Post #3528675

Organisational Dysfunction of the Day The learning organisation that doesn't learn Context: The organisation has committed to becoming a learning organisation. There are lunch-and-learns, communities of practice, knowledge-sharing sessions, and a learning management system with hundreds of courses. People are encouraged to spend time on development. A few do. Most do not have time, because the work does not stop. The knowledge shared in the sessions rarely changes how the work is done. The retrospectives identify the same issues quarter after quarter. The post-mortems produce action items that get deprioritised. The organisation talks about learning continuously. Its structure ensures it mostly does not. OST explains: Genuine organisational learning requires three things that DP1 systematically prevents: people must be able to set their own goals, receive accurate feedback on their work, and act on what they learn without waiting for approval from above. In DP1, goals come from outside the group, feedback travels up the hierarchy before it can be acted on, and changes to how work is done require sign-off from management. The result is that learning happens individually and occasionally, but rarely changes the system. DP2 is inherently a learning structure: self-managing groups set their own goals, own their feedback loops, and control how they adjust their work. Learning is not a programme they attend. It is what the structure produces continuously. The learning management system is not the problem. It is a symptom of an organisation trying to buy learning that its structure prevents. #OpenSystemsTheory #SocioTechnical #OrgDesign #leadership