David Cain is currently the director of facilities and capital planning at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. He is a member of the Strategic Assessment Model Task Force, a MAPPA program committee member for FY 2000, and a past contributor of several articles for Facilities Manager. He can be reached at dacain@ilstu.edu.
Facilities professionals today are challenged to meet the ever-changing needs of the 21st century. Never before have the stakes and expectations been so high. So why do we continue to work toward and develop political or authoritarian bureaucracies while visionary enterprises such as Internet businesses, e-commerce, and others involved in the computer technology revolution are unfolding globally at supersonic speeds right before our eyes? Furthermore, why do facilities professionals allow isolated bits of information, piecemeal analysis, reactiveness, and fragmentation to be the rule rather than the exception, even as the rest of the world becomes more inter- and intra-connected with adaptive processes and transparent applications via technology?
These issues could be resolved by understanding and using the theories and methods presented in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of Learning Organization authored by Peter Senge, a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Sloan School of Management. APPA has already adopted some of these constructs and theories by embedding them into the Strategic Assessment Model (SAM) and the Leadership Academy. These theories represent the driving force behind a new vision of organizational change. According to Fortune magazine, "the most successful corporations of the new millennium will be something called a learning organization, a consummately adaptive enterprise."
Developing a learning organization requires a quantum shift in how we interact and think. These fundamental shifts go well beyond the culture of facilities management, or even traditional western management culture. They challenge the steadfast assumptions of the industrial revolution about how individuals and organizations learn and work.
One guiding principle in moving forward is the discovery and exercise of personal commitment and building community. Without personal transformation, there is no real chance of moving towards an organization that learns to relearn. The best example of this is found in the reptile world where a loss of limb, by the miracle of DNA, is replaced by regrowth. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, leader in the quality movement, once stated that nothing ever happens without "personal transformation." I would agree and conclude that an organization cannot learn and move forward unless the individual within makes the personal transformation and commitment to the organization.
Deming further explains that "our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people." Unfortunately, many organizations and institutions of our society are predominately oriented toward cultivating control rather than learning. In learning organizations this postulate is reversed.
Learning Organization Defined
A learning organization is one in which people at all levels in the organization, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their knowledge capacity to produce the best practices and possible results. A learning organization is one that deeply cares about its people first. A learning organization represents a new understanding of the process of organizational change. It is not a top down nor bottom up change but rather participation thinking at all levels. Any type of organization can become a learning organization, i.e., industries, businesses, educational institutions, nonprofits, community groups, and families. Learning organizations start with the assumption that learning is valuable, continuous, and most effective when shared and that every experience is an opportunity to learn.
Learning Organizations' Characteristics
According to Calvert, et al. (1994) and Watkins and Marsick (1993), learning organizations have the following characteristics and share the same core values:
Those who work in a learning organization are "fully awakened" people. They are deeply engaged in their work, striving to reach their business and personal potential and they share common vision and mission in an effort to achieve a greater capacity. They use mental models to guide them in the pursuit of personal mastery, and their personal goals are in alignment with the needs and mission of the organization.
At its core, a learning organization understands itself as a complex organic system. It has a conscious vision and purpose. It is aware of its feedback system and alignment mechanisms and is deliberate about the method in which it constantly uses them to stay focused.
The total quality movement (TQM) represented the first real effort in building learning organizations. Its emphasis was on continuous improvement through analytical feedback. Today, leading organizations seek to understand and meet the "hidden need" of the customer and create the new anticipated service, which meets or exceeds that need. These potential needs are what customers might truly value but would never think to ask for. To illustrate this concept, consider my two-year-old daughter's reply to questions outside her realm of understanding and imagination: "I don't know what I don't know." To further demonstrate my point, one only needs to consider the recent proliferation of .com businesses that have emerged (i.e., Amazon.com and ebay.com) to clearly understand this concept. You name it, they have dot com'd, dot gov'd and dot org'd it!
Learning Organization's Core Concepts
Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline states that the concept of the learning organization (LO) has been promoted as a way to restructure organizations. Senge views teams as the core performance units in the organization. Much of the success of the Learning Organization movement is due in large part to Senge's emphasis on investing in the human capital rather than in the physical capital. While both are important, facilities professionals must give greater attention to human values in the work place and allow the natural forces to evolve and produce a genuine learning community.
The five disciplines are the key characteristics to achieving this type of organization:
According to Senge, systems thinking is the most important and underlies the rest.
1) Personal Mastery: Indicates a high level of proficiency in a subject or skill area. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening one's own personal organizational commitment by learning to expand one's personal capacity to create the future and results one most desires. Personal mastery applies to individual learning, and organizations cannot learn until their members begin to learn. Personal Mastery has two components. First, one must define what one is trying to achieve (a goal). Second, one must have a true measure of how close one is to the goal. Creative tension is what motivates individuals to change and represents the difference in our personal vision of what an organization can be versus its reality.
2) Mental Models: Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or images that influence how we understand the world, the organization, and relationships and how we choose to respond to various situations. Mental models guide our actions and represent the framework for the mental (cognitive) processes of our mind. In other words, they determine how we think and act. Surfacing, clarifying, testing, and improving one's internal representations of the world and understanding how these representations, along with their accompanying implicit assumptions, shape one's decisions and actions are important components of mental models. Understanding our own internal "theories in practice" of how things work allow us to challenge, modify, refine, and change our mental models. Mental models also help us appreciate the perspective of others.
3) Shared Vision: A shared vision begins with the individual, and an individual vision is something that one person holds as a truth. Better understood as a group competency than an individual skill, this is the practice of developing a vision for an organizational team. The shared vision of an organization must be built of the individual visions of its members. What this means for the leader in the learning organization is that the organizational vision must not be created by the leader, rather, the vision must be created through interaction with the individuals in the organization. Only by compromising between the individual visions and the development of these visions in a common direction can the shared vision be created. The leaders' role in creating a shared vision is to share their own visions with other employees. This should not be done to force that vision on others, but rather to encourage others to share their vision, too. Based on these visions, the organization's vision should evolve. Shared vision fosters genuine commitment and recruitment rather than just compliance.
4) Team Learning: The discipline of team learning focuses on the process of aligning and developing the capacity of team to create the learning and results members truly desire. Reflecting on action as a team and transforming collective thinking skills so that the team can develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of the individual member's talents are important to team learning. The key to this discipline is that members of a team suspend their assumptions and take up a "think together" mode that embraces the collective good and eschews individual self-interest. Characteristics of successful teams are principled leadership, a clear and elevating goal, a result-driven structure, competent members, possession of a unified commitment, working in a collaborative climate, using standards of excellence, and having both external support and recognition systems for feedback.
5) Systems Thinking: The fifth discipline is singled out because it underlies the other four. It is the framework for seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause- effect results. It is a learnable, habitual thinking process that allows one to look at events in an organization or life and see the patterns of complex interrelationships. Systems thinking takes the concept of interconnectedness of everything an organization does and understands the intra-connections and inter-relationships that shape the behavior of the system in which we exist. Systems thinking takes the doctrine of interconnectedness and brings it to bear on the organizational life. This discipline helps us act more in tune with the larger process of the natural and economic world. The best vision to describe systems thinking is the image of a spider web. People in the organization should be keenly focused on how small changes may be able to influence significant changes throughout the organization. For example, when an insect tries to fly through the spider web and gets entangled in a single silk thread, its delicate vibration and reaction signals that the next meal has arrived alerts the whole web!
Leadership Role in Learning Organizations
The role of facilities leaders in a learning organization centers on issues beyond just the operational management of the physical plant. The leadership shift is from that of the decision-maker to one of stewardship, mentorship, teaching, and community building. These new roles will require facilities professionals to acquire and utilize a different set of skills. They require the ability to create shared vision and mission, to challenge prevailing models, to foster creative patterns of thinking, and to build an organization that is able to continually expand the capability to shape its future. Figure 1 (Model of Leadership Competencies and Followership Expectations, by Chawla and Renesch, 1995) beautifully illustrates each of the five disciplines along with the desired leadership competency and counter followership expectation.
Measures for Developing a Learning Organization
While there is no one given approach to building a learning organization, the following measures will assist you to become effective at designing your own approach.
Conclusion
There has been a lot of interest for the past ten years centered around the concept of learning organizations applied to management. That interest is taking shape in all types of organizations developing into learning communities that continually regenerate themselves to maintain the competitive advantage. Knowledge of learning organizations provides a process by which facilities professionals can create and manage the transformations that are truly desired. It is a whole lot easier, however, to read, discuss and talk about building a learning organization than it is to create one. Developing a learning organization may not be an easy task for the facilities professional. It would be analogous to a lifestyle style change for the dieter. It may take a great effort of time, some money, and a lot of understanding and commitment, but the rewards are infinite. Anything that is truly worthwhile is never easy or cheap. Oscar Wilde represented this notion very well, by stating "For every complex question there is a simple answer, and it is wrong."
Learning Organization is not the latest management/leadership fad of the decade but rather a process and set of life skills to guide individuals and organizations to become successful in their personal and professional pursuit. Much like Stephen Covey's Seven Habits Of Effective People and APPA's new tool, the Strategic Assessment Model for organizational effectiveness, and APPA's Leadership Academy. These can all become a change agent for most and a way of life for all who prescribe. An organization that can thrive in today's world of interdependence, uncertainty and constant change will be the organization that will survive to see Y3K. It will be an organization that we call today a Learning Organization.
Learning Organization Reference List
Argyis, Chris. "Teaching Smart People How to Learn." Harvard Business Review. May- June, 1991, pp. 99-109.
Charwala, Sarita, John Renisch, ed. Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow's Workplace. Productivity Press, Portland, Oregon, 1995.
Kline, Peter, Benard Saunders. Ten Smarter Organizations. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, New York, 1994.
Marquardt, Micheal J. Building the Learning Organization: A System Approach to Quantum Improvement and Global Success. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York, 1996.
Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline. Currency Doubleday, New York, New York, 1990.
Senge, Peter, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, Bryan Smith. The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Currency Doubleday, New York, New York, 1994.
Zemke, Ron. "Why Organizations Still Aren't Learning" (interview with Peter Senge. Training, 1999, pp. 40-49.
Websites
The Learning History http://www.sol-ne.org.
A series of case studies housed on Society for Organizational Learning's websites.
Stanford's Learning Organization Web (SLOW)
http://www.stanford.edu/groups/SLOW/Futher/html.
"Recommended readings on Senge's Five Disciplines"
Fullerton, John Paul
http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/jfullerton/review/learning.htm
"Review of the Fifth Discipline."
Larsen, Kia, Clair McLnerney, Corinne Nyquist, Aldo Santos, Donna Silsbee
http://home.nycap.rr.com/klarsen/learnorg/. "Learning Organizations."