Learning Organizations avoid Organizational Stupidity

Characteristics

1. Shared Leadership

Everyone is encouraged t0

• Find ways to make decisions, direct operations, reach goals and improve products and services.
• Experiment with new methods to serve the organization's needs.
  

2. Culture

• Empower employee
• Leaders remove roadblocks
• Sense of community trust

Ability to communicate openly and honestly
Conflict and debate are accepted as responsible forms of communications
Employees feel important and believe they are being treated fairly
Employee cooperate because they want to not because they have to
Employees are more willing to make extra effort to find and fix problems
Employees are less likely to leave the organization

• Continuous learning

Facilitated by team-based structure found in learning organizations
Built around empowerment
Facilitated by formal training

3. Customer - focused strategy

a. Customer focus - reflect a clear understanding of how important customers to success
b. Adds value for customers by identifying customer needs
c. Long term perspective
d. Internal alignment
The business strategy drives the design of all systems within the organization

4. Organization Design
a. Organic rather than mechanistic system
b. Teams - 'bosses' are practically eliminated
c. Strategic alliances
* With suppliers, customers and even competitors
d. Boundary-less networks
*A network structure of linked organizations
* Provide learning opportunities and generate innovations in products and services
5. Use of information
a. Extensive scanning - of external and internal environments
b. Measurement oriented
*Make assessing improvement possible
*Data about
Customer satisfaction, profits and losses, market share
Employee commitment and competitors strategies
*Communication of shared problems and solutions
Minimizes the number of times the wheel is invented
Speeds up the process of organizational learning
Developing effective ways to record and transmit narrative explanations