is the active sharing of information, understanding and knowledge among employees and others (sometimes also called the Organizational Memory), we have also posted corresponding indexes of articles on a Knowledge Management web page and on E-Learning and Self-directed Learning web pages. The intersection of "knowledge management" and the "learning organization" is stated very well in the Kienholz paper below.]

• For visitors seeking a very brief overview, Ron Bleed (papers and presentations), Vice Chancellor, Information Technologies at Maricopa Community Colleges in Tempe Arizona has posted a series of quick one- or two-screen pages, informally defining a Learning Organization; listing its activities, attributres and reasons to build one; briefly describing the five disciplines; identifying leadership and assessment issues, and providing some Maricopa examples. Each page has a [next page] link at the bottom which can be used to click through the material more-or-less like a slide presentation. Each page also contains the index of links to the entire set, for viewing the topics in any order. In five to ten minutes visitors can obtain a quick grasp of Senge's Learning Organization. 
   
  For an only slightly longer two- or three-paragraph description of the five disciplines, see also the Tim Mulherin link, below, or see also the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI), "an environment for continuous learning; experimentation; and systemic, professional, and personal change."
  
• The Delta Partners consultancy posts a very brief overview "The Learning Organization Concept," which may be helpful in getting started quickly.
  • "In the traditional organization, information is filtered and directed through the hierarchy. ... In the Learning Organization, information and feedback flows simultaneously through all levels of the organization and each person, ..."
  • "From the point of view of the senior leadership of an organization, or the management of an organizational sub-unit, 'learning organization' denotes a way of maximizing organizational performance under conditions of uncertainty, thereby improving the chances of survival, adaptation and proactive goal attainment. From this perspective, it is a methodology for enhancing performance levels."
  • "At the core of this methodology is the diffusion of specific competencies, which encourage individual, learning and create a learning environment."
• Glen Hammond at Red River College posts a page "Learning Organization" with succinct definitions, characteristics, checklists, etc., in the context of a Course Implementation and Evaluation seminar which "explores methods of introducing or modifying courses so as to provide for maximum acceptance and achievement and minimum disruption and dissatisfaction."
• Michael Chase, Associate Professor of Psychology at Quincy University has posted a "Learning Organization" web page which provides a quick one-page overview of the Learning Organization and the five major features which Senge (see immediately below) calls the five disciplines. He points out that the Learning Orgainzation "is not so much characterized by its altered structure (flater and less hierarchal) and redesign of work (emphais on teams), but by the transformation of the relationship of the organization to the individual and increased capacity for adaptation and change."
• For a more comprehensive view, Sandra Kerka of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education (about) at the Center on Education and Training for Employment (about) in the College of Education at Ohio State University has posted "The Learning Organization" (1995; 3 pp) in their Myths and Realities section. She describes some of the characteristics of a Learning Organization, identifies some of the barriers to execution, etc., based on Peter Senge's "five disciplines," which are "the keys to achieving this type of organization: (1) personal mastery, (2) mental models, (3) shared vision, (4) team learning, and (5) systems thinking. According to Senge, systems thinking, is the most important and underlies the rest." The 1995 Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and information about the 1999 book by Senge et al, "The Dance of Change: the Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations" are also on-line. "A Growing Wave of Interest and Openness" is Peter Senge's retrospective on early adoption of the ideas articulated in The Fifth Discipline.
• The MIT Center for Organizational Learning (FAQ; About) posts an index of working papers and publications, some of which are on-line, and others of which are available for a fee. A 1995 paper by George Roth and Peter Senge "From Theory to Practice: Research Territory, Processes and Structure at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning" is available on-line describing the Center. "Reflections: Accomplishments and Challenges in developing the Center for Organizational Learning" (5 pp) is Senge's informal lecture at the RSM symposium, and describes many of the challenges in creating a Learning Organization of any sort. Below are excerpts from the Learning Center FAQ.
  • "The Center is a partnership between researchers and management practitioners who are working to advance the state-of-the-art in building learning organizations."
  • "The Learning Center is particularly interested in researching problems or situations characterized by high degrees of behavioral and dynamic complexity. These so called "wicked problems" are those in which there is highly embedded conflict, a multiplicity of views (mental models), and where the relationships between cause and effect over time and space are not easily understood. These problem areas--where 'obvious solutions' can often do more harm than good--characterize many of the challenges facing today's corporate and public institutions."

• In The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Senge points out that changing our mental models is far from easy:

  • "We have a tendency to see the changes we need to make as being in our outer world, not in our inner world. It is challenging to think that while we redesign the manifest structures of our organizations, we must also redesign the internal structures of our "mental models." But 'redesigning mental models' is not like redesigning a piece of engineering equipment. We do not 'have' mental models. We 'are' our mental models. They are the medium through which we and the world interact. They are inextricably woven into our personal life history and sense of who we are." Senge's paper "Learning to Alter Mental Models" (1999; 3 pp) discusses the impact on the adaptability of the learning organization.
• The Society for Organizational Learning, Inc., an offshoot of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning above (about SoL), posts an interesting segment, "The Learning Organization and the Role of Culture," part of a paper "Organizational Learning: What is New?" (Table of Contents) by Edgar H. Schein of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The paper is one of a number of interesting research working papers; and it contains the comments excerpted below.
  • "... one can see that the total organization's capacity to maintain itself and grow, to continue to act effectively in the face of changing circumstances, depends upon the creation of a set of shared assumptions that cut across the subsystems and that survive in spite of changes in the individual membership of the sub-systems, i.e. the culture."
  • "... the culture of the organization is both the consequence of the organization's prior experience and learning, and the basis for its continuing capacity to learn."
  • "... at the individual level [we need to manage] two kinds of anxiety: l) survival anxiety or the anxiety that if I do not change I will no longer be able to get along, or keep my job, or maintain my sense of identity and competence; 2) learning anxiety or the anxiety that if I do attempt to learn or change I will lose my identity and sense of competence."
  • "For learning to occur at the individual level, then, survival anxiety must be higher than learning anxiety, ..."

• In another segment of the paper, Schein points out that:

  • "... for organizations to learn they have to create some "slack" to allow people to learn new skills. In today's economic environment ... one must be lean and mean, and the very idea of "slack" is unthinkable [in the CEO's view]. Yet learning is undermined by that very attitude."

  and wonders why organizational learning seems to take so long. He identifies a number of steps by which organizations learn, lists the potential pathologies at each step and suggests possible remedies.
   
  In his paper "Organizational and Managerial Culture as a Facilitator or Inhibitor of Organizational Learning" (Table of Contents), Schein describes the two kinds of learning:

  • "we have to make the distinction between 'adaptive learning and coping,' on the one hand and what Peter Senge calls 'generative learning,' what Argyris and Schoen call 'double loop learning,' and what Don Michael, Gregory Bateson and others have identified as 'learning how to learn.' I think we all agree that the competitive edge for the 21st century organization will be in this latter 'learning how to learn' domain."

  He then talks about how management can reduce learning anxiety for employees, point out the benefits of making the desired changes, and provide an environment in which mistakes can be made (and even contribute positively to the learning process). He identifies seven elements of a culture that supports perpetual learning, along with a few cultural inhibitors.

  • "What this all adds up to," Schein says, "is that it is one thing to specify what it will take for us to become effective perpetual learners. It is quite another thing to get there, given some of the strong cultural inhibitors that are acting on us all the time," such as management focus on quarterly financial results, and a bias toward measurable outcomes rather than teamwork and relationship building, improved dialogue, etc.

  
  Another Society for Organizational Learning, Inc., paper by Nevis, DiBella and Gould, "Understanding Organizations as Learning Systems," asks (and attempts to answer, based on field observations in four companies) questions such as:

  • 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?
  • Do organizations see certain stages of the [value] chain where significant investment is more desirable [for enhancing learning] than at others?

  The paper has a very practical orientation, stating a few background assumptions, findings, etc:

  • "We define organizational learning as the capacity or processes within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience" in three stages:
    • Knowledge acquisition -- The development or creation of skills, insights, relationships,
    • Knowledge sharing -- The dissemination of what has been learned, and
    • Knowledge utilization -- The integration of learning so it is broadly available and can be generalized to new situations.
  • To be effective, learning must be "a systems-level phenomenon [so] it stays within the organization, even if individuals change."
  • "... some learning is dysfunctional, and some insights or skills that might lead to useful new actions are often hard to attain."
  • "... the value chain of any organization is a domain of integrated learning. ... Structures and processes to achieve outcomes can be seen simultaneously as operational tasks and learning exercises; ..."
  • Their Model of Organizations as Learning Systems identifies and defines seven learning orientations and ten facilitating factors used by effective learning organizations. These are good checklist items when evaluating learning readiness.
• Frank Edler at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska has posted a guide "Resources on Senge's Learning Organization" which includes brief answers from Senge to "What is a Learning Organization?" and "What does the 'learning organization' mean for entrepreneurial firms?" Other Senge papers are also linked.
• The Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Helsinki University of Technology hosts a "Learning Organizations" website containing literature, journals, conferences, etc.
• Dr. Ray Rasmussen in the Faculty of Business at the University of Alberta posts a page of "Learning Organization links."
• The Management Assistance Program (MAP) for nonprofits in Minnesota hosts an excellent library of links to management resources, and lists Learning Organization links, Knowledge Management links and Balanced Scorecard links in their Organizational Performance section. "MAP provides management consulting and board recruitment services to more than 600 organizations each year and engages over 700 volunteers in helping manage nonprofit organizations." They also host a page of links for Systems Thinking.
• The Ethical Edge, a Washington, D.C. consultancy, posts "Links to Learning Organization Resources," which points to papers, indexes of links to related resources, etc., including a paper on "The Necessary Conditions for a Learning Culture," that relates to Schein's work described above.
• The Learning Towns and Cities report in the U.K. (table of contents, with links to ~20 cities' reports) provides an introduction, and a summary of developments so far which "identifies the common trends and issues arising from learning cities and towns in Britain." The Learning City Network promotes "the use of lifelong learning for urban regeneration and generation through an exchange of best practice between cities, towns and communities."
• • "Learning should be valued and practiced as part of everyday life, ... It should form the basis of our society in which everyone has the opportunity to succeed and prosper."
  • "partnerships ... are bringing learning to whole communities, to young and old alike. Their example provides a firm basis on which other towns and cities can build."
• The European Network For Organisational Learning Development (ENFOLD) posts an "Interview with Peter Senge" from a workshop on Organisational Learning sponsored by the. Rotterdam School of Management. The interview transcribes Senge's answers to about 25 questions, among them:
  • "What is a Learning Organization?"
  • "Why don't traditional hierarchical organizations work anymore?"
  • "Will companies interested only in shareholder value disappear?"
• Tim Mulherin of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC) posts "The Learning Organization," an informal descriptive piece that provides a brief overview of each of Senge's five disciplines (scroll down just below "It Don't [Sic] Come Easy"): (1) personal mastery, (2) mental models, (3) shared vision, (4) systems thinking, and (5) team learning.
  • "An organization that continually strives to improve upon the way it thinks and acts is a learning organization."
  • "You get results and then you reflect on what was learned from them and what you might want to do differently the next time."
  • "Becoming an effective learning organization requires designing and implementing a holistic strategy that goes beyond the important yet superficial measure of making formal education and training opportunities available to employees."
  • "Organizations that hire workers to strictly fit in positions and not to grow as learners will never attain the rate of success learning organizations achieve."
  • "The three most desirable traits of employees in a learning organization are: (1) self-confidence, (2) natural curiosity, and (3) the strong desire to make a contribution."
• "A Different View of Organizational Learning" has been posted by Sue Gilly (1997; 4pp) in which she expands on organizational learning as the mere sum of the individual learning of its members. "We explore group learning as something different from the accumulation of individual learning. ... Viewing an organization as a culture is useful because learning is an inherent characteristic of culture." And we need to make a shift to "valuing wisdom rather than expertise."
• • "Learning should not just be seen as only occurring in special classes and workshops. ... Learning that is ongoing does not depend upon a qualified teacher or expert because learning occurs in groups of peers as they construct and reconstruct existing knowledge."
  • "Seeing the entire organization as learning and encouraging variety and exploration of alternative paths, makes it possible for some groups to explore while others maintain consistency. Those concentrating on consistency maintain the core identity of the organization while the rest look at new opportunities."
• Alice Kienholz has posted "Systems ReThinking: An Inquiring Systems Approach to the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization." In this excellent paper describing the intersection of the "learning organization" and "knowledge management," she proposes "that inquiring systems, as presented by C. West Churchman in his classic work The Design of Inquiring Systems, (1971) possess the necessary scope by which to elucidate and facilitate the acceleration and advancement of organizational learning for knowledge acquisition, creation and utilization. This paper builds on the application of Churchman's inquiring systems to learning organizations for "Inquiring Organizations" as proposed by Courtney, Croasdell and Paradice (1996, 1998). It also builds on the application of knowledge management in these inquiring organizations, as outlined by Malhotra (1997; "Knowledge Management in Inquiring Organizations"), by providing a readily available means by which to expedite the shift in thinking needed to accommodate the demands of a faster, more complex cycle of knowledge creation and action. By understanding and being aware of one's own relative preference for each of the five major inquiring systems, as determined by the Inquiry Mode Questionnaire (InQ), organizational members have a greater awareness and understanding of the way in which they, individually and collectively, go about gathering data, asking questions, solving problems and making decisions (Harrison and Bramson, 1982). Implications exist for applications in knowledge management, especially as it pertains to how people actually go about acquiring, creating and sharing knowledge." Kienholz uses Churchman's five philosophically based inquiring modes for understanding how we go about gathering data, asking questions, solving problems and making decisions:
  • The Synthesist (Hegel) sees likenesses in things that appear unalike, seeks conflict and synthesis, is interested in change, gets at underlying assumptions, sees the essence of problems, is speculative - asks what if and why not, and regards data to be meaningless without interpretation.
  • The Idealist (Kant) welcomes a broad range of views, seeks ideal solutions, is interested in values, is receptive, and places equal value on data and theory.
  • The Pragmatist (Singer) proceeds on the basis of an eclectic view, uses a tactical, incremental approach; and, being innovative and adaptive, is best in complex situations.
  • The Analyst (Leibniz) seeks the "one best way," operates with models and formulas, is interested in "scientific solutions," is prescriptive, and prefers data over theory and method.
  • The Realist (Locke) relies on "facts" and expert opinion, seeks solutions that meet current needs, is serious about getting concrete results, acts with efficiency and incisive correction, prefers data over theory.

• And she relates their strengths to each of Senge's five disciplines.

• The Academy of Management Review has posted (Jan 2000) "Downsizing in a Learning Organization: are there Hidden Costs?"
  • "We use a social network frame to consider the impact of downsizing on organizational learning and propose that the effects can be viewed as a nonlinear function of learning network size. From this perspective the potential damage to a firm's learning capacity is greater than headcount ratios imply."
  • "When the social complexities of the organization are considered, it becomes evident that nonprioritized downsizing has the potential to inflict previously undetected damage on the learning and memory capacity of organizations, and that the size of this risk is more difficult to estimate than the loss of individual expertise."
• An English summary of the "Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management Project for Social Services in the National Program for Children at Risk" has been posted by the Israeli Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Strategic Planning Division. "This paper describes a project for organizational learning and knowledge management ... at the eight pilot agencies participating in the National Program for Children at Risk and Family Violence. It describes the project's course to date, sketches a preliminary summary, and outlines targets for further work."
  • "Public organizations have a need to learn, both in order to fulfill their mission and in order to survive the competition for funding and clients."
  • In this project, "we ask two questions: How public organizations in general, and social service organizations in particular, learn and manage knowledge, and how the Ministry of Labor and Social affairs and its partners can be of assistance for these purposes."
  • The project's goals were:
    • To construct an organizational "memory": to harvest the professional knowledge of the pilot agencies' staff, raising the quality of services delivered to children and their families.
    • To formulate a learning methodology: to learn how social workers and social service organizations create, acquire, and disseminate knowledge coming from practice.
• John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist at Xerox Corporation (Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC) has posted "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation." The paper summarizes (from the classic Xerox case study) important contrasts between formal job descriptions, diagnostic procedures and training of service technicians on the one hand with their actual practices and training needs on the other. It points out how an organization's reliance on these formal descriptions can actually impair the work, the workers' learning and their motivation when social and contextual portions of the work are not recognized. It also points out how an informal (then formalized) community of practice (or learning organization) developed by these technicians helped to identify and solve important repair dilemmas. [Watch for words with "tt" in them; the t's are missing in every case.]
• • "The insight accumulated [by the service reps] is not a private substance, but socially constructed and distributed," whereas "in the corporation's eyes their work is viewed [only] individually."
  • Service reps "cultivate connections throughout the corporation to help them circumvent the barriers to understanding built by their documentation and training."
  • "In telling these stories [of successful diagnoses made outside the bounds of the formal repair procedures] an individual rep contributes to the construction and development of his or her own identity as a rep and reciprocally to the construction and development (and knowledge management) of the community of reps in which he or she works."
  • Other authors, he notes "have rejected [knowledge] transfer models, which isolate knowledge from practice, and developed a view of learning as social construction, putting knowledge back into the contexts in which it has meaning. ... What is learned is profoundly connected to the conditions in which it is learned."
  • "Learning ... involves becoming an 'insider.' Learners do not receive or even construct abstract, 'objective,' individual knowledge; rather, [what] they learn [is] to function in a community. ... Workplace learning is best understood ... in terms of the communities being formed or joined and personal identities being changed. The central issue in learning is becoming a practitioner not learning about practice."

  An index of a few of Brown's other papers may also be of interest, including "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning." In this paper, Brown asserts that "learning is not a process of delivering information to individuals. Rather, the paper proposes, all learning has apprenticeship-like properties. Understood this way, both learning and teaching look significantly different." Another Brown paper, "Learning, Working and Playing in the Digital Age" identifies several dimensional shifts in learning and literacy which will require skills for navigation through complex knowledge bases, discovery learning, borrowing (applying ideas in new ways) and judgement in the digital age. [The article covers several topics. Scan for "new literacy" a little above the mid-point.]
   
  The Brown paper "Learning, Working and Playing in the Digital Age" also summarizes the Xerox case study of Julian Orr concerning copier service technicians, how they diagnosed machine malfunctions, created their own community of practice, etc. [The article covers several topics. Scan for "Xerox" at about the mid-point.]

• The Open Directory Project posts links to resources on the Learning Organization in their Knowledge Management category.
• The Netscape directory lists a similar catalog of links to the Learning Organization under the Information Assets section of their Knowledge Management category.
• SearchTaxi posts links to resources on Learning Organizations among Information Assets, also in their Knowledge Management reference section.
• The Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS) posts "The Learning Organization" among its Library of Monographs. Author Mike Hannan discusses adaptive and generative learning in the school context and points out the need for schools "to undergo a metanoia" (a fundamental shift of the mind).
• The Stanford Learning Organization Web (SLOW) is an informal network of Stanford University researchers, staff, and students along with colleagues and friends from the corporate world interested in the nature and development of learning organizations. Their postings are now (Jan 2000) housed at the KnowledgePassion.com website.
• "Building a Learning Organization" (1993; 9 pp), a Harvard Business Review article by David Garvin, describes 5 fundamental building blocks: (1) systematic problem solving, (2) experimentation with new approaches, (3) learning form their own experience and past history, (4) learning from the experiences and best practices of others, and (5) transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization. A current version might also include sensing and responding to changes in the business environment. The article also comments on measuring learning and identifies practical first steps.

• "The first step is to foster an environment that is conducive to learning. There must be time for reflection and analysis, to think about strategic plans, dissect customer needs, assess current work systems, and invent new products. ... Another powerful lever is to open up boundaries and stimulate the exchange of ideas. ... Once managers have established a more supportive, open environment, they can create learning forums. ... Together these [and other] efforts help to eliminate barriers that impede learning and begin to move learning higher on the organizational agenda. They also suggest a subtle shift in focus, away from continuous improvement and toward a commitment to learning. Coupled with a better understanding of the "three Ms," the meaning, management, and measurement of learning, this shift provides a solid foundation for building learning organizations."

• Robyn Ewing and David L. Smith at the University of Sydney have posted "Framing a Professional Learning Culture: A Case Study." The paper develops "principles that might be applicable to the learning school" and expands on the literature "describ[ing], analys[ing] and understand[ing] the explicit nature and characteristics of a successful professional learning culture in schools and the processes by which such a culture is realised." It also presents as a case study "some of the most important elements that constitute an effective professional learning culture in one school and the roles and structures that are necessary to support these."
• The Council of State Community Development Agencies (COSCDA; about) has posted "Learning Organizations and Strategic Leadership" (1999; 7 pp). In this well-articulated and practical introductory paper, the author indicates that "before it can become a learning organization, an organization must assess its culture, its overall behavior system and structure to determine the changes may be necessary to provide fertile ground for learning. Such an assessment may mean that an organization will need to address and change a variety of inter-connected structures and patterns of behavior as it moves to become a learning organization." The author also discusses and identifies aspects of an organizational culture which support a learning organization (external orientation, free exchange/flow of information, commitment to personal learning and development, climate of openness and trust, learning from experience is commonplace, a shared understanding of the organization and being pushed by unlearning), and other aspects which are inhospitable (compartmentalization, vertical hierarchies, preoccupation with firefighting, overly focused on systems and processes, reluctant to train except for immediate and obvious need, control management and advocacy).
  • "the only way we could well address complex problems was by bringing together organizations and institutions that had dissimilar but complementary resources - diverse organizations have to collaborate to build knowledge and solve problems."
  • "If the pace of change outside your organization is faster than the pace of change in your organization, the end is near."
  • "The learning organization is a journey, not an end; it is an organizing principle rather than an attainable reality; it is an idea, not an ideal state; it is a template for the examination of current practices."
  • "Metacognition, the capacity to think about the way you think and about how you learn, is a critical capacity."
• Ernst and Young's "Managing the Knowledge Organization" website posts an interview, "Talking with Ikujiro Nonaka" in which Nonaka speaks about organizational knowledge creation. It's only about 4 printed pages, but has some very interesting ideas about the roles of information and innovation in knowledge creation. Nonaka identifies four essential steps in expanding a vision within a learning organization. Below are some quotes from the interview.
  • "I saw that people working on innovation are very committed. They try to realize a vision or dream and they bet their whole life on realizing their dream. Their behavior was very different from simple information processing. So I began to think, perhaps it's not information that matters so much in innovation, perhaps it is the process of creating knowledge."
  • "I saw that information is passive, but knowledge is committed and active. Information is not worried about truth, goodness, and beauty, but knowledge aspires to some higher object, to something universal."
  • "We see four modes of knowledge conversation in the knowledge-creation process: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. Tacit personal knowledge is shared in a socialization process. Then it is converted to explicit team knowledge through externalization. Combination converts team knowledge to organizational knowledge; it expands through the organization. Finally, organizational knowledge feeds back to the individual. It is internalized and the individual grows. So we call this [four-step knowledge creation process] a self-transcending process."
  • "The role of the organization is to promote, develop, and nurture socialization, not to manage it. Managers have to trust the self-organizing process and let it go."

• I suspect that these ideas are amplified in Nonaka's book "The Knowledge-Creating Company," a blurb about which is available on the Haas School of Business website. Nonaka, was named the first Xerox Distinguished Professor of Knowledge at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

• "Leading Learning Organizations" (1996; 3 pp), is Senge's paper defining three kinds of needed leaders: local line leaders, executive leaders and internal networkers.
• • "Local line leaders - undertake meaningful organizational experiments to test whether new learning capabilities lead to improved business results."
  • "Executive leaders - support line leaders, develop learning infrastructures, and lead by example in the gradual process of evolving the norms and behaviors of a learning culture."
  • "Internal networkers, or community builders, the 'seed carriers' of the new culture - move freely about the organization to find those who are predisposed to bringing about change, assist in experiments, and aid in the diffusion of new learnings."
• One of Senge's early papers, "The Leader's New Work: Building Learning Organizations," identifies (from a summary) leaders as "designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systemic patterns of thinking. In short, leaders in learning organizations are responsible for building organizations where people are continually expanding their capabilities to shape their future --that is, leaders are responsible for learning."
• In the overview (5 pp) of the MIT Learning History Research Project, Dr. George Roth describes the use of "Learning Histories: A New Tool For Turning Organizational Experience Into Action" It describes informal papers by participants documenting their view of learning efforts, aimed at avoiding the adverse effects of assessments while facilitating the transfer of understanding among and between groups.
  • "All efforts to transform organizations sooner or later run up against the challenge of proving their value. Yet traditional "assessment" approaches, reacting to everyday pressures, can easily undermine the original learning effort. As people become aware of being judged and measured, they seek to satisfy the evaluation criteria instead of improving their capabilities. The intrinsic motivation which drives learning is then supplanted by the desire to look successful. Yet evaluation is vital to learning as a feedback process that provides guidance and support. Learning histories were invented in response to this dilemma" (our emphasis). [Roth also provides a useful field manual (15 pp) and describes future aspects of the research].

• A related paper, "Learning Historian - Memorandum of Agreement," describes the use of learning histories, the activities involved, the deliverables expected, etc.; and it contains an appendix with definitions, processes, standards, and even has terms and conditions with estimated costs, etc.

  • "The learning history approach develops the capacities of learners to reflect and assess their own efforts, and utilizes data from that reflection and assessment as the basis for further learning."
• STEM-Net (Educational Networking in Newfoundland and Labrador) posts "One School District's Experience in Building a Learning Organization," an informal case study of a project involving 8 schools with 139 teachers and just over 2,600 students. Among their findings they reported that:
  • "In one school ... results indicate that the model of team leadership training directed at the development of the school as a learning organization is workable and that it contributes to improvements in teaching and learning and [has the promise of improving] student outcomes."
  • "There is more cooperative learning going on than before. There is significantly greater commitment to trying cooperative learning. There is a climate of collaboration at the school that did not previously exist."
  • "While teams were quite positive during the summer session and were engaged in several problem-solving sessions on team learning and school improvement, they found that back in their schools they did not have the practical experience to sustain the process toward the development of a learning organization."
  • "Administrative structures can be major obstacles, and some second-order changes are needed to facilitate the transition to a learning organization. Evidence confirms that a school structure which limits teacher flexibility inhibits collaboration and team planning."
• Statoil posts in its Statoil Forum a series of articles "Organisational Learning and Competitiveness" that includes an article on "Competence Development and Knowledge Management."
• Dr. Ruth Ash, Dean of the School of Education at Samford University in Alabama, has posted "The Principal As Chief Learning Officer: The New Work Of Formative Leadership," which deals with preparing faculty to develop learning organizations in schools.
  • "In this world of knowledge-based organizations, leaders will do their work by enhancing the quality of thinking of those within the organization."
  • "In the twenty-first century, with the continuing development of the information-based global economy and industry's increasing need for high-performance employees, intellectual capital will be the most critical resource in our state and in our nation. ... Our problem, however, is that we are entering the twenty-first century with schools and instructional methods designed in the nineteenth century."
  • "Student learning must now become the focus of our educational efforts, and school leaders must have the ability to create systemic change and pursue ever-higher levels of student achievement."
  • "Instructional leadership needs to focus more on the learning opportunities provided students and on the work students do, and less on the teaching process and the work teachers do."
• The Research Center of the Learning Resource Network posts "From Evaluation of Training to Measurement of Learning," an informal case study on learning and development at the Canadian national police force.
  • "Perhaps most significant and successful, we have fundamentally changed the methodology we use in developing learning opportunities. Our focus has shifted from the trainer to the learner, from content to process and from rules to values."
  • "Learning is being built into the RCMP work processes, organizational culture and management systems. Learning is no longer seen as a discrete activity apart from work or performance."
  • "The early stages of organizational renewal are rife with mishaps and adjustments. Premature evaluation can inhibit major change by playing into the hands of those in the organization who are defending the status quo and by fuelling the fears of those who will be held accountable for the transformation exercise."
  • "Measuring our new graduates' competence in managing crime problems would include not only a count of problems resolved effectively and efficiently, but also an assessment of what they learned from each incident and how the learning was integrated into work practices - measuring the learning process itself."
  • "Success in the future will belong to those individuals and organizations who not only adapt to change but who become agents of change, masters of change. This shift from training to learning is a shift from the mastery of roles and functions to the mastery of improvement and change."
• The Ethan J. Mings consultancy posts in its Operational Performance index, "The Laws of the Fifth Discipline: A Reference Guide by Ethan J. Mings," which lists the dozen or so "laws" of Systems Thinking, Senge's notes on each law, some implications by Mings and possible remedies, or questions to ask. A few "laws" are excerpted below.
  • Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions."
  • The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
  • The cure can be worse than the disease.
  • The easy way out usually leads back in.
  • Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
  • Dividing the elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
• Barry Richmond has posted "Systems thinking: critical thinking skills for the 1990s and beyond" (1993; 21 pp; .PDF format). Though this informal paper dates from early times, it provides a good overview of system dynamics with examples; and it identifies 7 components of systems thinking: dynamic thinking, closed-loop thinking, generic thinking, structural thinking, operational thinking, continuum thinking and scientific thinking. These can help in obtaining a clearer picture of systems thinking. His similar descriptive paper "System Dynamics/Systems Thinking: Let's Just Get On With It" (1994; 10 pp; HTML format) may also be of interest.
• The Center for Futures Research (about) at St. Gall University in Switzerland posts a diagram on Systems Thinking Practice (with links to short descriptions of each element), a related page of explanation and another page on the Learning Organization. The latter includes links to documents in English and German, links to organizations, projects and people.
• Strategy and Business has posted "an interview with Chris Argyris" (1998; 9 pp; .PDF format) in which Argyris (the James Bryant Conant Professor Emeritus of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard University) describes Model I and Model II behaviors, notes that most of management is using Model I behavior, and points out how important (and difficult) it is to move them to Model II. The interview is also available as a series of HTML pages (Table of Contents).
  • "Model I is an approach that is geared more to reaching agreement than it is to validating the truth of something at issue. As such, it encourages people to say what they think others want to hear. Since agreement is more important than truth, this model can put an individual, group or organization out of touch with reality. By contrast, under a Model II approach, the parties work hard to have honest communication and to become aligned with reality. Model II rewards tough reasoning that is productive."
  • "The sacred set of values, therefore, in an organization are these: valid knowledge, informed choice and personal responsibility to monitor the effectiveness of the effort."
• Martin Ryder, at the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Denver, has posted "Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management" (2 pp), a current compendium of links to websites dealing with both subjects.
• The Public Service Commission of Canada posts a Research Directorate paper, "Some Thoughts on Turning a Government Organization into a Learning Organization," which identifies a list of traits commonly found in learning organizations, a list of barriers to learning, mechanisms for overcoming barriers, the approach of a U.K. government unit (in six steps) in moving toward becoming a Learning Organization, etc.
• Chun Wei Choo, a faculty member of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, posts "Organizational Learning and Cognition" (1998; 2 pp) an index of Knowledge Management websites, including about a dozen programs at universities. He also posts "Information Management for the Intelligent Organization: Roles and Implications for the Information Professions," (1995; 14 pp) where he points out that the "intelligent organization is able to ... pursue goals in a changing environment by adapting behavior according to knowledge about itself and the world it thrives in. The intelligent organization is therefore a learning organization that is skilled at creating, acquiring, organizing, and sharing knowledge, and at applying this knowledge to design its behavior [i.e Knowledge Management]. Organizational learning depends critically upon information management -- the capacity to harness the organization's information resources and information capabilities to energize organizational growth."
• Maggie McVay, a Franklin University professor, posts on the Horizon website for educators (about), an article "Facilitating Knowledge Construction and Communication on the Internet." McVay emphasizes the roles of interaction and communication as "the keys to facilitating knowledge construction on the Internet." She points out that interaction with the content is insufficient, and that interaction with peers and a mentoring relationship with the instructor are also needed. "A learning community allows individuals to share information, experiences, discoveries, and emotions in an ongoing exchange."
• Barry Sugarman, Professor, Masters in Management Program at Lesley College, has posted "The Learning Organization and Organizational Learning: New Roles for Workers, Managers, Trainers and Consultants" (1996; 11 pp). The paper provides good background and introductory material concerning the urgency for fundamental change in most businesses and public sector organizations, including references. A few excerpts are below.
  • "In place of the bureaucratic model that calls for obedient "cogs" in its well-adjusted machine, the LO calls for workers who can contribute as creative participants to revising and adapting the formula or rules of operation."
  • "We are not just learning to do the work better, but we are building the organization's knowledge base and revising its tools, processes, and products, as we work."
  • "The kind of leadership required for [a learning] organization is radically different from the traditional model, of course. The new script calls for the leader as designer; leader as teacher, coach, facilitator; leader as steward, but no more leader as hero."
  • "[M]ost organizations need a certain amount of second order [or 'framebreaking'] thinking (in the right places) if they are to find the significantly new strategies demanded for success in the new conditions. ... Thus a focus on single-loop learning alone becomes actually harmful, because it systematically diverts attention away from where it is critically needed."

• Government Technology's August, 1999 Visions supplement has posted an interview with Doug Engelbart (bio), "The Unfinished Revolution." Elgelbart, who invented the mouse, multiple screen windows and other interactive components commonly in use today (see also news article "The Man Who Sees the Future"), talks about how "the potential for using computers interactively could really change the way we go about collective, cooperative knowledge work." Below are some quotes from the interview.
• • "... collective intelligence, or collective IQ, is a very real thing." If you could measure it, you could ask, "What did [the organization] really keep track of and know about? How did it recognize threats and opportunities? How quickly did it change its approach to things, its goals and targets? How quickly did it recognize changes and set up a new plan of action and rearrange its resources accordingly? If you looked at different organizations and institutions this way, you'd find some very big gaps."
  • "... anything that is as big a challenge as [the Internet's global effect on economic activity] really needs a strategy. You have to find a way to change. Let's call that change improvement. So you have to take a look at the infrastructure within and between organizations that accommodates the improvement process. And the question becomes, 'What can we do to enhance that improvement infrastructure and give it more attention? Get it clarified?' And then get organizations to realize they are going to have to spend more resources to strengthen their improvement infrastructure. Then, if we think of the improvement infrastructure as something that has an organizational, collective capability, the question becomes how to make that part smarter. How do we improve collective knowledge work, especially in distributed cases? Can we take a new or a better look at revitalizing our improvement infrastructures? The improvement infrastructure would be a terrifically important place for governments and other organizations to invest early money to better prepare for changes ahead."
  • "The time constants for changing organizations are much longer than the time constants for getting new products out. So the key question is, 'Who is driving all this anyway?' There are limitations to any market orientation. People's immediate perceptions of what truly might be valuable to them isn't always the most enlightened. ... Fundamentally, I believe we are unprepared for the scale and pervasiveness of the technology changes ahead, and especially the secondary effects of these technologies. Who is thinking about these second-order changes, which can be huge? And who is really aware of the forthcoming nanotechnology? This is for sure going to be there. You will be able to manufacture things that are so very, very small and therefore so very, very fast."

  Elgelbart's current project, the Bootstrap Institute (about; mission), helps "organizations transform into high-performance organizations." Their associated Bootstrap Alliance (about) is a vehicle for exploring the development of organizations that are capable of maneuvering successfully into that future. The vision of the Bootstrap Alliance is "to learn how to dramatically boost the performance of organizations, teams, and individuals."

• In a project sponsored by the World Bank Global Distance Education Net (about), Dr. Marilyn Corbin of the Institute for Systems Leadership at the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service has summarized elements of a workshop titled "Leadership For a Learning Organization," (4 pp) based on Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline," and Stephen Covey who wrote "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Each of the sessions focused upon one of Senge's disciplines: Personal Mastery, Systems Thinking, Team Learning, Mental Models, and Building a Shared Vision. Stephen Covey's seven habits of effective leaders provided background for the participants learning experience to operationalize Senge's disciplines. These habits are: (1) be proactive; (2) begin with the end in mind; (3) put first things first; (4) think win/win; (5) seek first to understand ... then to be understood; (6) synergize; and (7) sharpen the saw. (Covey, 1989). The paper emphasizes management of a learning organization, describes the learning experiences at the workshop and lessons learned.
• Mark Addleson, former Associate Professor and Chair, Program on Social and Organizational Learning in the Public Administration Department at the California State University of Dominguez Hills School of Management has posted "What is a Learning Organization?" (5 pp) as part of the reading for a graduate-level class. He identifies and describes 5 axioms about collaborative learning in organizations (with emphasis on the social aspects):
• 1. Organization is about relationships and collaboration.
  2. People's attitudes (or orientation) towards other people are at the heart of a learning organization.
  3. Structure and strategic plans have little to do with getting things done.
  4. Organizational boundaries depend on people's relationships.
  5. Managing - 'organization building' - is situational not functional.
• Richard Karash moderates the Learning Organization Mailing List and Archive, and posts "What is a Learning Organization?" along with "Why a Learning Organization?"
• CIO Magazine posts an August, 1999 article "Fast Forward," which focuses on leadership essentials for the new millennium (especially human resource management). Below are a few quotes from the article.
• • "Companies are now managing changing workforces, building workplaces that balance profitability with the demands of a new, independent-minded generation of workers. Businesses can no longer just be good at the traditional tasks of recruiting, retaining and training their employees-hurdles that are daunting enough in their own right-but must also find new and different ways to unleash the creative powers of their workers. Today diversity is a desirable commodity to these winning enterprises. Dissent should be encouraged because it lets staffers think for themselves, and failure should not be a dirty word, because fear of failure begets fear of risk. Creating such a culture is not an easy task. It is a critical one, though, for timidity and conservatism can cause a company to lag behind."
  • "Companies need to move beyond the pyramid structure of the bureaucratic model. 'Instead of pyramids, these postbureacratic organizations will be structures built of energy and ideas, led by people who find their joy in the task at hand, not in leaving monuments behind'."
  • "You have to do business now with a fluid talent pool. It means a fundamental rearrangement in the way you organize your business and the way you handle staffing, a new way of looking at your human resources, a new way of motivating employees that goes beyond simple retention strategies."
  • "Innovation needs to be an integral part of a company's culture-and organizations need to provide the room and encouragement for staffers to excel at it. For instance, 3M asks employees to spend 15 percent of their work time daydreaming about new inventions."

  
  CIO Magazine also posts a May, 2000 book excerpt "Learning to Lead," concerning the creation of a Learning Organization and its contrast with one aimed at teaching.

  • "Teaching puts the instructor front and center. Concepts and ideas flow from the top down or the center out, and the focus is on knowledge transfer. Teachers are the experts; their role is to deliver content, communicate clear messages and instill better ways of working. Students are regarded as novices; their role is to absorb and accept. The effectiveness of the process is usually measured by the degree to which important information makes the trip from the first group to the second."
  • "A process designed to foster learning is quite different. New ways of thinking become the desired ends, not facts or frameworks. Discussion and debate replace ex cathedra pronouncements. Questions become as important as answers. And success, to use a currently popular phrase, is measured by the degree to which students 'learn how to learn.'"
  • "There are three primary tasks to developing the learning organization:
    • First, leaders and managers must create opportunities for learning by designing settings and events that prompt the necessary activities.
    • Second, they must cultivate the proper tone, fostering desirable norms, behaviors and rules of engagement.
    • Third, they must personally lead the process of discussion, framing the debate, posing questions, listening attentively, and providing feedback and closure."

  -From Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work, by Harvard Business School Professor David A. Garvin.

• "The Age of Smart" has been posted by Anna Muoio on FastCompany - Life and Work in the New Economy.

• In coping with today's over-abundance of information, the challenge "is not only to learn what you need to know but also to unlearn what you no longer need. That means eliminating the habits, practices, and assumptions that once worked -- even those that may have accounted for past successes -- to make room for new methods that better fit your new circumstances." The Learning Organization is the sum of individual learning to some degree. And unlearning is part of that process for individuals and organizations. This paper contains examples from a dozen individual experts.

• FastCompany posted in May of 1999 "Learning for a Change," an interview with Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), and The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations" (1999). Senge discusses the great difficulty of making significant changes, especially in large organizations, and concludes that it is not simply a lack of resources or intelligence. "When I look at efforts to create change in big companies over the past 10 years, I have to say that there's enough evidence of success to say that change is possible--and enough evidence of failure to say that it isn't likely. Both of those lessons are important," he says. He also points out that we traditionally think of businesses as machines, whereas we need to begin to think of them more as organisms of nature.
  • "We keep bringing in mechanics, when what we need are gardeners. We keep trying to drive change, when what we need to do is cultivate change."
  • "A relationship with a machine is fundamentally a different kind of relationship [from an interpersonal relationship]: It is perfectly appropriate to feel that if [the machine] doesn't work, you should fix it. But we get into real trouble whenever we try to 'fix' people."
  • "Even on a large scale, nature doesn't change things mechanically: You don't just pull out the old and replace it with the new. Something new grows, and it eventually supplants the old."
  • "Deep change comes only through real personal growth -- through learning and unlearning."
  • "... if you want real, significant, sustainable change, you need talented, committed local line leaders." And you need "internal networkers who know how to get people talking to one another and how to build informal communities." Senge also found "executives who were providing leadership by doing activities that were more mature and more profound than simply offering themselves as heroes. These were executives who focus on acting as a coach or as a mentor. ... For significant change to take place, you need to create an interplay among [all of] those three communities."

• The Senge interview (printer version) also identifies the ten challenges of initiating change, and lists a chronology (from 1938 through 1999) of Learning Organization Concepts.

• Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), a Washington, D.C. consultancy, posts "Transforming an Existing Organization into a Learning Organization." The latter is a proposal for a multi-year research project that will investigate and develop "a theory of effective, sustainable, geographically distributed teamwork."
  • "The theory will be based on empirical studies of distributed teams in the World Bank, Boeing, and Bell Atlantic. We will observe teams at work, interview team members, and analyze both their conversations and artifacts to determine the salient causal factors in the long-term sustainability of distributed collaborations. These observations are expected to yield a sort of ecological theory consisting of principles that differentiate environments that sustain teamwork from those that cripple it. Some aspects of the theory will be tested in experiments conducted either in the field or in a university laboratory."

• GDSS also posts "Blending Cultural Transformation and Groupware to Create a Learning Organization" (mirror site posting) and an index of working papers.

• Eileen Quann, a principal at Fastrak Training Inc., has posted "Transforming the Workplace into a Learning Organization" (mirror site). It dates from a conference in 1995; but she hits all the right points in a half-dozen very readable pages, and provides many of the reasons and avenues that might be useful in a management or strategy session. Though Fastrak is no longer operating as it did then, their articles list may provide other useful insights.
• Converge magazine posts "OTIS Elevator's Virtual University: A Grassroots Learning Organization," describing the redesign of their in house training initiative for up and coming managers.
• Bizhan Nasseh has posted "Learning Organization" (1996; ISP), a draft paper describing some of the practical steps that might be taken to nurture a learning organization in the University Computing Services unit at Ball State University. His premise is that becoming a learning organization or society is a survival issue for individuals (with emphasis on self-directed life-long learning), for his unit, for the university and for society in developed nations as a whole.
• E-Papyrus (about) principal Dr. V. Balasubramanian has posted "Organizational Learning and Information Systems" (ISWorld Net, May 1995; 6 pp; mirror site) providing a very readable overview of the Learning Organization, its different types, goals and learning processes, and the influences on it. His emphasis is on the role of information systems technology in fostering learning organization effectiveness (including knowledge acquisition, information distribution and interpretation, and organizational memory). Some of his other publications may also be of interest.
• The Learning Organizations Home Page (3 pp) is posted by Kai Larsen at the College of Business and Administration at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He posts a very brief summary of The Fifth Discipline, and provides links to articles and other related material.
• A Stanford student posts an extensive page "Learning Organization and Knowledge Management Resources On the Web" which includes sections: Institutions & Organizations | Articles & Journals | Conferences | Consultants and Related Product/Service Companies | Other Resource Pages and more.

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Sources of Related Information

Below are a few related information sources, most of which are outside the City of Grande Prairie website. Each external reference is linked so as to open a new window in your browser. To return here, just close the new window. Internal references are linked in the usual way (the "Back" button will return you to this page).

• The Alberta Personnel Administration Office posts "Towards a Learning Organization in the Alberta Public Service: A Corporate Learning Strategy - October 1996" which includes a vision for the Alberta public service and a human resource development plan with four objectives: (1) alignment - the goals and behaviours of individuals employees are aligned with department and government goals; (2) commitment - processes exist to build employee commitment to government goals and values; (3) competence - the organization has the knowledge, skills and abilities to accomplish current and future business plan goals; and (4) versatility - processes exist for rapidly adapting and transforming the organization to meet changing needs.

• U of A graduate Greg Kearsley has posted "Explorations in Learning and Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database" at a George Washington University website where he was previously on the faculty. The Theory Into Practice (TIP) database (about; acknowledgments) "contains descriptions of 50 theories relevant to human learning and instruction. Each description includes the following sections: overview, scope/application, example, principles, and references. Relationships between theories are identified by highlighted text within articles. These relationships can be connections between specific theories or to concepts that underlie a number of theories. The theories are also indexed according to content domain and type of learning."

• The Ontario Prevention Clearinghouse (OPC, a non-profit encouraging social, emotional, physical and environmental health and wellbeing; about) posts a series of articles on implementing organizational change "The Learning Organization: The Implementation Challenge" (scroll down below the bulls eye). The articles were compiled from the Ontario Health Promotion E-Mail Bulletin, a free electronic mailing list which provides "information exchange among community leaders, practitioners and researchers interested in health promotion."

• The 1999 reports/findings/conclusions of the MIT Sloan School of Management's 1994 initiative in research and education called "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century."

• "The mission of the center was to not only understand emerging ways of working, but also to invent entirely new and more effective approaches and put them into practice. The genesis of the effort was found in a unique point in our history.  Sweeping political, economic, social and especially technological transformations have created a fundamentally new era of business characterized by unprecedented complexity and rapid change during the 1990s. These sweeping changes have produced startling setbacks for what have been some of the world's most successful companies, and at the same time brought great opportunity for new types of organizations."

• Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, hosts the "South Australian Centre for Lifelong Learning and Development," which "will pursue the strong links between lifelong learning and lifelong employability. The Centre will also assist in the preparation of a coordinated State plan to meet the present and foreseeable skills requirements of the South Australian workforce."

• Alan Greenspan, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair (speeches), in a speech entitled "The Evolving Demand for Skills," given at the U.S. Department of Labor National Skills Summit, Washington, D.C. in April, 2000, pointed out the need for alignment of education curricula with employment related needs.
  • "The remarkable coming together of technologies that we label IT has allowed us to move beyond efficiency gains in routine manual tasks to achieve new levels of productivity in routine information-processing tasks that previously depended upon other facets of human input--computing, sorting and retrieving information, and acting on pieces of information. As a result, information technologies have begun to alter, fundamentally, how we do business and create economic value, often in ways that were not readily foreseeable even a decade ago."
  • "The essential contribution of information technology is the expansion of knowledge and its obverse, the reduction of uncertainty."
  • "The major contribution of advances in information technology ... is to reduce the number of worker hours required to produce the nation's output, ... . Echoing a debate that is as old as Adam Smith, some view the investment in new capital or the introduction of innovative production processes as a threat to our economy's capacity to create new jobs. However, because technological change spawns so many opportunities for businesses to expand the range and value of their goods and services, the introduction of new efficiencies has not led to higher unemployment. Rather, the recent period of technological innovation has created a vibrant economy in which opportunities for new jobs and businesses have blossomed."
  • "I see nothing to suggest that the trends toward a greater conceptual content of our nation's output and, thus, toward increased demand for conceptual skills in our workforce will end."
  • "Workers must be equipped not simply with technical know-how but also with the ability to create, analyze, and transform information and to interact effectively with others. Moreover, that learning will increasingly be a lifelong activity."
  • "It is not enough to create a job market that has enabled those with few skills to finally be able to grasp the first rung of the ladder of achievement. More generally, we must ensure that our whole population receives an education that will allow full and continuing participation in this dynamic period of ... economic history."

• Dee Hock has posted "A Little Known Education System," where he describes an educational system in which everyone manages his own learning account from birth to death, public and other funding is provided with guidelines and incentives (but little bureaucracy), and the boundaries between education, work and private life are dissolved. He augments his case by pointing to components of his proposed system which are in successful operation outside the education community. His word "Chaordic" is an amalgamation of chaos and order, both of which are present in measured amounts, paralleling organic systems. Other background information, transcripts, papers, etc., are available at the Chaordic Alliance website, which includes indices of articles and speeches. For those with further interest, one paper, "The Lesson of the One-horned Cow," is a particularly compelling description of his organizational and management principles and practices; and FastCompany posted "The Trillion Dollar Vision of Dee Hock" in their Oct/Nov issue back in 1996.

• The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management has posted "The Practice of Innovation," an excerpted chapter from the Drucker Foundation's award-winning journal "Leader to Leader," and a draft outline titled "Mastering the Tools of Change." In the chapter, Senge discusses some of the reasons why effective innovation is so elusive in organizations. He uses Peter Drucker's three ingredients of the "discipline of innovation" (focus on mission, define significant results and do rigorous assessment) as his framework. Another Senge excerpt from "Leader to Leader," titled "The Ecology of Leadership," points out that ''what people are looking for is not the leadership of exhortation, it's the leadership of clarification," and "at the senior executive level, ... the most effective training programs are catalytic -- creating a very new experience, getting you thinking 'out of the box'." Other "Leader to Leader" chapters and/or Foundation Publications may also be of interest, including "The Shape of Things to Come," a Drucker tome that emphasizes the aging workforce, the unsustainable trend of of earlier retirements, and the need to manage workers as if they were volunteers: "... so accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer. They carry their tools in their heads and can go anywhere."

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