Audit of a Learning Organisation LO27530

From: Mark W. McElroy (mmcelroy@vermontel.net)
Date: 11/11/01


Replying to LO27527 --

All:

Dave Mather raises a very good question. My own view is that the most
useful approach to conducting an audit for OL to is to focus on the health
of the conditions responsible for learning. Those of you familiar with me
and my company will know that we have formalized a methodology for just
this purpose. We call it the 'policy synchronization method.'

Our entire method is predicated on the view that collective learning is an
emergent process. This makes OL difficult to directly manage, much less
control. But what we can do is directly manage the conditions in which
collective learning occurs. By focusing on enhancing these conditions, we
can indirectly improve organizational learning. We call the environment
of intest here the 'knowledge operating system' of an organization.

To do this, we must first have a theory of how OL happens in human social
social systems. Equipped with such a theory, we can then start to
formulate what the conditions need to be in an organization in order for
the OL dynamics reflected in the theory to unfold to their full potential.
In our case, we hold to the view that organizational learning is a
consequence of strong individual and group learning, coupled with a
political environment in which shared knowledge is mutually created and
open to objective criticism. From this insight, we can start to imagine
the kinds of conditions required to support strong organizational learning
performance.

In our methodology, we not only conduct an audit, but we follow through
with a variety of interventions designed to strengthen the performance of
OL. These interventions are of two types: social and technological.
Further, we focus on evaluating the current 'policy' and 'program'
environment in several specific areas that represent the 'conditions' of
interest to us from an OL standpoint. The audit, then, is aimed at
assessing the quality of current policies and programs in these specific
areas (there are 8 of them). We then shift our focus to the prospect of
making interventions in these 8 areas, where needed. All of this is, as I
say, designed to assess and then enhance the conditions in which OL occurs
in a firm. So what we're 'measuring' is the presence and make-up of
policies and programs in the 8 areas of interest. That, we believe, is
the most useful form of OL audit.

The key to all of this is to begin by recognizing that we're dealing with
an emergent phenomenon, not a determinate one. The collective capacity to
learn is an emergent property of organizations, not a managed one. The
measures of interest in such systems are not so much the outcomes, as they
are the conditions in which the outcomes occur. Like an organic farmer,
we must manage the soil, not the plants. In the context of OL, collective
learnings and innovation are the plants, and the policies and programs
under which they emerge are the soil conditions of interest to us. Ergo
our audits and management interventions should focus first and foremost on
the policy and program conditions that, in the end, account for the
quality of a firm's OL performance. After all, these are the things that
managers CAN have impact on in their quest to improve OL.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Mark

chris macrae wrote:

> Replying to LO27520 --
>
> Malcolm, I assume its ok to debate this -as one might in an Oxford Union
> Debate - no holds barred

-- 

"Mark W. McElroy" <mmcelroy@vermontel.net>

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