Before presenting the results for my organization, I would like to introduce the following video which accompanied Garvin et al's article in the Harvard Business Review. It is well worth watching - in it Garvin and Edmondson discuss the following:
- What is a learning organization?
- Why are learning organizations important?
- What barriers do organizations need to overcome to become learning organizations?
- What specific company can be used as an example of a learning organization?
- What concrete practices can organizations put into place to help them become learning organizations?
As indicated by Garvin et al, their tool can be used to assess different parts of the organisation. What I have tried to do is assess my organisation at two levels - the first being the Library as the unit in which I work, the second being the University as a whole. Three charts are presented below, which group comparative results according to the three building blocks identified by Garvin et al.
What is immediately obvious is that in all but one area the Library scores higher than the University. Of course, it is impossible to draw conclusions from these data, as they are derived solely from my input. In their article, Garvin et al recommend that many individuals from across the organisation take the survey, and then combine the results. This will produce a more accurate picture of the organisation.
Also, the scores I provided for both the University and the Library tend to be on the high side, compared with both the benchmarks provided by the authors, and also compared to those of other members of my group. We discussed this fact within the group, and agreed that this was probably the result of my own particularly optimistic perceptions. Again, this indicates the need to get an average of many different respondents when applying this tool in practice.
Turning more specifically to Assignment Task 1, this tool has clear value in helping us understand what strategies our organisations have in place to encourage change and development. By looking at the areas where our organisation scores highly, we can think about what concrete strategies have helped result in that high score.
For example, in my results the Library scores highly in education and training. Specific strategies that contributed to this include:
- Managers encouraging their staff to take formal courses, and backing this encouragement up with financial resources.
- Whenever a new service is announced, ensure that adequate training is provided. Recently we launched a new chat reference service for which all participants received a half-day of training.
- Inclusion of professional development as part of the annual performance review to provide individuals with incentive to further their education.
Hi, Chris.
ReplyDeleteFrom your chart that I find your library is better than your school. I suppose there has some uncertain relationship between organization scale and learning organization.It seems to be inverse ratio， when the scale is bigger， while the learning organization achievement is lower.It is interesting I think. When the organization is big enough there are more difficult to manage it or operate it.