Learning organization
From Freepedia
Peter Senge defined a learning organization as human beings cooperating in dynamical systems (as defined in systemics) that are in a state of continuous adaptation and improvement. This view, and the associated phrase learning a living, have become the dominant theory of enterprise management and strongly influenced development of ISO standards applicable to management, accounting and auditing, of which ISO 19011 is the most significant.
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Feedback
That is, organisations that are adapted for maximum organizational learning and that build feedback loops deliberately to maximize their own learning.
Such a taxonomy almost always begins as a so-called "folksonomy", those keywords that arise naturally from usage in the enterprise.
Taxonomy
However, a learning organization must eventually establish a more solid description of what is subject to rapid change, and what is not. This enterprise taxonomy is a common and agreed upon understanding of terms, concepts, categories and keywords that apply within that organization, and are expected to keep applying for many years as it grows and prospers.
It combines and specializes terms that are defined within technologies, industries and professions that have to be managed by core business or work processes of the enterprise or agency - often called by the Japanese term for this: kaizen.
The overall process resembles academic research in the social sciences. However, as an enterprise has very narrow needs, it typically uses only a tiny subset of the terms and tests required for a full ontology - though an enterprise taxonomy can be considered to be either a very minimal foundation ontology, or, a very large data dictionary. Few enterprises have the resources to do more than combine and specialize the terms already defined by academics, so, typically, people with graduate degrees in social science become involved either as consultants or as the human resources experts.
Roles and flows
The most basic information is job descriptions, as ISO 9000 standards specify, and the organization's environmental impact as the ISO 14000 standards specify. Auditing of these two standards is now officially combined in the ISO 19011 protocol.
Beyond that, the domains in which an enterprise must pay attention to change, versus those in which it must be constantly learning, vary drastically with the type of enterprise, its customers and its marketing and supply relationships. In any of these "departments":
Information must somehow be classified so that people can share and reuse organizational knowledge, increase efficiency, streamline business processes and facilitate integration with new technologies.
Challenging assumptions
Once it has established what they are, learning organization must constantly challenge its processes, instructions, assumptions and even its basic structure:
- the zero base budget technique whereby an organisation or division must redefine itself with each budget cycle, with no prior assumptions about how it is organised or what model of activity-based costing should apply. Such a technique ensures that every manager can justify the total cost of operations of every aspect of their division or work.
- the back to the floor method whereby an executive must regularly visit the shop floor as an ordinary worker.
Essentially, the true learning organization is redesigning itself constantly, using only its own taxonomy to decide what not to change.
Accounting
The accounting for the learning process is a difficult and controversial problem. There are many solutions that tend to compete:
- Executive Value Added tries to measure contribution of executives
- throughput accounting is more concerned with process efficiency
- full cost accounting is more concerned with resource efficiency
- risk as regret models are general enough to deal with all of the above, but typically require much more complex scenario analysis
As of 2005, there is no consensus beyond the ISO 19011 audit.
