Timing: Allow 120 minutes for this activity
Read and take notes on the article ‘Cohesion or confusion? Towards a typology for organizational learning research’ by Shipton (2006), which you will also find in your printed Reader. When you have done so, make notes in answer to this question:
- How would you characterise the approach to organisational learning of your own organisation or one well known to you?
- What could your organisation do to improve its ability to learn?
Feedback
- Your answer will be specific to your organisation.
- It may be that your organisation adopts a variety of OL approaches (whether these are explicitly or not named as such).
- With relation to the second question, this will depend on your chosen perspective of OL.
- For instance, if you use the explanatory perspective perhaps you can suggest better ways in which knowledge can be managed.
- Or perhaps your organisation adopts an explanatory OL perspective but your views are more closely aligned with the descriptive perspective; you might argue that rather than pursue an instrumental view of managing knowledge, your organisation should ensure that there is an environment which fosters the development of communities of practice.
