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Contents 1 What was intended! 2 Feedback 3 Taxonomy 4 Roles and flows 5 Challenging assumptions 6 Accounting

What was intended!

Dr Peter M. Senge, is a Senior Lecturer at MIT United States, wrote the book about Learning Organizations and is also the founder of the global Society for Organizational Learning says:

"Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning."

In 1990, when Peter Senge wrote the book "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization" he defined "Learning Organizations" as organizations and individuals within it with the capacity to create results that matter.

The reality each of us sees and understands depend on what we believe is there. By learning the principles of the five disciplines, teams begin to understand how they can think and inquire that reality, so that they can collaborate in discussions and in working together create the results that matter (to them)!

Often the practitioner has seen the work as a vital yet viable means of developing a cadre of high performance leaders able to mobilise peoples' commitment towards results and change in organisations with ease. We have noticed, such leaders become much better adapted at producing the engaged organisation, creating communities for action and getting results! As they get to their "bottom line" they do this by also generating a quality of life in their organisations and lives that inspires its members.

In short, a Learning Organisation (as espoused by Dr Peter Senge).

Brief on Peter Senge: An engineer by training, Peter was a mentee of Jay Forrester (famed for his works with Systems Dynamics, significant innovations and developed and still holds the patent for intel chips) and has followed closely the works of Chris Argyris and Robert Fritz and based his books on pioneering works with the five disciplines in Ford, Chrysler, Shell, AT&T, Hanover Insurance, Harley Davidson since the 70s and 80s through today.

Good links: Book Cover:[1] About Peter Senge: [2] Organizational Learning milestones: [3] The core of Learning Organization: [4] The language of Learning Organization: [5] Society for Organizational Learning: [6] Learning Organization Practitioners' Network (LOPN/Singapore): [7] Recommended Readings: [8]

Contacts: Singapore: Sheila (sheilasingapore@gmail.com), Ding Seok Lin (seoklin@pacific.net.sg), Dr Jacob Lee (Jacob_Lee@alum.mit.edu), Jacqueline Wong (jacq@sequoia.com.sg), Mirimba Giam (mirimba@pacific.net.sg), Gavin Tan (gtanhome@singnet.com.sg) Hong Kong: Joey Chan (joey@birdview.com.hk) United States: Peter Senge (psenge@mit.edu), Michael Goodman (mrginhop@aol.com), David Stroh (dstroh@bridgewaypartners.com), Daniel Kim (dhkim@alum.mit.edu)

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Peter Senge defined a learning organization as human beings cooperating in dynamical systems (as defined in systemics) that are in a state of continuous adaptation and improvement. This view, and the associated phrase learning a living, have become the dominant theory of enterprise management and strongly influenced development of ISO standards applicable to management, accounting and auditing, of which ISO 19011 is the most significant.

Feedback

That is, organisations that are adapted for maximum organizational learning and that build feedback loops deliberately to maximize their own learning.

Such a taxonomy almost always begins as a so-called "folksonomy", those keywords that arise naturally from usage in the enterprise.

Taxonomy

However, a learning organization must eventually establish a more solid description of what is subject to rapid change, and what is not. This enterprise taxonomy is a common and agreed upon understanding of terms, concepts, categories and keywords that apply within that organization, and are expected to keep applying for many years as it grows and prospers.

It combines and specializes terms that are defined within technologies, industries and professions that have to be managed by core business or work processes of the enterprise or agency - often called by the Japanese term for this: kaizen.

The overall process resembles academic research in the social sciences. However, as an enterprise has very narrow needs, it typically uses only a tiny subset of the terms and tests required for a full ontology - though an enterprise taxonomy can be considered to be either a very minimal foundation ontology, or, a very large data dictionary. Few enterprises have the resources to do more than combine and specialize the terms already defined by academics, so, typically, people with graduate degrees in social science become involved either as consultants or as the human resources experts.

Roles and flows

The most basic information is job descriptions, as ISO 9000 standards specify, and the organization's environmental impact as the ISO 14000 standards specify. Auditing of these two standards is now officially combined in the ISO 19011 protocol.

Beyond that, the domains in which an enterprise must pay attention to change, versus those in which it must be constantly learning, vary drastically with the type of enterprise, its customers and its marketing and supply relationships. In any of these "departments":

Information must somehow be classified so that people can share and reuse organizational knowledge, increase efficiency, streamline business processes and facilitate integration with new technologies.

Challenging assumptions

Once it has established what they are, learning organization must constantly challenge its processes, instructions, assumptions and even its basic structure:

• the zero base budget technique whereby an organisation or division must redefine itself with each budget cycle, with no prior assumptions about how it is organised or what model of activity-based costing should apply. Such a technique ensures that every manager can justify the total cost of operations of every aspect of their division or work.
• the back to the floor method whereby an executive must regularly visit the shop floor as an ordinary worker.

Essentially, the true learning organization is redesigning itself constantly, using only its own taxonomy to decide what not to change.

Accounting

The accounting for the learning process is a difficult and controversial problem. There are many solutions that tend to compete:

• Executive Value Added tries to measure contribution of executives
• throughput accounting is more concerned with process efficiency
• full cost accounting is more concerned with resource efficiency
• risk as regret models are general enough to deal with all of the above, but typically require much more complex scenario analysis

As of 2005, there is no consensus beyond the ISO 19011 audit.