Lesson 5 - Organisational Learning & Learning Organisations

Activity 5:

Use the Harvard Review Survey results of your institution to help analyse the extent of LO in your workplace

Review group workplace cases:

Compare similarities and differences and develop a table evidencing this.

What can be learnt from this comparison to help complete Assignment Task 1.

(posted by Leo)

Base on the Harvard Review Survey results of my organization, it shows that my workplace can only fulfill some of the criteria to be the well Learning Organization.  In the Supportive Learning environment, my workplace can give time for our colleague to raise problem and reflect on this. We can share information about what does and doesn’t work during the meeting.  It is true that they are interested in finding the better ways of doing things. However, people are too busy to invest time in improvement, and the experiments with new ways of working seldom occurred in our collage.

In case of the new systems or policy is adopted, training will be provided for our colleague to attend, so we will know what’s going on in our collage. But for the periodic training and training updates, it is difficult to find in our workplace. Hence, there are still rooms for improvement in order to make our organization to become skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

When compare with other cases in our group, it is find that all our scores in “Learning Processes composite” are at the bottom quartile. It is true that many organizations willing to make change and have the well planning. But, when come to the concrete process, they may easily fail to perform well or difficult to keep on making changes due to several reasons, such as people get heavy workload and don’t have extra time to work on improvement, and some veterans refuse to learning new things. 

(posted by Steffani)

With reference to the survey result, the scaled scores for the composite building blocks of my organization are relatively low. Except for the 'Time for Reflection', all other scores are lower than the median. In my organization (school), evaluation meetings are always held. Teachers always reflect their teaching strategies, teaching schedule, activities and programmes organized, etc. Evaluation meetings are held every day in school to reflect upon the events on that day or week so that they can take immediate action to improve/ follow up.  

Concluding the first building block-- supportive learning environment, the scores of the subcomponents show that my organization does not do much to support the staff to learn. In fact, my organization always invites the colleagues to share their thoughts and ideas. However, decisions are often made by the decision-makers without consulting the staff or adopting colleagues’ opinion. Therefore, some staff may not speak out their opinion in the meeting. Therefore, I do believe that the leaders of my organization should change the organization culture that encourages learning in order to improve.

For the second building block—concrete learning processes and practices, my organization does not score high as well. This is also an area that my organization should change. New teaching methods, guidance techniques, etc. should be explored. My organization always stresses on evaluation and improvement. Teachers who learn new things from outside seminar need to share in the meeting. I wonder why the scores are low in this area; maybe it is due to not systematic enough.

For the third building block—Leadership that reinforces learning, as organizational learning is strongly influenced by the behavior of the leaders, leaders who actively question and listen to employees can encourage their employees to learn. In this area, my organization does not score high as well. Actually, the staff seldom have chance to meet and discuss with the leader. Most of the staff can just express their opinion to the department head only. Department heads can help to express the opinion to the senior-graded staff and this senior staff help to pass the message to the leader.

To compare the similarities and differences of my groupmates' workplaces, I have done the following table. By reviewing the table, Cyrus’s workplace is the best learning organization, followed by Marisa’s. Angus’s workplace is the least satisfactory. Besides, all our groupmates’ workplaces are weak in the area ‘learning process composite’.

(P.S. yellow-checked boxes indicate that the workplace scores higher than the others)

	Steffani	Leo	Angus	Cyrus	Marisa
Psychological Safety	68.6 2nd Quartile	60 Bottom Quartile	57.1 Bottom Quartile	77.1 3rd Quartile	60 Bottom Quartile
Appreciation of Differences	53.6 Bottom Quartile	57.1 2nd Quartile	35.7 Bottom Quartile	75 3rd Quartile	64.3 Median
Openness to New Ideas	78.6 Bottom Quartile	64.3 Bottom Quartile	35.7 Bottom Quartile	78.6 Bottom Quartile	82.1 2nd Quartile
Time for Reflection	62.9 3rd Quartile	52.9 3rd Quartile	45.7 2nd Quartile	65.7 3rd Quartile	65.7 3rd Quartile
LEARNING ENVIRONMENT COMPOSITE	65.9 2nd Quartile	61.1 Bottom Quartile	43.6 Bottom Quartile	74.1 3rd Quartile	68 2nd Quartile
Experimentation	67.9 2nd Quartile	71.4 Median	42.9 Bottom Quartile	75 3rd Quartile	75 3rd Quartile
Information Collection	64.3 Bottom Quartile	69 Bottom Quartile	31 Bottom Quartile	71.4 2nd Quartile	66.7 Bottom Quartile
Analysis	65.7 2nd Quartile	65.7 2nd Quartile	51.4 Bottom Quartile	65.7 2nd Quartile	65.7 2nd Quartile
Education and Training	73.8 2nd Quartile	65.7 Bottom Quartile	52.4 Bottom Quartile	42.9 Bottom Quartile	95.2 Top Quartile
Information Transfer	58.9 Bottom Quartile	71.4 Median	53.6 Bottom Quartile	57.1 Bottom Quartile	76.8 3rd Quartile
LEARNING PROCESSES COMPOSITE	52.7 Bottom Quartile	48.9 Bottom Quartile	34.9 Bottom Quartile	59.3 Bottom Quartile	54.4 Bottom Quartile
LEADERSHIP THAT REINFORCES LEARNING	47.5 Bottom Quartile	65 Bottom Quartile	52.5 Bottom Quartile	75 2nd Quartile	67.5 2nd Quartile

(posted by Marisa)

According to  the Harvard Review Survey results of my previous internship organization, it indicates that my workplace doesn't reach criteria so well to be the qualified Learning Organization. Scanning my results, the score I've got is quite interesting. The openness of Idea and Information Transfer reach higher score which means my workplace really focus on communication between members and ideas' transmiting is the focal points in media group. A program must be smoothly produced by a series of meeting and suggestion communication and revised improvement.
When it comes to the learning environment composite,the analysis of the cost of program, budget, process edition, and benefit outcome are in our daily working analysis.so the learning workshop is still having space to improvement. The professional training courses and programs should be  up-to-date under such circumstance or some new revolution in media field.And the leadership style should  be changeable  with the policy and situations.

As I mentioned “Learning Processes composite”part same as Leo.We got the low marks on it.It reminds me that a scholar once said:People nowadays focus more on outcome and reward they got,letting the learning go. It is true that ,in most organization, leaders don't have such creation to make organization processing. In the reality, many groups should  make some change in style of leadership and quality of the task's outcome,not only purchasing the high efficiency and money payment. The quality and mental contribution of members plays vital role in the construction of a certain group.

(Posted by Cyrus)
My organization (Marketing department in U.S.Health-care company) performs pretty well in most of the aspects as shown in the 3 building blocks of a learning organization suggested by Harvard Business Review Survey. Among the 3 building blocks, my organization has a sound and supportive environment for learning (3rd quartile); a rather effective and influential leadership that reinforces learning (2nd quartile); but not really satisfactory learning process resulted (bottom quartile).

The least performed areas are (1)Openness to New Ideas, (2)Education and Training and (3)Information Transfer. Conceivable reason for low marks in (1)Openness to New Ideas is the focus has all been put on problem-solving. However, as stated by Garvin, D.A., Edmondson, A.C., & Gino, F. (2008), learning is not simply about correcting mistakes and solving problems. It is also about crafting novel approaches. Employees should be encourages to take risks and explore the untested and unknown. Besides, the lack of (2)Education and Training for both new and existing employees hinders learning process and the lack of a clearly defined (3)Information Transfer system also makes information sharing slowly and inefficiently both internally and externally.

To compare with other organizations in my group, even though my organization has more effective environment and leadership for learning, some of the learning processes still perform as unfavorable as others with less effective environment and leadership for learning. And that although Angus's organization performs less satisfactory in all building blocks, it still performs better than my organization in Education and Training. From these, my organization can actually learn how to refine a balanced strategy with more focus on concrete practice rather than the hardware of  environment and leadership only.

Reference:
Garvin, D.A., Edmondson, A.C., & Gino, F. (2008). Is Yours a Learning Organization?. Harvard Business Review, 86 (3), 109-166