Are you truly a Learning Organisation?
This has been an area of study for me over the past 6-7 years and I truly believe it is a model that can drive performance and continuous improvement, as I found in my research throughout New Zealand Rugby teams. So, yes a learning organisation does not apply to only “educational and learning institutions”, but this is where my question is aimed at, is your “education and learning institution”, be it primary school, high school, polytechnic, community college, University and private training organisations, are you actually a Learning Organisation?
What has always troubled me is the utilitarian approach, where education and qualifications are offered based on the job the graduates can do or jobs they can go fulfil in the industry. This is the golden token being offered, but when our organisations are doing this are they actually enabling themselves to be a learning organisation rather than a service deliverer? I don’t think so, a true learning organisations needs to firstly, have a commitment to learning as well as a structure and leadership that will drive it. Secondly, do you see yourself as a learning system? To be a learning system you’ll have an orientation towards learning and as a focus on facilitating factors.
The learning orientation includes the values and practices and reflection of how learning happens within your organisation not just for your students but for staff as well. While your facilitating factors focus on your structures and processes to enable learning across your organisations. I can hear some already thinking, “oh, we do this, we have processes in place to make sure we have a learning environment”. Let me ask you, have you considered that every year, every semester you have a new cohort of students, thus an entirely new group comes to be a part of your environment but to also contribute from their own experiential, social, cultural, religious, political and economic stand point? Are you ready for them to contribute, shape and mould your organisation? Have you considered that their moment in time in unique, new and different to previous cohorts? The environmental (ie. weather), social and political scene at this particular time these new students will be at your organisation will be different and will also shape and mould your entire organisation. If you add that in our educational environments today we have more that classroom teaching today, and we have online learning platform like Google Classroom, Blackboard or Canvas among others, and that we also extend our educational delivery into the workplaces, the place of where our organisations operate also vary profoundly with each cohort of students.
How are you preparing for all this as a learning organisation? Let’s have a look at the facilitating factors: how is learning acquisition happening; how is learning being disseminated; and how is learning being used? As you can see we are needing a learning system. So do you have the structure to implement a learning system, commonly we immediately think of our hierarchical human resources structures but in this case we need to think in a leadership network: a multi-layered, collaborative and participative leadership environment which encompasses different actors within your organisation, integrating learning capabilities into their own environments.
The generic roles played by these leaders are those of designer, teacher, and steward, as we see below:
- The designer heads or leads specific units or groups within an organisation. They have autonomy to perform and have independence to decide and influence their areas of responsibility in the organisation directly. They are active agents trying new things and working with others in the pursuit of new practices; they become the “teachers” within learning system.
- The actual teachers are the advocates for change and improvement. They play a mentoring role to enhance the uptake of new processes within the organisation.
- The steward or Kiatiaki, as we call them in New Zealand, will help carry learning systems across the organisation. They provide institutionalised credibility to the learning processes and help establish measures and checkpoints to evidence the success of the learning systems.
From a classical management theory point of view, the Kiatiaki can be seen as the boss, the hierarchical head, who is pushing a system down on the individuals or simply giving a set of orders, or what we like to call the strategic plan. The difference is in a Learning Organisation that the Kiatiaki is invested in promoting learning within the organisation and recognising learning systems that have been effective across different units. But there is a key forth type of leaders needed in a learning organisation, and they are the network advocates. These advocates can be described as leaders by example. They do not carry a title; they do not formally lead a unit or a group within the organisation but through their work and good practices are able to exemplify learning behaviours across the organisation. A key characteristic of the internal networkers is that they can move freely across the organisation. This could be due to their role or due to their professional capabilities. They are effective internal networkers, seen as credible, knowledgeable, committed individuals who are not a particular threat to anyone. They are contributors; collaborators who act as implicit teachers within their learning organisation.
Who are your network advocates, are you aware of how they are aligning and contributing to your learning organisation?
Thomas Education NZ 