Learning organization

Information from Wikipedia - learning organization

Motivation of learning organization came from the pressure. The companies are facing two ways of pressure, from internal and external. External pressure came from the business environment change and the innovation of technology. Internal pressure came from the issues of internal operation system and management methodology. To create a competitive advantage, companies need to be able to learn faster than their competitors and also develop a customer responsive culture. On the other hand, they need to correct their internal issues and elminate the wastes in their process. For this post, I would like to discuss more about the learning organization to face internal pressure, and this kind of culture is also part of the lean manuafcturing culture.

In order to form a learning organization, for all employee should promote their self-reflection. This is the basic element of learning organization. Similar to the lean spirit, everything needs continuous improvement, and the attitude of self-relfection is the part of the mindset of continuous improvement. We can do better! Ask youself, "where is the room for further improvement?" If we think everything is alright, is the best, there is no motivation for improvement anyway.

In the organization, we need to execute the policy deployment to align the goal of everybody. The learning organization can only exists when most of the people have the same vision and same objective for working. With this sense, they can share their knowledge and experiance supported by some knowledge management system in IT. Otherwise, all the effort we spent on improvement is only a short term solution. The only way to solve the internal problem is well implement the standardization, and the standardization is also a part of learning organization because the others can learn and study how to solve the old problem from the document of standardization.

With the self-relfection attitude and common vision of grow, the company needs some tools to dig out and solve the issue. It is a very important tools in lean concept for problem solving, do you remember? Yes, the 5 whys analysis. At this moment, we got the preliminary solution from 5 whys analysis, we also need the Deming cycle to make sure the follow up the actions and fine tune the answer according to the situation until the problem is solved in long term. They are always using the A3 report to summarize all the information, the report will be used as the material for standardization and training material for the organization.

In lean concept, the learning organization is more focusing on learning from the mistakes. The knowledge and experiance is generated from the problem we solved before. The most important elements of learning organization is self-reflection, 5 whys analysis, Deming cycle and policy deployment. If we miss anyone of these, the learning organization can not be well implement.

Let me know if you find I missed something, and welcome for any comments. Thanks!