Learning Organizations

The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth and Bryan Smith Doubleday, New York, 1999, 596 pages. ISBN 0-385-49322-3, US $35.00. Book Review by Patricia R. Tuecke Why is it so difficult to sustain change? Over the past two decades, organizations have embarked upon change journeys to meet the challenges of increased global competition, new markets, and pace of the technological development. In their attempts to respond quickly to external changes in the environment, most have failed, even after some initial success. Ten years ago, Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, a seminal book in the field of organizational change and systems theory. In 1994 Senge and five other authors wrote a followup book, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. This book was filled with practical ways to initiate new ways of thinking in organizations. After its publication, as they met and talked with people, the six authors became increasingly aware of the difficulties people were having in sustaining organizational change. The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations is the authors' response to these difficulties. A basic premise of this book is that organizations are products of the ways that people in them think and act. Organizational learning results from individuals participating in activities that embody new ways of thinking and acting and relating together, leading to an increasing and enduring organizational capacity for change. The book grew out of conversations at the MIT Center for Organizational Learning among leaders involved in change efforts. They were responding to the question: "What forces seemed to propel organizational learning efforts forward or to slow them down?" This book is written for those involved in change initiatives, managers, organization executives, directors, consultants, and facilitators, to help them make sense of the organization's response to change. It is written from a systems perspective. In the sense that to facilitate is to make easier,' then understanding the authors' framework, and utilizing their models and suggestions to meet the challenges of change would help facilitate a change effort. Facilitators working with organizations going through profound change will find this book a major resource. Anyone reading it will gain theoretical understanding of the systemic dynamics at work in change initiatives, and surely recognize some of the challenges in their own experiences. The thought provoking questions and exercises can be utilized in many group situations. Like its predecessor, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, this book is written as a collection of "notes from the field." The book is structured around the three major phases of change: 1) initiating change, 2) sustaining momentum, and 3) redesigning or redirecting the organization. The myriad personal stories it contains illustrate what often happens in a system undergoing change, and in meeting challenges of sustaining change inherent in each phase. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the stories, gleaned from conversations and interviews, relating experiences of change efforts. The stories are written in a first-person style. The leaders openly share their vulnerabilities and the mistakes they made. They relate the excitement, the frustration, the confusion, the surprise, and the satisfaction of their experiences. They tell of their struggle. to understand what was going on, of the organizational resistance they met, the tactics they used, and the creativity catalyzed in meeting the challenges of leading their organizational change efforts. The Dance of Change is the authors' attempt to make sense of change efforts, both the failures and the successes, and to create a framework that holds the dynamics of the change journey. …

Background: Implicitly, innovative schools have historically contained some (but not usually all) of the properties of learning organizations and professional learning communities but have a weak record of sustaining success over time. Can innovative schools that self-consciously establish themselves as learning organizations and professional learning communities sustain their early promise of success in the face of the predictable cycle of the “attrition of change”; of pressure and envy in the surrounding district, profession, and community; and of the historically specific and recent pressure of standardized reform? Purpose : This article explores the impact of these influences on three innovative schools and their sustainability over time. It concentrates in particular on the promise and viability of one of these schools, which has been consciously modeled as a learning organization and professional learning community. Conclusions: Although further research is required, the article concludes that the learning organization and professional learning community model may provide a more robust resistance to conventional processes of the attrition of change and of surrounding change forces, but much like other innovative schools, it also shows signs of defaulting to conventional patterns of schooling in the face of standardized reform.

Limited published research has examined the role of leaders and managers in building learning capability and learning organizations. It is speculated that leaders and managers will assume roles such as facilitators of learning, coaches, and teachers. However, these roles and the micro‐behaviors manifested in them remain an area that has not been fully explored. This article reports specific findings from a qualitative critical incident study that was designed to investigate the multiple ways exemplary managers facilitate their employees’ learning in organizations considered to be learning organizations. Thirteen behavior sets emerged from this research that help to define the role of facilitator of learning. Implications for management development are discussed and areas for future research are identified.

This article concerns the first phase of a project introducing organizational learning into the Ordnance Corps of the Israel Defense Forces. Conducted as a joint experiment, the project was guided by a set of principles and metaphors that constituted a vision of learning organizations. The article describes the conceptual rationale underlying the project, difficulties encountered and their solutions, and implications of our experience for building learning organizations.

School district central office administrators face unprecedented demands to become key supporters of efforts to improve teaching and learning districtwide. Some suggest that these demands mean that central offices, especially in midsized and large districts, should become learning organizations but provide few guides for how central offices might operate as learning organizations. This article presents a conceptual framework that draws on organizational and sociocultural learning theories to elaborate what might be involved if central offices operated as learning organizations. Specific work practices that this conceptual framework highlights include central office administrators’ participation in new school assistance relationships and their ongoing use of evidence from assistance relationships and other sources to inform central office policies and practices. Sense making and managing paradoxes are fundamental to these processes. I highlight these activities with empirical illustrations from research and experience, discuss conditions that help/hinder these activities, and suggest directions for district research and practice.

The ability to learn faster than your competition is your only sustainable competitive advantage! This compilation of 34 powerful essays, written by experts recognized worldwide, is rich in concept and theory as well as in application and example. An inspiring follow-up to Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline, these essays are grouped in four sections that address all aspects of learning organizations: the guiding ideas behind systems thinking; the theories, methods, and processes for creating a learning organization; the infrastructure of the learning model; and arenas of practice. The authors move you from thinking in parts to thinking systematically, from absolute truths to coherent interpretations, from problem solving to creating, and from self to community. Whether you are a marketing executive, personnel officer, secretary, strategic planner, plant manager or line supervisor, this collection will forever change your mind about work as a place to learn, create, and have fun - not just a place where you go to 'make a living.'

Our approach to learning organizations understanding learning in organizations conceptualizing learning organizations tools for a learning organization analyzing the state of learning in the organization devising an implementation plan helping managers to manage learning tools for enhancing learning from training to learning interventions reflections on becoming a learning organization.

Preface. Acknowledgments. About the Author. PART ONE. Chapter 1: Case for Transformation. Chapter 2: Systems and Technology Change. Chapter 3: Bureaucracies vs. Learning Organizations. Chapter 4: Bureaucratic Images of Schools. Chapter 5: A New Image of Schools. PART TWO: GETTING OUR BEARINGS: THE SOCIOPOLITICAL LANDSCAPE. Chapter 6: Bureaucratic Impulse. Chapter 7: Reassessing Standards. Chapter 8: Restoring Civic Capacity and Building Social Capital: Two Keys to School Transformation. PART THREE: TAKING THE FIRST STEPS: HOW TRANSFORMATION CAN HAPPEN. Chapter 9: Painting a New Image of Schools. Chapter 10: Creating the Capacity to Support Innovation. Chapter 11: Transforming Standards into Sources of Direction. Chapter 12: A Theory of Action. Chapter 13: Leading from the Heart and Recapturing our Heritage. PART FOUR. Appendix A. Appendix B. Bibliography. Index.

Purpose – To explore and analyse various learning organizations and to attempt to outline the form of a holistic learning organization.Design/methodology/approach – The tool described in this article is a continuation of the work published in a Licentiate thesis in 1996 and developed further in a doctoral dissertation in 2001. The Learning Organization Diamond Tool is based on a holistic concept of a learning organization being regarded as a structure of related elements: driving forces, finding purpose, questioning, empowering and evaluation at two interconnected levels of individuals and the whole. Data from 686 respondents were gathered from 25 Finnish organizations in 1998.Findings – The outcomes of the study are mainly presented in the form of imaginary diamonds complying with the basic framework. In 24 organizations the individuals placed more trust in themselves and their own learning than in their organization as a learning environment. When comparing different business sectors the variation on th...

Coping with increasing rates of environmental change and turbulence requires that management changes an organization to a form that is flexible, adaptive, responsive and value adding. Having this as a widely accepted clear goal for organization transformation, the emphasis shifts to how to accomplish the desired change. Several approaches seem to compete for this task, with total quality management (TQM), re-engineering and learning organizations being the most promising options in this decade. This article examines the relationship of re-engineering, TQM and the learning organization, the last two considered most likely to yield enduring long-term results. Unlike re-engineering, they manage to accomplish this without disrupting the social fabric that affects an organization's human resources, widely accepted as the most valuable means to bring about such transformation.