Dave Snowden on Learning Organization

The idea of a *Learning Organisation appealed to a more human approach to work, in contrast with the hardness of BPR which saw humans as readily disposable widgets in a wider manufacturing process
The whole organisational development movement started here, driven by the need to align individuals with wider goals set by leaders
My general view is that more people were inspired by Senge’s work, and we had the Society of Organisational Learning set up (SOL) although that seems to have declined somewhat since the Vienna congress at which I was, thanks to the Australian’s, a disruptive keynote.

To be clear here (before too many people jump on me) I do know that Senge represents a popularised form of system dynamics not the whole of systems thinking but he uses the wider phrase as his fifth discipline so for the purpose of this post I am running with it

With Learning Organization, adoption of the language and many of the practices was easy but also more ephemeral in nature.
- Other approaches could mimic much of the LO approach but with different labels and different hype
- The dependency on behavioural shifts by individuals for its implementation meant that it was fairly easy to game, to use the new language but continue with the old practices

With the benefit of hindsight Fifth Discipline was very good at saying what was wrong, and very good at saying how things should be, but weak on methods that would produce sustainable change
- I and others who pioneered the early days of knowledge management took Senge’s work as part inspiration to drive the work we were doing
- The problem we started to encounter was the question of how to make the lofty ideas work in practice
  - It’s all very well to say that managers should listen to their employees before formulating goals and the like, but most managers say they do