FAQ
Q-01 > What is Learning Organizations?
Q-02 > Why should organizations care?
Q-03 > What's in it for the people?
Q-04 > Are there any examples of Learning Organizations?
Q-05 > How it works?
Q-06 > What the learning organization promises?
Q-07 > What is the basis of Learning Organizations?
Q-08 > What are means of building the Learning Organizations? What are they?
Q-09 > What are the applications of these disciplines?
Q-10 > What is System Thinking?
Q-11 > What is Personal Mastery?
Q-12 > What is Mental Models?
Q-13 > What is Shared Vision?
Q-14 > What is Team Learning?
Q-15 > Who these five disciplines relate to business needs?
Q-01 > What is Learning Organizations?
A "Learning Organization" is one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about.
Q-02 > Why should organizations care?
The level of performance and improvement needed today requires learning, lots of learning. In most industries, in health care, and in most areas of government, there is no clear path to success, no clear path to follow.
Q-03 > What's in it for the people?
Learning to do is enormously rewarding and personally satisfying. For those of us working in the field, the possibility of a win-win is part of the attraction. That is, the possibility of achieving extraordinary performance together with satisfaction and fulfillment for the individuals involved.
Q-04 > Are there any examples of Learning Organizations?
Yes, but the Learning Organization is an ideal, a vision. Various organizations or parts of organizations achieve this in varying degree.
Q-05 > How it works?
Becoming a successful learning organization requires a collective mind shift at all levels. After all, the argument goes, transforming an organization is possible only after individuals are transformed. People who can see the world as a large system of interrelated parts, who have strong, clear visions of the future and are able to achieve the results they really want (a quality Senge refers to as personal mastery) are characteristic of those in a learning organization. They are impassioned about their work and committed to helping their organization achieve its vision. Such people learn from their mistakes and break the old patterns of behaviour that lead to crippling business decisions.
Q-06 > What the learning organization promises?
By looking at problems systematically, organizations avoid the blame game and finger pointing that typically leads to quick-fix solutions. Employees are encouraged to learn and participate, and their contributions are valued. They realize their full potential because they are no longer shackled by functional barriers, historical biases or hierarchical management structures.
Q-07 > What is the basis of Learning Organizations?
The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge brings word of "learning organizations". It is defined in Q1
Q-08 > What are means of building the Learning Organizations? what are they?
There are Five disciplines which are means of building learning organizations. The five disciplines are:
- Systems Thinking,
- Personal Mastery,
- Mental Models,
- Shared Vision and
- Team Learning.
Q-09 > What are the applications of these disciplines?
The first three disciplines have particular application for the individual participant, and the last two have group application.
Q-10 > What is System Thinking?
Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.
Q-11 > What is Personal Mastery?
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
Q-12 > What is Mental Models?
"Mental models" are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
Q-13 > What is Shared Vision?
The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.
Q-14 > What is Team Learning?
The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together."
Q-15 > Who these five disciplines relate to business needs?
Individual learning should prepare the individual for being a part of the group (personal mastery), and what is learned needs to prepare receptivity to others' learning, experience, questions, and manner of thought (mental models). A viewpoint that is sufficient for understanding business cycles and system relationships is required for working with cycles and toward better relationships both of systems and with people (systems thinking). Without a guiding purpose and shared values (shared vision), corporate effort will have the Tower of Babel problem and the confusion resulting from different languages. For everyone to learn together (team learning), a receptive process of listening to one another is needed.