Learning Organizations

11 Pages 2743 Words

The Need for the “LEARNING ORGANIZATION”
The nature of the environment has changed dramatically due to significant economic, social and technological changes over the past decades. Organizations today are confronted with increasing environmental turbulence arising from global competition, the introduction of new technologies, shortened product lifecycles and political and social pressures. Organizations, today must be flexible and learn to anticipate changes and respond rapidly. Today, learning makes the critical difference among organizations.
Learning can hardly be described as a new characteristic of organizations. Organizational learning is as old as organizations themselves. What is new, is an increased awareness of the connections between learning and competitive ability as well as better insight into the conditions for effective learning. In the long term it is said that learning will only provide competitive advantage to organizations that learn faster and better than their competitors.

Changes in the business environment have significant implications for learning
and its role:

What is a Learning Organization?
A learning organization is one that seeks to create its own future; that assumes learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members; and that develops, adapts and transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations of people, both inside and outside itself.
At the heart of learning organization stands the belief that enormous human potential lies locked, undeveloped in the organizations. Central to this belief is the convinction that when all members of an organization fully develop and exercise their essential human capacities, the resulting congruence between personal and organizational visions, goals and objectives will release this potential.
Peter Senge, known as Mr. Learning Organization, defines the learning organization as the organization “ in which you cannot not learn because ...