Öğrenen organizasyonlar

Abstract

ÖĞRENEN ORGANİZASYONLAR ÖZET Son yılların popüler kavramı öğrenen organizasyonlar yeni bir yönetim teknolojisidir ve henüz bir buluştur bir yenilik değildir. Öğrenen organizasyonlar teorisi üzerine Peter Senge ve arkadaşlarının 20 yıllık çalışma birikimi sağlam bir teori oluşturmuştur. Ancak henüz tam anlamıyla bir uygulama gerçekleştirilememiştir. Bu sebeple Öğrenen organizasyonlar üzerine micro dünyalardaki kısıtlı uygulamalar dahi çok önemlidir. Öğrenen organizasyonlar beş disiplinden meydana gelir. Bu disiplinler, öğrenen organizasyonlar teorisinin uygulanabilmesi için reçete niteliğindedir. Bu teorinin en önemli ama son disiplini fakat ilk anlatılması gerekeni sistem düşüncesidir. Sistem düşüncesi, çocukluğumuzdan başlayarak bize okulda, evde, iş yerinde öğretilen sistemleri parçalayarak inceleme anlayışım tersine çevirerek sistemlere bir bütün olarak bakabilme yeteneğini vermeye çalışır. Bu becerinin önündeki en önemli engel dildir. Çünkü diller insanları sistemleri sebep sonuç ilişkileri içinde doğrusal bir bakış açısı ile incelemeye yönlendirir. Sistem düşüncesinin son disiplin olma sebebi de diğer disiplinleri birleştirici niteliğidir. Diğer disiplinler sistem düşüncesinin bütünleştirici düşünce tarzı ile, uygulamalarda aynı anda empoze edilmelidir Kişisel hakimiyet, kişilerin kendi işlerini iyi yapmalarında çok, yeniliğe ve öğrenmeye açık olamalan anlamına gelir. Paylaşılan vizyon, organizasyon içinde çalışanların üstünde anlaştığı bir son resimdir. Bu resim ulaşılmak istenileni temsil eder. Düşünsel modeller, kişilerin geçmişlerinden gelen inanışlarını ve birikimlerini önyargılı bir şekilde düşüncelerine aktarmalarıdır. Bu aktarımlar zamanla inanış haline gelir. Öğrenen organizasyonların düşünsel modeller disiplini, bu inanışları su üstüne çıkarıp, sorgulamak üzerine odaklaşır. Bu disiplin özellikle, takım halinde öğrenebilmek için, takımların önünü açar. Takım halinde öğrenme disiplini, insanların doğru davranışlar içinde takım halindeki zekalarının ve yaratıcılıklarının dolayısıyla da öğrenme kapasitelerinin, bireylerden daha yüksek olduğunu söyler. Uygulamada bu beş disiplinin özellikle ikisinin, takım halinde öğrenme ve düşünsel modellerin üzerinde durulmuştur. Bu disiplinler bir üst düzey yönetim kuruluna adapte edilmeye çalışılmıştır. Son olarak da uygulamaların başarısı bir performans ölçümü ile raporlanmıştır. vn

LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS SUMMARY Human beings are designed for learning. No one has to teach an infant to walk, or talk, or master the spatial relation ship needed to stack eight building blocks that don't topple. Childeren come fully equipped with an insatiable drive to explore and experiment. Unfortunately, the primary institutions of our society are oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn. The young child entering school discovers quickly that the name of the game is getting the right answer and avoiding mistakes-a mandate no less compelling to the aspiring manager. Over the past five years, business academics and senior managers have begun talking about the notion of the learning organization. The rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. The fifth discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, begins to chart this new territory, describing new roles, skills, and tools for leaders who wish to develop learning organizations. For organizations in 1990's, learning makes the critical difference. Through learning, organizations adapt to change, avoid the repetition of past mistakes, and retain critical knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Unfortunately, too many organizations are unable to learn from their mistakes; they fail to adapt to customer needs and do not improve their processes to meet rising competitive standarts. As a result, they eventually lose market share and drop out of the race. Even when they do learn, it is often by accident rather than a result of a deliberate attempt to deepen understanding, and too frequently the learning remains confined to small pockets of the organization. The reason most organizations are inefficient learners is their lack of systematic process to facilitate learning. The major learning problems identified by organizations include... 1. diffuculty in moving knowledge across organizational boundaries - the `chimney` effect; 2. slow implementation of strategic change efforts; 3. diffuculty in making cultural change; 4. need for process improvement; and 5. slowness in adapting to technological advances. These critical programs are programs of learning. The ability to implement a strategic change, to respond to competitive challenge, to move information cross Vllldivisional boundaries - all are closely tied to the organization's ability to learn. To attack their problems, organizations need to recognize learning as a key issue in any strategic decision. In other words, they need to become more intentional about their learning. The rate at which individuals and organizations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage, especially in knowledge - intensive business. In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Those who have stopped learning find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. Reason why learning in organizations matters more now than in the past: 1. Increased pace of change & competitiveness 2. Workforce competence & the changing nature of work. Learning is now so essential for career success, corporate survival, and national prosperity that it no longer makes sense to relegate it to certain institutions or to particular periods in one's life. Learning is now everybody's business. In this thesis, learning organization is defined, the principles of learning organization are analysed and applied to a periodic executive meetings of an organization. The definition of the `Learning Organization` is; an enterprise that focuses on the continuous improvement of its processes, products, and services; that facilitates the learning of its members, both individually / independently and as groups / teams; that continously transforms itself inorder to meet its strategic goals. Analogous to individual learning, organizational learning is defined as increasing an organization's ability to take effective action. Organizations in which people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns or thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. Organizational learning is the outcame of three overlapping spheres of activity - individual, team, and system learning. All three kinds of learning take place simultaneously. 1. Individual Learning takes place each time an individual reads a book, performs an experiment, or gets feedback from workmates or colleagues. 2. Team Learning takes place when two or more individuals both learn from the same experience or activity. Team learning may involve new ways to address the team's responsibilities, or it may involve some aspect of the interaction between the members of the team themselves. IX3. System Learning takes place when the organization developes systemic processes to acquire, use, and communicate organizational knowledge. A learning organization embodies an attitude, an atmosphere. The desire to learn can be found in individuals, teams, processes, systems, and structures. Learning is the central cultural value of the organization. In this environment, innovation is net just encouraged, it's celebrated. Change is avidly sought rather than avoided. The dictionary definition states that learning is the acquiring of knowledge or skill. Both parts of the definition are important: what people learn (know how) and how they understand and apply that learning (know why). Learning can thus be defined as increasing one's capacity to take effective action. There are two kinds of learning:. Adaptive / Maintenance Learning: Learning from experience; coping. Anticipate / Innovative Learning: Proactively creating The first discipline: Team Learning While team learning sounds a bit like team building, it actually focuses on the learning activity of the group rather than on the development of team processes. Individual learning, no matter how wonderful it is or how great it makes us feel, is fundamentally irrelevant to organizations because virtually all important decisions occur in groups. The learning units of organizations are 'teams', groups of people who need one another to act. Learning situations based on intact work groups have a powerful advantage over those involving individual learners. Infact group learning is particularly important when the training involves such topics as teamwork, problem solving, or strategic planning. The 2nd discipline: Shared Vision Vision is an ideal and unique image of the future. Momentum comes from a clear vision of what the corporation ought to be. The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. The single thread that runs through all my success stories is the involment of large numbers of individuals in drafting the vision; how the words get written is just as important as what gets written; widespread participation empowers people. All must understand, share in, and contribute to the organization's vision or that vision will not become a reality. It is not truly a shared vision untill it connects with the personal visions of people throughout the organization, a by-product of interactions of individual visions. The 3rd discipline: Mental Models D!Mental Models are described as deeply held internal images of how the world works, which have a powerful influence on what we do because they also effect what we see. Mental models represent a person's view of the world, icluding explicit and implicit understandings. Our theories in use betray our mental models, versus our espoused theories. We all like to think that we hold certain views, but our actions reveal deeper views. The first critical step in building a learning organization is to encourage people to addopt different mental models that better reflect competitive and workplace realities. Beliefs can put a lid on potential. Changing is less a matter of working harder than a matter of changing what you believe is the 'truth'. The process of surfacing individual mental models and making them explicit can accelerate individual learning. Team members constructively challenge each others ideas and underlying assumptions in a dialogue (vs. discussion). Discussion is about pounding home ideas in a confrontational menner. Dialoge is about meaning being sahared. The skills of dialogue require that team members be willing to hold their ideas as hypotheses to be tested and that they willingly inquire into the reasoning of others. Dialogue focuses on getting in touch with underlying assumptions (especially our own assumptions or mental models) that automatically determine when we chose to speak and what we chose to speak and what we chose to say. The 4th discipline: Personal Mastery Personal Mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of devoloping patience, and of seeing reality objectively. People with a high level of personal mastery live in a continual learning mode. They never 'arrive' the journey is the reward. Embarking on any path of personal growth is a matter of choice. No one can be forced to develop his or her personal mastery. Self-esteem generates the confidence and creativity needed to tackle new challenges (on the journey to Personal Mastery). The 5th discipline: Systems Thinking The 5th discipline (Systems Thinking) is the corner stone of how learning organizations think about their world, the essence lies in a shift of mind: seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause -effect chains, and seeing processes of change rather than snapshots. In the application part of the thesis, team learning and mental models are focused on. These disciplines are adapted to a periodic meeting of a management team. This XIis not a well-known type of learninig organization implementation. Because learning organization theory highly emphasize to implement all disciplines simultanously. This is especially known as the basic assumption of the fifth discipline, system thinking. Because of the beginning enablings of the application, couple of modifications are applied to the theory. After that a team mentor is included to the team. And last of all a regular training on mental models, and team behaviours are provided to the team members. These attempts are expected to improve the productivity of the team. In order to feel these improvements, a team performance system is designed and coded in visual basic. The indicators of the performance trended for ten months showed that the attempts made positive changes. Xll