TAADES501A Design and develop learning strategies

Organisational factors that may influence formation of learning strategies

Figure 2 Needs and Outcomes that drive the learning strategy process

Traditionally a learning strategy is triggered by a needs analysis exercise, which can be informal or formal. Undertaking a training needs analysis is covered more comprehensively in another topic area.

However, there are a wide range of other factors that may shape learning strategies from need through to implementation. Organisations implement approaches to design and development of learning strategies to achieve many different outcomes. Some of the system-level factors that may need to be considered when developing a learning strategy within an organisational setting may include the policy and strategic focus on building:

• A learning culture focussed on quality improvement;
• Maximising human capital;
• Just-in-time learning; and
• A learning organisation and organisational learning.

A learning culture

To build a learning culture all levels of an organisation have to value learning as a strategic and a personal asset. Three levels of performance can be defined in most organisations. While we may focus on individual learning, quality systems emphasise the need for learning to be able to enhance team and process-level performance. This, in turn, contributes towards and is a subset of organisational-level performance improvement. Therefore learning strategies need to be cognisant of needs and relationships between the:

1. Corporate level;
2. Process improvement level;
3. Individual staff members.

Figure 3 Conceptual Model For Developing a Quality Strategy

© The Centre for Working Futures, 1992, with permission

Just as quality systems need to span all three levels, so learning needs to support and reinforce development at all three levels within an organisation. The fundamental value of competency standards to many organisations is their ability to use performance standards to remove variation between individual, process and corporate levels. In terms of total quality within an organisation this ensures that individual behaviours do not undermine the optimal performance of both process outcomes and overall corporate direction.

Individual and organisational performance must also be aligned to avoid wasted energy and effort. The key to aligning individual performance to collective outcomes lies in developing a shared mental model or frame of reference that orients particular groups and the organisation as a whole to focus on supporting individual efforts. Table 1 identifies the alignment required of organisational, group and individual capabilities.

Table 1 Applying capabilities at three levels of the organisation

Performance variables	Organisational level	Group/team/process level	Individual level
Strategic goals	Is the organisational purpose known, and are strategic goals attuned to the reality of economic, political and cultural forces?	Do the process goals enable people to work together to achieve both organisational and individual ends?	Are the professional and personal goals of individuals consistent with those of the organisation?
Competency	Do structure, policy and competency frameworks support improved performance?	Are processes designed to permit individuals and groups to modify systems to meet contingencies?	Are individual styles of learning and creative processes respected?
Expertise	Does the organisation select for capabilities (e.g. for cultural 'fit') as well as for 'skills'?	Are processes and teams developing expertise to respond to change and new customer demands?	Do individuals have the applied competencies to master both task performance and work in a specific context?
Future capacity	Does the enterprise manage human, infrastructure and social capital to achieve its goals?	Are management systems and processes designed to encourage learning that improves current and future capacity?	Does the individual want to perform, learn and respond to customer and market demands?
Cultural identity	Is there a sense of shared identity and convergence of values, beliefs and norms to support desired performance?	Are interrelationships identified and managed to encourage diversity, creativity and innovation while achieving team and process outcomes?	Is the individual committed to work and innovation while respecting divergent views and ideas?

Workplace learning and development requires both an inward focus on individual and group capacities and an outward focus on enhancing capabilities through the capture of knowledge residing in the complex relationships that make up an organisation and link it with its environment. These relationships are strongly influenced by an organisation's culture, encompassing shared beliefs, values, roles and patterns of behaviour. The organisational culture in turn contributes to the identity of individuals in the organisation and influences how it is viewed by both insiders and outsiders.

Maximising human capital

An emphasis on human capital links learning with processes and practices that support the drive to expand the overall capital value of the human resources within the organisation or society. This is often represented by the formula:

Learning + Performance + Knowledge Management + HR
= Human Capital Management.

Human capital formation may stress that value in learning lies beyond competencies alone.

The common delineation of capital resources in organisations is between tangible and intangible resources. Tangible resources are made up of financial, physical, human and organisational resources. Intangible resources are identified as reputation, technological resources and innovation.

Intangible assets such as knowledge in organisations have always been an essential part of successful organisations. The development and utilisation of knowledge and capabilities within organisations is now being identified as critical to success or failure.

Many organisations now undertake a far more complex analysis of what constitutes the capabilities required to achieve not only corporate outcomes but also the individual capabilities and team capabilities that underpin current and future outcomes.

The need for process improvement within principally manufacturing organisations led to the definition of competencies. Competency defines the ability of an individual to perform an isolated task. Capability as a broader term than competency measures the range of activities that are possible given the skills, experience and knowledge that can be deployed in a generalised and/or a specific context. As such, capabilities define the range of activity performance that is possible.

The development of capabilities and the transfer of individual knowledge could be seen to relate to both competency and non-competency variables:

Competency factors

Competency is defined as the knowledge , and skills that shape the individual's expressed behaviour or applied performance

Identity factors

Identify is composed of the intangible competency attributes held by individuals, groups and the organisation and may include:

1. Cognitive and behavioural
   the individual's acquisition and application of knowledge-relates directly to how we assimilate and process information and interpret the world around us within a context
2. Experience used here denotes experience that is acquired and focussed in a given performance situation
3. Communication used here is defined as the capacity to convey meaning on a given subject (method, media, semiotics, etc), to a message receiver
4. Cultural awareness
   the ability to contextualise and prioritise activities appropriate to the beliefs, values, meaning and worldview promoted by diverse interests (individual, societal, organisational, etc.) impacting a given performance context

Learning Just-In-Time

The traditional company has a centralised training system. With the development of competency-based systems the aim must be to have operational staff and managers increasingly demand training. Under a just-in-time learning (JITL) style of competency-based training, all learning must deliver programs to meet specific needs. JIT learning delivers the specific learning requested, where and when the user demands.

Training under a demand-driven competency-based framework challenges traditional approaches and requires enterprises to change the way they view the whole concept of learning. While building on past lessons the focus on performance requires training to be responsive to, and involve managers and staff in, the design and delivery of training. Basically supply-driven training is replaced by learning that responds to the individual user's development demands and to the enterprise's demand for relevance to operational outcomes and task performance.

Figure 4 Just-in-time training can eliminate barriers to achieving training goals

JIT training addresses five factors that can be barriers to how learning can satisfy needs and goals. If barriers are eliminated, training can have zero variance from the target.

Activity 2

• Make a list of external factors of uncertainty that may affect how learning strategies are implemented on a cyclic basis.
• Apply some of these more traditional JIT factors to the design and development of learning strategies in an organisation with which you are familiar.
• Reduction in the costs of failure (e.g. rework/scrap);
• Reduction in the cost of purchased materials;
• Reduction in the size and cost of inventories and therefore the reduction in the space requirements for storage;
• Reduction in the lead time;
• Reduction in machine setup time.

The learning organisation and organisational learning

Internal to organisational structures-the learning organisation: In this scenario, learning is tied to the organisation's strategic purpose and occurs systematically as part of its functioning. Individual participants derive meaning through structures, systems and interactions occurring in the workplace. This leads to the concept of learning organisations where knowledge and learning are meaningful on an organisational level and learning is managed by the organisation to achieve specific performance outcomes.

Extending beyond organisational structures-organisational learning: This approach suggests that organisational learning is not limited by organisational structures but grows out of individuals and communities. In this view, knowledge and learning exist in social situations and in networks of individuals that have identified with a common purpose. These networks may well extend beyond the organisation. Individuals can contribute to the organisation's core purpose even when they choose learning paths outside the workplace's boundaries and systems.

The learning organisation revisited

Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation (1992) spurred a surge of interest in the idea of the learning organisation. Yet Senge did not invent the concept, nor was his the only framework for analysing its principles. The concept of the learning organisation had been aired internationally for more than a decade before Senge's book appeared.

In early works on the subject, the learning organisation was presented as an ideal rather than as a basis for everyday practice. Alistair Crombie, writing in Australia in the late 1970s, was careful to present the learning organisation strictly as a utopian model, 'suggestive of a future ideal, rather than descriptive of present realities' (1978:38). In Britain in the late 1980s, John Burgoyne consolidated a framework for creating what he termed a 'learning company'; he published his findings with Mike Pedler and Tom Boydell in The Learning Company: Strategy for Sustainable Development ( 1991). Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell also presented the learning company as an ideal paradigm rather than a reality. They promoted the potential of the concept, but they explicitly rejected the idea that it could offer a 'quick fix' (1991:3). Learning was advanced as a catalyst for improvement, not as a substitute for other management approaches.

Senge, by contrast, intended the learning organisation to provide a 'management solution' in the real world (Senge, 1992:37). His The Fifth Discipline set out a new systems approach to management and presented a coherent and holistic framework for both study and practice (Senge, 1992:42). Senge summed up his approach as follows:

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants. Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organisations; to understand the most challenging managerial issues requires seeing the whole system that generates the issues (1992:66).

Under a learning organisation approach the aim is to create a compelling corporate vision that encourages employees to constantly think about how they might improve the way that work is conducted. Can you imagine belonging to an organisation where everyone, from senior management down, is absolutely committed to increasing their understanding of the ways that work can be improved? Such an environment has the potential to make work truly meaningful for employees and to substantially increase the profitability of the business.

In The Fifth Discipline , Peter Senge links the capacity of an enterprise to become a 'learning organisation' with its ability to obtain and hold competitive advantage (Senge, 1992). Senge depicts an organisation where individuals continually seek to expand their capacity to create desired results, where new patterns of thinking are nurtured, and where people are continually 'learning how to learn' together.

Senge recognised that building a learning organisation required a substantial shift in prevailing mental models. In 1992 he expressed disappointment with the lack of implementation of learning organisation approaches, blaming this on the fact that 'new insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting' (1992:7). Traditional training structures, for example, stress conformity as a source of cohesion and unity of purpose for participants. Training approaches are better at inculcating established belief systems than encompassing diversity. The idea is that if people all think and act like machines, they will interact efficiently and generate shared values, views and attitudes. In a predictable and unchanging environment, this approach facilitates process efficiencies and reduces the amount of coordination required of managers within a hierarchical structure.

When the environment is unstable and unpredictable, however, the lack of diversity limits organisational agility. Bureaucracy, which is the epitome of a cohesive organisational culture, experiences serious difficulties when presented with non-routine problems. This is the antithesis of a customer-responsive, service-oriented organisational approach. The development of a learning organisation is widely seen as requiring an organisational culture that balances functional efficiency with open systems-that is, the ability to take on and learn from diverse values, beliefs and experiences (McGill et al., 1992; Schrage, 1990: ch. 5).

Figure 5 The five stages of the learning organisation
(Redding & Catalanello, 1994)

According to Redding and Catalanello (1994), there are five stages on the path to becoming a learning organisation. Those five stages are outlined in Figure 5.

The characteristics of each stage are as follows:

Stage 1: The start-up company is basically learning how to stay afloat. No effort is invested in deciding what people need to know to do their jobs better.

Stage 2: Training programs are made available through outside providers. Training is viewed as a consumable and is aimed at fixing short-term problems.

Stage 3: Some in-house training may be offered and there is a greater emphasis on gaining sustainable results, but training is not fully coordinated and may focus on 'flavour-of-the-month' subjects.

Stage 4: Senior managers realise that they need to develop the skills and knowledge of the workforce in order to remain competitive. Training is usually conducted offsite, and is targeted towards providing competitive advantage.

Stage 5: Learning is seen as vital to the success of the organisation, and there is a planned effort to make learning part of everyday work. The organisation encourages employees to learn by trying new things and experiencing different processes within the workplace itself.

In the fifth stage, which typifies the learning organisation, employees may work on projects outside their usual domain to promote reflective learning that can offer insights into the way they normally do things. A sales manager, for example, might join a production team to learn more about how the products work, or production staff might work with salespeople to develop a marketing strategy for a product that is in the pipeline. Employees are motivated to improve their existing skills by an organisation that makes it clear that their existing skills and knowledge are valued as part of day-to-day activities. In this scenario, elearning can be deployed to encourage collaborative exchanges, to enable people in multiple locations to complete a common activity, or to integrate learning into the everyday work environment by making knowledge accessible on demand.

In spite of its attractions, the concept of the learning organisation is not above criticism. Some commentators have suggested that it is too much a 'systematic approach' that fails to take into account the vast array of processes that create and modify knowledge (Schulz, 2001). The emphasis on creating systems that encompass the whole organisation risks overlooking the variations in how individuals interact, transact and learn.

Activity 3

Individual learning in a learning organisation

Pearn et al. (1995) have developed a list of traits or behaviours that are exhibited by individuals who integrate learning into their everyday work. Place a tick in the space next to those activities that you currently employ at work. Be honest; this is purely a learning exercise.

Tick

__ I observe other people's styles.

__ I reflect on what I have seen or heard at work.

__ I seek feedback on my performance.

__ I listen to other people's arguments or logic.

__ I learn from other people's mistakes.

__ I insist on understanding the answers to questions.

__ I go beyond the first answers to questions.

__ I ask questions to check my understanding.

__ I go back to basics if I do not understand something.

__ I realistically assess what I do know about an issue.

__ I work out where there are gaps in my knowledge that need to be filled.

__ I talk to people outside of my direct network to find information.

__ I discuss new ideas with other people.

__ I seek outside sources of information, such as books, magazines, websites, etc.

__ I listen to advice.

__ I collect and build on other people's ideas.

__ I get started on new projects without too much procrastination.

Now consider the following.

• Are there any areas where you could improve?
• What about the people you work with?
• Identify someone at work who is interested in new ways of doing things, involves others in new projects and seeks feedback from others. What can you learn from them?

Organisational learning

In contrast to the idea of the learning organisation, the concept of organisational learning is less evangelical and initially more modest in its aims. It starts from the insight that organisations are not primarily built to learn, but to engage in transactions both within and outside their structure. Therefore, organisational learning may be viewed as a means of enhancing an organisation's capacity to create a climate conducive to change and to realise competitive advantage through performance improvement. Organisational strategies for learning should not confine their emphasis to codifying or bureaucratising learning under a 'systems' model. Rather, learning exchanges and individual social interactions can be viewed as opportunities to stimulate relationships that can be strategically managed to encourage organisational learning through knowledge sharing. This process can be facilitated or inhibited by the ecological system in which transactions take place (Argyris cited in Malhotra, 1996:68).

Unlike advocates of the learning organisation approach, most organisational learning advocates believe the best approach is to accept that learning will occur, then set out to design, deploy and lead it towards agreed outcomes (Garvin, 1993). The emphasis is on individuals within and outside the organisation. Ultimately, it is they who have to experience a desire to learn and adopt the requisite behaviours. The organisation's task is to harness this capability so as to generate the knowledge required to perform and adapt.

Crossan and Hulland identify six points of difference between an organisational learning approach and the concept of the learning organisation (1997:4-14):

• All organisations learn: Patterns and processes of learning vary between and within enterprises, and no single theory can allow for all these differences.
• Learning is not an end in itself: The crucial question in assessing organisational learning is whether the organisation is skilled at developing new products or services, and is able to compete in a complex and changing world.
• Organisational learning extends beyond dedicated 'learning' activities: There is more to the translation of learning than managing individual acquisition of skills and knowledge. Learning is embedded in interaction and relationships within and outside the organisation.
• There are learning processes that link organisational levels: Learning is a meta-process; individuals absorb knowledge, integrate it at the level of the team and institutionalise it at the level of the corporation.
• Organisational learning needs to consider the flow of learning among these levels: Any learning process needs to integrate individual learning (competencies, capabilities and motivation) with processes affecting the group (group dynamics and development of shared understanding) and organisation (knowledge assets/capital, systems, structure, procedures and culture).
• Individuals within the organisation are the ultimate arbiters of organisational learning: Individual perceptions drive the system of building knowledge assets. To evaluate organisational learning success is not simply a matter of determining whether the organisation has achieved its overall goals; it is also necessary to measure individual employee perspectives and understanding.

The distinction between organisational learning and the learning organisation is a subtle but important one. The idea of the learning organisation, as advanced by Senge and others, is very much a systems-level approach in which learning becomes the focus of organisational design. Strategies to achieve organisational learning can underpin many of the same principles and practices, but they do not require learning to be viewed as the organisation's central purpose. In fact, many practitioners of organisational learning would not see any value in building a learning organisation. They would prefer to see learning managed as part of wider management systems.

Activity 4

Is your organisation a learning organisation?

The following questions may be used to evaluate whether your workplace has adopted the general principles that may underpin a learning organisation. The questions are based on a sample from Pareck's Organizational Learning Diagnostics (OLD) survey. Give your workplace a mark out of ten for each item and add them up to give a total mark out of 100. Is there any room for improvement? What does your organisation do well? How would you improve things?

•  Experts and experienced personnel are invited to share their ideas with members of the organisation.	/10
•  Employees are encouraged to experiment.	/10
•  Innovations are rewarded.	/10
•  Periodic meetings are held for sharing ongoing experiments.	/10
•  Task groups are created for implementing and monitoring new projects and experiments.	/10
•  Task groups are created to evaluate and report on plus and minus aspects of innovation.	/10
•  Widespread debates are held on experiences of implementation.	/10
•  Realistic appraisals are made of the support needed for continued use of innovation.	/10
•  Implementation plans are modified when experience indicates that modification is needed.	/10
•  Various groups are encouraged to prepare alternative forms of implementation.	/10
Total Score	/100

10-45 = No immediate evidence of the general principles that may underpin a learning organisation.

46-79 = Some evidence of the general principles present and the ability to advance workplace learning within a strategy that may progress towards a learning organisation.

80-100 = Evidence of strong capacity to adopt and deploy the general principles that underpin a learning organisation.