TERM PAPER
ON
LEARNING ORGANIZATION AND KOLB’S LEARNING
CYCLE
SUBJECT : ORGANIZATIOAL BEHAVIOUR
SUBMITTED TO : Dr. DURGA PRASAD
It is not the strongest of the species who survive, or the most intelligent; rather it
is those most responsive to change.
---------- Charles Darwin
SUBMITTED BY:
ARAVIND : 09206
CHAITANYA : 09211
MOHIT : 09226
SANDEEP : 09241
VIJITHA : 09256
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
It is indeed with a great sense of pleasure and immense sense of gratitude that we
acknowledge the help of these individuals who helped us in doing this paper.
Firstly we are grateful to our Director DR. KAMAL GOSH RAY, for the facilities
provided to accomplish to this project. We feel elated in manifesting our sense of
gratitude to our Faculty and Dean Dr. Durga Prasad for his valuable guidance. He
has been a constant source of inspiration for us and we very deeply thankful to her
support and invaluable advice.
Finally we express our heartfelt thanks to the God almighty and our parents for their
blessings and constant support.
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CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................................................4
OBJECTIVE..............................................................................................................................................4
INTRODUCTION TO LEARNING ORGANIZATION....................................................................................4
ACTIVITIES OF LO...............................................................................................................................5
CHARACTERISTICS OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION.................................................................................6
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE, PETER SENGE.....................................................................................................7
PERSONAL MASTERY.........................................................................................................................8
MENTAL MODELS..............................................................................................................................8
SHARED VISION..................................................................................................................................8
TEAM LEARNING................................................................................................................................9
SYSTEMS THINKING...........................................................................................................................9
KOLB’S LEARNING STYLE MODELS AND EXPERENTIAL LEARNING THEORY............................................9
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................13
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ABSTRACT
Technology has a shelf life of about 5 years. That means obsolescence occurs at the rate of
20% per year. The organizations that succeed in this highly competitive environment will be
those that recognize that the only constant thing is CHANGE. Dealing with change as the
constant demands that we rethink the way we develop the people who will manage and
contribute to change. Constant learning and relearning are critical to be competitive. The
ability to think, analyze and to learn better and faster than the competitor becomes our
discriminator. Dealing with change as the constant, demands that we create learning
organizations that acknowledge the changing nature of knowledge. Every plan to grow, to be
alive in the most competitive business environment can be achieved only by adopting to
change. If our work place is not learning, it will die. As today’s society is a knowledge based
economy, it is said that only Learning organizations can survive. For only its ability to learn,
codify and utilize knowledge faster than your rivals and quicker than it’s the environmental
changes- will provide tomorrow’s corporation a competitive advantage that is externally
sustainable.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of the study is to understand the various processes or stages an organization has
to undergo to become a learning organization.
INTRODUCTION TO LEARNING ORGANIZATION
The importance of Learning Organization was put forward by a Chinese philosopher,
Confucius (551 – 479 BC). He believed that everyone should benefit from learning.
“Without learning, the wise become foolish; by learning the foolish become wise”
David Garvin in the August 1993 Harvard Business Review defines a leaning organization as
"an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying
its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights."
In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (1990) defined a learning organization as “… a
place where people continually expand their capacity to create 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 how to learn”.
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It can further be referred to as “a company that facilitates the learning of all of its members
and that continuously transforms itself”.
The important component of the definitions above is the requirement that change occur in the
way work gets done. Learning in an organization means the continuous testing of experience,
and the transformation of that experience into knowledge- accessible to the whole
organization, and relevant to its core purpose.
In a way those who work in a learning organization are “fully awakened” people. They are
engaged in their work, striving to reach their potential, by sharing the vision of a worthy goal
with team colleagues. They have mental models to guide them in the pursuit of personal
mastery, and their personal goals are in alignment with the mission of the organization.
Working in a learning organization is far from being a slave to a job that is unsatisfying;
rather, it is seeing one’s work as part of a whole, a system where there are interrelationships
and processes that depend on each other. Consequently, awakened workers take risks in order
to learn, and they understand how to seek enduring solutions to problems instead of quick
fixes. Lifelong commitment to high quality work can result when teams work together to
capitalize on the synergy of the continuous group learning for optimal performance. Those in
learning organizations are not slaves to living beings, but they can serve others in effective
ways because they are well-prepared for change and working with others.
As highlighted in literature and in practices, a Learning Organization is seen as a
response to an increasingly unpredictable and dynamic business environment. Learning
Organizations are seen as adaptive to their external environment and continually enhancing
their capabilities to change and to adapt. This could be done by developing collective as well
as individual learning and by using the results of learning in order to achieve better results.
Therefore “Learning Organizations are those that have in place systems, mechanisms and
processes, that are used to continually enhance their capabilities and those who work with it
or for it, to achieve sustainable objectives – for themselves and the communities in which
they participate”.
ACTIVITIES OF LO
1. Systematic problem solving:
o Thinking with systems theory
o Insisting on data rather than assumptions
o Using statistical tools
2. Experimentation with new approaches:
o Ensure steady flow of new ideas
o Incentives for risk taking
o Demonstration projects
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3. Learning from their own experiences and past history:
o Recognition of the value of productive failure instead of unproductive success
4. Learning from the experiences and best practices of others:
o Enthusiastic borrowing
5. Transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization:
o Reports
o Tours
o Personnel rotation programs
o Training programs
CHARACTERISTICS OF LEARNING ORGANIZATION
A learning organization is one that is able to change its behaviors and mind-sets as a result of
experience. This may sound like an obvious statement, yet many organizations refuse to
acknowledge certain truths or facts and repeat dysfunctional behaviors over and again.
Although there may be some metrics that can gauge and evaluate learning in an organization,
this discussion will offer an alternative perspective, not about how to measure outcomes, but
more about how to create learning environments that facilitate the achievement of specific or
of multiple, related objectives.
Such environments tend to promote learning and leadership at all levels and they are likely to
make the organization more accountable for its actions as individuals tend to accept more
readily responsibility for their actions
Organizations, both in the private and public sectors that have adopted this approach find that
individual responsibility increases to a significant degree and accountability becomes clearer
and stronger. They also find that they develop true distributed leadership, as everyone is a
responsible agent working towards a shared vision, exploring possibilities and taking
initiatives that nevertheless fit well into the overall strategic direction.
Learning organizations achieve this through a strong network of relationships and peer
support. All human organizations are complex and one way of understanding their
characteristics is through complexity theory. Organizational learning is more than individual
learning and arises through the interaction of individuals in groups and teams of different
sizes.
Learning organization is an emergent process in the sense that its outcome is not predictable
and it is more than the separate contributions of individuals. Organizational learning needs
the right environment to thrive, one that allows time for reflection on past actions and
outcomes and is prepared to accept some unpalatable truths and one that is not a blame
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culture in the sense that ‘mistakes’ are unacceptable. Such an environment makes a
distinction between ‘mistakes’ that are the result of irresponsibility and lack of forethought
and those that are genuine explorations of a new idea or a new way of working.
If individuals and teams are encouraged to be innovative then they need to explore
alternatives and to take thoughtful risks. But not all the experiments will succeed. For one to
succeed many need to be tried. The ‘failures’ are not ‘mistakes’, they are legitimate
explorations of the space of possibilities, as part of the search to find new, innovative
products, procedures, ways of working, etc.
During the learning process, individuals will influence each other and their ideas will co-
evolve; that is each idea will adapt and change in the context of other ideas, and once
changed, it will, in turn, have an influence on what happens next. The concept of co-
evolution is a powerful one and applies not only to internal organizational learning but also to
strategy in relation to a changing environment, as well as to sustainability understanding.
Learning organizations encourage self-organization, so that groups can come together to
explore new ideas without being directed to do so by a manager outside that group. This is
the process that occurs naturally around the coffee machine or the water cooler, but learning
organizations actively encourage self-organization and do not see it as a waste of time. This is
an essential part of the innovative process which is also an integral part of creating an
environment that facilitates co evolutionary sustainability.
Organizations include multiple and intricate networks of relationships, which are sustained
through communication and other forms of feedback, with varying degrees of inter-
dependence. Although heavily influenced by their history and culture, they can transcend
both when necessary. When such organizations meet a constraint they are able to explore the
space of possibilities and find a different way of doing things
THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE, PETER SENGE
Peter Senge, in particular, posits the radically humanist idea that organizations should
become places where people can begin to realize their highest aspirations. He talks of
developing worker commitment not compliance; of building shared visions, not imposing a
mission statement from above; of effectively reconciling individual and organizational
objectives. Senge (1992) described the core of a learning organization’s work as based upon
five learning disciplines, which represented lifelong programs of both personal and
organizational learning and practice. These include:
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PERSONAL MASTERY
Personal mastery is what Peter Senge describes as one of the core disciplines needed to build
a learning organization. Personal mastery applies to individual learning, and Senge says that
organizations cannot learn until their members begin to learn. Personal Mastery has two
components. First, one must define what one is trying to achieve (a goal). Second, one must
have a true measure of how close one is to the goal.
Individuals who practice personal mastery experience other changes in their thinking. They
learn to use both reason and intuition to create. They become systems thinkers who see the
interconnectedness of everything around them and, as a result, they feel more connected to
the whole. It is exactly this type of individual that one needs at every level of an organization
for the organization to learn. (Senge, 1990) Traditional managers have always thought that
they had to have all the answers for their organization. The managers of the learning
organization know that their staff has the answers. The job of the manager in the learning
organization is to be the teacher or coach who helps unleash the creative energy in each
individual. Organizations learn through the synergy of the individual learners.
MENTAL MODELS
A mental model is one's way of looking at the world. It involves each individual reflecting
upon, continually clarifying, and improving his or her internal pictures of the world, and
seeing how they shape personal actions and decisions. It is a framework for the cognitive
processes of our mind. In other words, it determines how we think and act. A simple example
of a mental model comes from an exercise described in The Fifth Discipline Field book.
Learning only comes from seeing the world the way it really is.
SHARED VISION
What does it mean to have a shared vision? A shared vision begins with the individual, and
an individual vision is something that one person holds as a truth. It means individuals
building a sense of commitment within particular workgroups, developing shared images of
common and desirable futures, and the principles and guiding practices to support the journey
to such futures.
The shared vision of an organization must be built of the individual visions of its
members. What this means for the leader in the Learning Organization is that the
organizational vision must not be created by the leader, rather, the vision must be created
through interaction with the individuals in the organization. Only by compromising between
the individual visions and the development of these visions in a common direction can the
shared vision be created. The leader's role in creating a shared vision is to share an own
vision with the employees. This should not be done to force that vision on others, but rather
to encourage others to share their vision too. Based on these visions, the organization's vision
should evolve.
It would be naive to expect that the organization can change overnight from having a
vision that is communicated from the top to an organization where the vision evolves from
the visions of all the people in the organization. The organization will have to go through
major change for this to happen, and this is where OD can play a role. In the development of
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a learning organization, the OD-consultant would use the same tools as before, just on a
much broader scale.
TEAM LEARNING
This involves relevant thinking skills that enable groups of people to develop intelligence and
an ability that is greater than the sum of individual members' talents. It is a discipline that
starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter
into a genuine "thinking together." Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are
the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.
SYSTEMS THINKING
This involves a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding
forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. It is a paradigm premised
upon the primacy of the whole --the antithesis of the traditional evolution of the concept of
learning in western cultures this discipline helps managers and employees alike to see how to
change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the
natural and economic world.
Once we embrace the idea that systems thinking can improve individual learning by inducing
people to focus on the whole system, and by providing individuals with skills and tools to
enable them to derive observable patterns of behavior from the systems they see at work, the
next step is to justify why systems thinking is even more important to organizations of
people. Here, the discipline of systems thinking is most clearly interrelated with the other
disciplines, especially with mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
KOLB’S LEARNING STYLE MODELS AND EXPERENTIAL LEARNING
THEORY
According to Kolb (1984, 41), "learning is the process whereby knowledge is created
through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of
grasping experience and transforming it."
David Kolb published his learning styles model in 1984. The model gave rise to related terms
such as Kolb's experiential learning theory (ELT), and Kolb's learning styles inventory (LSI).
In his publications - notably his 1984 book 'Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source
of Learning and Development' Kolb acknowledges the early work on experiential learning by
others in the 1900's, including Rogers, Jung, and Piaget. In turn, Kolb's learning styles model
and experiential learning theory are today acknowledged by academics, teachers, managers
and trainers as truly seminal works; fundamental concepts towards our understanding and
explaining human learning behaviour, and towards helping others to learn and he also teaches
and researches in the fields of learning and development, adult development, experiential
learning, learning style, and notably 'learning focused institutional development in higher
education'.
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Kolb's model therefore works on two levels - a four-stage cycle:
1. Concrete Experience - (CE)
2. Reflective Observation - (RO)
3. Abstract Conceptualization - (AC)
4. Active Experimentation - (AE)
Some examples to understand the above concepts:
Learning to ride a bicycle:
o Reflective observation - Thinking about riding and watching another
person ride a bike.
o Abstract conceptualization - Understanding the theory and having a clear
grasp of the biking concept.
o Concrete experience - Receiving practical tips and techniques from a
biking expert.
o Active experimentation - Leaping on the bike and have a go at it.
· Learning a software program:
o Active experimentation - Jumping in and doing it.
o Reflective observation - Thinking about what you just performed.
o Abstract conceptualization - Reading the manual to get a clearer grasp on
what was performed?
o Concrete experience - Using the help feature to get some expert tips.
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· Learning to coach:
o Concrete experience - Having a coach guide you in coaching someone
else.
o Active experimentation - Using your people skills with what you have
learned to achieve your own coaching style.
o Reflective observation - Observing how other people coach.
o Abstract conceptualization - Reading articles to find out the pros and cons
of different methods.
· Learning algebra:
o Abstract conceptualization - Listening to explanations on what it is.
o Concrete experience - Going step-by-step through an equation.
o Active experimentation - Practicing.
o Reflective observation - Recording your thoughts about algebraic
equations in a learning log.
Kolb says that ideally this process represents a learning cycle where the learner 'touches all
the bases', i.e., a cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Kolb's learning
theory sets out four distinct learning styles, which are based on a four-stage learning
cycle, in which 'immediate or concrete experiences' provide a basis for 'observations and
reflections'. These observations and reflections are assimilated and distilled into 'abstract
concepts' with implications for action, which the person can actively test and experiment
with, which in turn enable the creation of new experiences producing new implications for
action which can be 'actively tested' in turn creating new experiences. In this respect Kolb's
model is particularly elegant, since it offers both a way to understand individual people's
different learning styles, and also an explanation of a cycle of experiential learning that
applies to us all and a four-type definition of learning styles, (each representing the
combination of two preferred styles, rather like a two-by-two matrix of the four-stage cycle
styles, as illustrated below), for which Kolb used the terms:
1. Diverging (CE/RO)
2. Assimilating (AC/RO)
3. Converging (AC/AE)
4. Accommodating (CE/AE)
Here are brief descriptions of the four Kolb learning styles:
Diverging (feeling and watching - CE/RO)
These people are able to look at things from different perspectives. They are
sensitive. They prefer to watch rather than do, tending to gather information and use
imagination to solve problems. They are best at viewing concrete situations several different
viewpoints. Kolb called this style 'Diverging' because these people perform better in
situations that require ideas-generation, for example, brainstorming. People with a Diverging
learning style have broad cultural interests and like to gather information. They are interested
in people, tend to be imaginative and emotional, and tend to be strong in the arts. People with
the Diverging style prefer to work in groups, to listen with an open mind and to receive
personal feedback.
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Assimilating (watching and thinking - AC/RO)
The Assimilating learning preference is for a concise, logical approach. Ideas and
concepts are more important than people. These people require good clear explanation rather
than practical opportunity. They excel at understanding wide-ranging information and
organizing it a clear logical format. People with an Assimilating learning style are less
focused on people and more interested in ideas and abstract concepts. People with this style
are more attracted to logically sound theories than approaches based on practical value. This
learning style person is important for effectiveness in information and science careers. In
formal learning situations, people with this style prefer readings, lectures, exploring
analytical models, and having time to think things through.
Converging (doing and thinking - AC/AE)
People with a Converging learning style can solve problems and will use their
learning to find solutions to practical issues. They prefer technical tasks, and are less
concerned with people and interpersonal aspects. People with a Converging learning style are
best at finding practical uses for ideas and theories. They can solve problems and make
decisions by finding solutions to questions and problems. People with a Converging learning
style are more attracted to technical tasks and problems than social or interpersonal issues. A
Converging learning style enables specialist and technology abilities. People with a
Converging style like to experiment with new ideas, to simulate, and to work with practical
applications.
Accommodating (doing and feeling - CE/AE)
The Accommodating learning style is 'hands-on', and relies on intuition rather than
logic. These people use other people's analysis, and prefer to take a practical, experiential
approach. They are attracted to new challenges and experiences, and to carrying out plans.
They commonly act on 'gut' instinct rather than logical analysis. People with an
Accommodating learning style will tend to rely on others for information than carry out their
own analysis. This learning style is prevalent and useful in roles requiring action and
initiative. People with an Accommodating learning style prefer to work in teams to complete
tasks. They set targets and actively work in the field trying different ways to achieve an
objective.
CONCLUSION
It seems that the concept of the learning organization is clear enough to some to be putting it
into practice; to others, it is fuzzy and amorphous and needs critical attention. However,
useful insights can still be drawn from theory and practice. The learning organization is best
thought of as a journey, not a destination (P. West 1994), a philosophy, not a program
(Solomon 1994). Few would argue that bureaucracy, Taylor’s, or passive learning is the best
ways to work and learn in the world today. The Learning Organization has a lot to offer to the
reform and restructuring of organizations, but building one is clearly an enormous task.
However, one can begin with the attitude that learning is "a sustainable resource, not a
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limited commodity" (May 1994, p. 53) and work on developing the mindset of a culture of
learning. It must be recognized that the visioning process is ongoing, not a one-time event
(O'Neil 1995).
REFERENCES
http://www.gemi.org/metricsnavigator/eag/What%20are%20the%20Characteristics
%20of%20a%20Learning%20Organization.pdf
http://www.chartula.com/LEARNINGTHEORY.PDF
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/92012989/abstract?
CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Learning Organization by AJAY AGARWAL- www.hrfolks.com
Dimensions of the Learning Organization. Manila. ADB. Available:
www.adb.org/documents/information/knowledge-solutions/dimensions-learning-
organization.pdf
