Towards a Learning Organization

A learning organization is one that is consistently capable of adaptive change in response to signals from its environment. However, knowledge management initiatives to enact learning organizations have not been uniformly successful. This chapter focuses on the role of the psychological environment of the individual in enabling or hampering organizational learning. Six theories drawn from multiple fields are reviewed to identify both opportunities and barriers to fostering change at the level of the individual. These include orientation to learning, motivation to act, and capacity for change. However, the authors argue that organizations ought to be regarded as complex social systems. Change strategies intended to foster a learning organization are more likely to succeed if they embrace the idea that designing change for complex social systems requires a special approach: design thinking. This is characterized by iterative prototyping, experimenting, trialing, and piloting changes to work processes, structures, and tasks.