Learning organisation: The place of knowledge sharing - Video Transcript
This time I would like to tell you about the learning
organisations. Many would agree that the most important asset of the
organisation today is the knowledge of their employees. So what do they do
about it?
Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak went to many com panies, and
sometimes they have seen the coffee machines. And they have found a note next
to the coffee machine, work, don't talk. Don't spend any time here at the
coffee machine, chatting to your colleagues. Go back to your office, sit down,
and work.
I said, this is the worst thing you can do about
organisational learning. What you should do encourage people.
You have knowledge
workers. They are interested in working better. Encourage
them to talk. They will talk about how to do a better job,
because they are interested in it. They want to do it.
If they don't want to do it, create an environment in which they
do want to do it. So they were, for example, advising a company on how to set
up a completely new plant. They said, the best, most central locat ion should
be a coffee shop. You make excellent coffee and you encourage your employees to
spend time there, and they will work better.
So why is there this kind of discrepancy between how we
approach it? It is because we don't really understand knowledge and learning.
So I would like to see how you achieve that kind ofenvironment, where you can say, let smart people talk.
What I want to talk about is the knowledge orientation of an
organisation. So I'm not talking bout those organisations which I call the
ignorant one's in the previous slide so who don't care about knowledge. They
will die out anyway. So it is not important to consider them.
But once you focus on knowledge, what is it that you put
into the focus really? What is the focalvalue? Say that it is knowledge. That's the most obvious
thing.OK, what will happen if the knowledge is in the focus, if
the knowledge is the most important value? If I have knowledge, and my
organisation values knowledge in itself, what I will do I will keep it for
myself. Not give it to anyone, because I am more valuable if only I have it. So
that is actually towards the right direction, but then it stops and goes
completely wrong.
So Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak suggested that there is
another level. You should focus on knowledge sharing. Encourage people to share
knowledge. That's all the coffee machine metaphor's all about.
What happens if you do that? What I will do if I have
knowledge, I will start teaching others. Let's get a bit closer to that. I
think that they are still wrong.
I had an exam when I was a student, where the professor came
into the classroom. It was a written exam. He gave what we need to work on, and
then he left the room.
He came back only about 40 minutes later, and he said, you
know, while you were here alone, I was over there, in the other building, and I
was watching you through the window. Of course, we started laughing. That
cannot be really true. Actually, it was. We realised that then he went to the
first student. He said, I have seen that they were asking most questions from
you. And here is you get the highest mark. It was 5 in that system.
Then he said, OK. He might have really done that. And what
he did then--he went to the other guy. He says, OK, I have seen that you were asking
most of the questions. Come, I will ask you a couple of questions. Lie,
immediate fail.
So what happens in this approach. You are rewarding the
person who wants to share their
knowledge, but you are punishing the one who wants to learn.
Of course, the exam is not the right moment to learn.
But in an organisation, you need to reward the knowledge
increase. That's how you can achievehigh levels of people wanting to learn all the time and
doing it and so on. That is where you can get if you are focusing on knowledge
increase.
Now, what is it when we say that organisations learn? But it
doesn't make any sense. Organisations do not have knowledge.
The knowledge of the organisation is the knowledge of the
employees, which is in between theirears. So how can organisations learn? First of all, there is
something else--not only the knowledge of the employees. Because from the
interaction of the employees, additional knowledge may result.
And there is also quite a lot of knowledge embedded in the
organisational processes of roducingsomething. Of course, those processes cannot learn unless
there are those people who designthem who can learn more and that way improve the processes.
But it means that we can try todevelop the organisational context in a way that it responds
to environmental challenges by learning.
What would be the first level? Thefirst level is that we
notice that there is something wrong
with the action. The consequences are wrong. For example, it
is--the manufacturing process is producing lots of rejects. What do we do? We
fix the malfunction. And the same process that was there before will work
better.
Or we can go beyond that, and we can decide that actually,
we need to improve the whole process. We need to change the process, or we need
to change what we are measuring about the process and so on. This is called
double-loop learning. And this is already what most authors will identify with
a learning organisation.
But actually, you should go a bit further than that. There
is a possibility to revise the whole context--where are you, what are you
about? For example, most people were thinking about IBM as the biggest computer
manufacturer a couple of years ago. What is IBM today?
IBM today is a huge consulting company, a solution provider,
and so on. So they reinvented
themselves. It is a different context in which they are
operating today.
So what Peter Senge says is that the essence of the learning
organisation is that it is a place where people learn together all the time,
and they learn about how to learn even better together. And they say that it is
the only way to be competitive in today's environment. Now, there is a specific
notion. It is called Communities of Practice, which I see is the way of having
all of this happening.
So we have the organisation. And then we have these
individuals in and also outside the
organisation. They have their own knowledge, and they
interacting in multiple ways. And together, they make sense about things.
Now this entity, where this making sense about things
together, sharing knowledge, learning
together, joining our minds, this is called the Community of
Practice. What is very important is that it is the nature of knowledge that it
is sticky and leaky. It sticks to the practice. It sticks to those annoying
processes that people perform, and it leaks through organisational boundaries.
It does not have any respect for the organisation.
Now, unless your organisation can accept that some of this
learning is occurring beyond their boundaries and control, it will not be--the organisational
learning will not be happening. This is the only way of organisational
learning. And only the organisation who does that is deserving the name of
learning organisations. Thank you very much.
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