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LEARNING ORGANIZATION
Always Learning
A learning organization seeks to create its own future; it assumes learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members; and it adapts, develops, and transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations of people both inside and outside the company.
A learning organization does away with the mentality that only senior management can do the thinking for the organization. It challenges all team members to tap into the resources and potential of the group in the desire to build the company around the shared values or respect, appreciation and the desire to learn.
Five Easy Pieces
The core of a learning organization is based upon five learning principles – lifelong programs of study and practice:
1. Personal Mastery: Learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment that encourages all its members to develop themselves towards the goals and purposes they choose.
2. Mental Models: Reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal picture of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.
3. Shared Vision: Building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.
4. Team Learning: Transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that the groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual member’s talents.
5. System Thinking: a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively and to act more in tune with the larger process of the natural and economic world.
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