Your Workplace Conference 2009: Dr. Peter Senge

Dr. Peter Senge, a world renowned strategist on organizational change and leadership, spoke about the changes in the world economy challenging businesses directly, and the reflexive response that is all too often a hyper-focus on the bottom line. Companies that recognize the power of mobilizing their people’s aspiration, creativity and talent, and have the know-how to do so effectively, hold an important advantage. They are more likely to thrive in harmony with the constantly changing environment.

Dr. Senge spoke inspiringly on “building organizations that can thrive in difficult times”. While Dr. Senge is famous for having posited the notion of a “learning organization”, he took the time to clarify what that truly means, as more than a faddish HR phrase.

All learning, according to Dr. Senge, is contextual. Schools and organizational training classrooms remove that context. Additionally, all learning is done through error failure – we cannot possibly hope to or expect to succeed the first time we do something new – and likely not the second, or third, or fourth time either. However, this is exactly what most organizations expect, and as such, innovation falls short.

The true learning organization, then, has a spirit of learning that far transcends dollars spent on training in a decontextualized setting. There can be no innovation without failure, because failure begets learning, and we need to be able to tell the truth about our mistakes and errors.

Our human nature is to be exploratory and experimental and so the workplace needs to allow and foster these attributes, creating a new notion of “play at work”. Given a choice, people will seek and create joy at work, not drudgery. However, in times of stress, organizations (just like individuals) tend to hunker down and become protective, enacting old habits, and that will suffocate experimentation and innovation and joy.

Changing to a “learning organization” does not happen suddenly or quickly; organizational adaptation, as in nature, does not happen as a majority undertaking – it happens because something new starts to grow in the midst of what already exists. This sort of change needs time and attention, but it does not require everyone to stop everything and start completely anew.

And creating this “learning organization” does not require a sudden attention shift from output to people – both are important, and people of managerial responsibility, across the entire organization, need to be passionate about both people and results. A learning organization is about people having a different quality of conversation, in a healthy workplace that is deeply personal and inherently collective.

AUTHOR: LISA SANSOM