The Learning Organisation

This sketch explores a learning organisation, putting ‘sense making’ at the centre: it’s a view of how our relationship with knowledge is changing, and hence our approach to learning itself. Away from a formal model, where the Organisation shapes and shares a story, through to a more social and collaborative one, where ‘sense making’ is key.

I’ve tried to capture two sides of this: the inputs and outputs. On the top left is the ‘disturbance’ that initiates learning: this may be externally imposed (you must do this), triggered (diagnostics, psychometrics), or internally discovered (exploration/curiosity etc), but in either case, it creates the opening for learning to occur. The ‘perspectives’ that are shared may be formal (stories the Organisation tells), or social (experience, tribal, stories that we each individually tell).

At the bottom are the ‘loops of learning’ that are so central to a Socially Dynamic Organisation: a pattern of behaviour where we go from ‘sense making’, into planning, action, reflection, and further cycles of individual and collective ‘sense making’. This is where knowledge is grounded into practice, and hence at the heart of how we build effectiveness and the evolution of behaviour. Coming out from all of this is ‘sharing’ and ‘storytelling’, which carries the learning out of our local, tribal, bubbles, and into a broader Organisational view.

So a modern learning organisation will hold learning to heart: triggering learning, hearing diverse views, making sense of it all, carrying that ‘sense’ into action, cycles of planning and review, further sense making, and then sharing from local to global.