Models Of Organizational Learning: Paradoxes And Best Practices In The Post Industrial Workplace By Marilyn E. Laiken, Ph.D./Musings: J. Colannino

Marilyn Laiken is a professor of Adult Education in the Workplace Learning and Change specialization at OISE, University of Toronto. In a three-year study (1998-2001), Dr. Laiken surveyed forty two organizations that publicly declared themselves to have become or to be in the process of becoming learning organizations. Ten organizations agreed to participate in further research by randomly selecting ten employees to take the Learning Organization 5 Stage Diagnostic Survey (Woolner, Lowy, and Redding, 1995). Evaluation of the survey identified five organizations that were mature learning organizations, of which four agreed to in-depth investigations including "individual interviews, focus groups, and on-site observations."

Dr. Laiken concludes that a learning organization is one that manages paradox effectively. By paradox, Professor Laiken specifically mentions

• leadership vs. autonomy,
• confrontation vs. collaboration,
• action vs. reflection, and
• the journey vs. the goal.

In other words, all eight qualities are important for an effective learning organization to exist. The secret is to balance these sometimes competing ideals. As an example, consider age-old sage advice about decision making.

• Look before you leap
• He who hesitates is lost

Both are true and at seeming odds: one cannot look without hesitating, or in Laiken’s parlance, an action-vs.-reflection paradox exists. Laiken has well-chosen her words. It is important to point out that this is a paradox not a contradiction.

Many knowledge management professionals are fond of embracing eastern mystical ideas at this point, especially the “both/and” (Eastern) vs. “either/or” (Western) way of looking at things. I have written about this in a previous blog and will not repeat my comments here. However, Laiken has used exactly the right word because the contradiction is apparent but not actual. Sometimes it is best to analyze a decision thoroughly before taking the plunge: if you’re heading in the wrong direction, speed is not your ally. At other times swift action must slay analysis paralysis in order to move forward. Knowing when to do what is the trick.

A command and control organization is not sentient – it is insular and inept. But shouldn’t a learning organization fare better in such matters? Such a near-rhetorical question belies a very deep philosophical conundrum. Can there really be any such thing as a learning organization or is it only individuals that can learn? I believe that pragmatism is firmly on the side of the learning organization as a sentient entity. In other words, some corporate bodies behave as if they are organized as an organic whole, acting in concert to achieve remarkable ends.

Probably the most famously recognizable example of such an institution in the West would be the Church. In capitalizing the word I am referring to various Catholic and Protestant believers all working toward some invisible yet understandable goal: e.g., to proselytize the world. In large part, this body succeeds. Is the Church therefore a learning organization? I can think of few institutions that have had such a lengthy corporate history (approximately two millennia). Even more surprising, the idea of individually empowered believers behaving in a corporate way to adapt, survive, and thrive as a corporate entity seems anticipated and encoded by its founder long before the phrase “learning organization” was ever coined. This occurs in many instances – in the great commission and Paul’s famous Corinthian discourse on the matter, to name two.

Perhaps the realization of individually empowered employees working together to achieve a greater corporate good seems to be such a rare religious experience because it is one.