What is a Learning Organization?
Problem Statement: There are far too many builders in Vermont who continue to suffer from a lack of an applicant pool of skilled carpenters, see the workforce that has slid from the once esteemed image of grit, and face a culture resistant to change and ongoing learning. The challenge for any builder in the face of these barriers is how to retain your qualified workers and position your company in a way that attracts inquisitive and creative workers. So the opportunity for builders is “how do I/we rethink the culture of our company that unleashes the innate desire of your workforce to grow and live with a sense of purpose. Speaking frankly, these are some of the criteria for happiness, and our current youth (under 30) are not happy.
In the 1990’s Peter Senge of MIT’s Sloan School of Management proposed a transformational approach to management entitled Learning Organizations. Multiple books have followed documenting this approach: The Learning Organization, the Fifth Discipline, and the *Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. According to Senge ‘learning organizations’ are those organizations 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 to see the whole together.’
Senge believes that real firms in real markets face both opportunities and natural limits to their development. Most efforts to change are hampered by resistance created by the cultural habits of the prevailing system. No amount of expert advice is useful. It’s essential to develop reflection and inquiry skills so that the real problems can be discussed. In Vermont’s residential building industry we face a cultural habit of a resistance to learning the science behind high performance building, a lack of discipline to abide by the Energy Code, and a lack acceptance of joint responsibility to complete projects given the desired metric. Certainly there are pockets of exceptionalism throughout the state, but this is not the norm.
So how do we go from the philosophical to the practical. The core of Learning Organizations work is based on 5 learning disciplines – lifelong programs of study and practice
- Personal Mastery – learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.
- Mental Model – “I prefer conviction” – reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal pictures of the world and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.
- Shared Vision – building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared visions of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.
- Team Learning – transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that the groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of the individual members talents.
- Systems Thinking – a way of thinking about and a language for describing and understanding the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us seer how to change systems more effectively and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.*
You have to stop and reflect on these disciplines and ask “Why wouldn’t any builder want such disciplines for their workforce?” These are not expensive fixes. Just some guided facilitation to orient the workforce to the tasks ahead
Future blogs will be a deeper dive into each discipline, and where do you start.
by Guy Payne
*The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Richard Ross, Bryan Smith, Charlotte Roberts, 1994, Doubleday