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Something always causes learning to happen. Stimuli for learning can come
from social, legal, economic, political, cultural and ethical environments,
as participants heard in a workshop chaired by Prof. Wolfgang Michalski,
Director of the Advisory Unit to the Secretary-General at the OECD in Paris.
But in today’s world, passive learning about the environment can be too
slow. Prof. Edwin M. Epstein, Professor Emeritus from the University
of California at Berkeley argues for active, rather than passive awareness
of environmental stimuli. “It seems an important responsibility of
organizations to absorb various sources of information and strategically use
it,” he says. Establishing a competitive intelligence practice in the
organization would be one example, and Epstein illustrated with a biblical
tale of Moses sending spies into Canaan to report on the situation. The news
that was brought back—and the reaction thereto—revealed knowledge about the
Canaanites and the Israelites.
“Information which an organization gleans from the environment can inform it
not simply about the environment but also about its core values, personnel,
resources and capacity to undertake strategic initiatives,” Epstein
explains. “True organizational learning occurs only where the organizational
leadership is open to assimilating knowledge acquired about diverse spheres
of the environment from diverse sources by diverse persons into the culture
and strategic vision of the organization.”
It would be even better, notes Prof. Josef Bugl, Chairman of the
Supervisory Board of the Academy for Technology Assessment in
Baden-Württemberg, Germany, if experts from diverse interest groups
representing science, industry, politics and Social movements could learn
together, jointly assessing the future risks and rewards of technology and
development. Bugl chaired a workshop on how crises or potential crises can
trigger learning.
For example, Dr. Jürgen Kädtler of the Sociological Research
Institute at the University of Göttingen suggests that social movements—as
stakeholders of the environment—should be a valuable source of information
for industry as a chance to learning about the environment from the
environment.
 Organizational learning has traditionally assumed that people learn more
from mistakes than from successes. However, sometimes mistakes are not an
option because the consequences are too severe. Prof. Todd LaPorte,
of the University of California at Berkeley, has spent years studying just
such situations on aircraft carriers and in other high-risk, high-stress
situations. Organizations develop specific cultures enabling them to learn
differently, and their processes offer powerful lessons for others.
For example, LaPorte
explains, as the tempo of flight operations increases on a carrier, military
hierarchy can essentially reverse in order to accelerate learning. Instead
of supervising their reports, officers devote themselves to supporting and
protecting subordinates to enable these highly trained professionals to do
what they know how to do better than anyone else—to the point where they
essentially give orders to their superiors. (This kind of learning about
“potential” events is an example of learning from the future, discussed
below.) |
