Building a Learning Organization By David Garvin Hawa’a Al-Naki 208121966

What is a Learning Organization? It is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. The process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding. It is a process of detecting and correcting errors.

Peter Senge’s description to a learning organization: Where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.

Critical issues must be addressed before a company can truly become a learning organization: we need: A well grounded, easy to apply definition of a learning organization. Management: clearer operational guidelines for practice. Better tools for measurement can assess an organization's rate and level of learning, to ensure that gains have in fact been made.

Garvin defines learning organizations at five main activities: * Systematic problem solving by generating hypotheses, gathering data to test hypotheses, and using statistical tools (such as cause-and-effect diagrams) to organize data and draw inferences rather than guesswork .

…five main activities: * Experimentation with new approaches by using small experiments to produce incremental gains in knowledge. *Learning from past experience by reviewing successes and failures, identifying lessons learned, and record those lessons in accessible forms.

…five main activities: *Learning from the best practices of others by looking outside the immediate environment to gain new perspectives considering these sources: Other companies: Identify best practice organizations, using site visits and interviews to study how they get work done, and generate ideas. Customers: Meet regularly with customers to gather knowledge about products, competitors, consumers’ preferences, and the quality of service.

…five main activities: Learning must be more than a local issue. *Transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the whole organization by moving experts to different parts of the company across divisions and departments, so they can share the wealth because it carries maximum impact when it’s shared broadly. These activities helps the organization make enduring improvements that translate directly into measurable gains.

The learning process will grow much faster if employees know that their ideas and plans will be evaluated and implemented and their learning will be applied.

Successful learning organization needs: Measuring cognitive and Behavioral changes as well as Performance improvements in results because “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Building a successful learning organization comes from carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments, and management processes that progress slowly and steadily.

Organizational learning helps Organizational learning helps to avoid a decline because mistakes are recognized in the early stage and avoided in the future, which enables an organization to maintain a competitive. Inspire its workforce to achieve greater results. Improve quality, innovations, a better understanding of the business itself, and the increased ability to manage changes are further important outcomes of a learning structure.

Thank you..