Learning organizations: theory, characteristics, and implementation

Learning Organizations and Innovation

The characteristics of learning organizations that set them apart from the many other types is the ability to continually stay agile in structure and process, continue to find new approaches to fostering passionate commitment from their employees, suppliers, partners, and customers, and finally, a culture that seeks to maximize each person's potential in the context of current business strategies and needs. The learning organization is agile enough to change significantly with time, passionate enough to keep their best employees, constituents, and customers involved, and seek to always have a strong culture that stresses team achievement and individual growth. The challenge for all organizations seeking to be learning organizations is that inherently in their core business models and processes there is the potential to excel at taking customers from one generation of products or services to another; this agility underwrites financially the culture of progressive change in companies.

Following this is the growth of cultures that allow for risk-taking and the Voice of the Customer (VoC) becoming more of the centerpiece of products and services strategies than internally focused and often myopic measures of performance. Companies lose their ability to learn when they become myopically focused only on their own needs. When CEOs care more about what is being said about them than what's being celebrated at customers, an organization has ceased to learn, it has become self-absorbed and not outer-absorbed.

Organizations then do have inherent strengths they can build on to stay agile enough to be learning organizations over the long-term. There are core attributes of their business models that force agility, make reliance on passionate people very necessary (as is the case in service industries), and continually reinforce a culture of being externally focused and willing to risk new strategies in serving their existing customers and earning new ones.