”He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” – Kurt Lewin

organizational learning theory

Since a kid I have always been highly critical and analytical person. I never take anything for granted. I need proof. I need data. The same goes with my theoretical foundation of coaching methods. Since 2011 I have been studying leadership, organizational theories and everything that has to do with transforming individuals, teams and organizations. In year 2015 my world view was turned upside down when I went trough coaching training course by MCID – Master's Coaches program. I fell in love with the idea of coaching and since that I have dug into the mechanisms behind coaching methods.

When I read Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, I knew that organizational learning theory would be foundational for my future career as a coach. I love how the theory of organizational learning connects individual learning with the whole organizations ability to learn, adapt and transform. Senge outlines 5 disciplines, that are foundational for building learning organization:

1. Personal Mastery

2. Mental Models

3. Shared Vision

4. Team Learning

5. Systems Thinking

I'll open these up in the blog section if you are interested to dig deeper into them. For my coaching purposes I have made my own model around these five disciplines. In the picture below you see three over lapping circles, that are the three main orientations or domains of a learning organization. It might be any kind of community of people – business, school, church, sports team or your knitting group. This model includes everything you need to know about transforming that group into a highly functional learning organization.

First you see the Personal Mastery on the top circle which we talked about in Purpose section. It's the I-orientation – how I see myself, my calling and my life balance. I couldn't emphasize enough how important this is for every organization. We can't escape the fact that everything comes down to people. If we don't take care of ourselves and people beside us, whatever you do you won't get the highest possible results. 

Next on the left side you see Dialogical Mastery, which is the We-orientation. As you guessed, this domain is completely dependent on the dialogue skills. Disciplines of team learning and shared vision are situated under Dialogical Mastery. 

Third domain or orientation is Systemic Mastery, which is equivalent of the discipline of systems thinking. You could call it We-In-It-orientation. It's organizations ability to see itself through the eyes of every member of it. When you switch the mental model of organization as a machine to organization as a living organism, you see the difference. When traditional and hierarchical organization is functioning through "command and control" culture, living organism is adapting and transforming through "sense and respond" culture. I'll open this up more in the blog section.

In the middle you can see maybe the one single most important discipline for transformation of individuals and organizations. Mental Models are like eye glasses we look the world through. If I say "a chair", you might start to think about some kind of chair. That is the mental model you have about chair. If you combine all the mental models you have, you could call it your world view. That's the way you see the world as an individual. 

Mental models guide our everyday life. They are anchored in our core beliefs, assumptions and opinions. All learning happens through reflection of our mental models and if possible, transforming them to something better. Good mental models produce good results and poor mental models produce poor results. 

On three circles you can see a triangle which represents the organizational dimension. Three circles (personal, dialogical and systemic mastery) are all first person point of views. Organizational dimension is about basically asking the same questions from the whole organization's point of view.

So Guiding Ideas are about the "personal mastery" of the whole organization: who are we as a community of people? What is our mission? What are our values? Are we purposefully in control of creating the culture we want? 

Innovations in infrastructure is about the structural dimension of the organization for supporting eg. communication, decision making and conflict resolution. It's about asking from the whole organizations point of view how are we functioning from the dialogical perspective.

Theory, methods and tools are the It-orientation from the organizations point of view. It's about the ability to offer theoretical and methodological framework for seeing the organization from the bird’s eye perspective. It's important to have the theoretical grounding which makes it possible for developing and experimenting with new tools for building a learning organization.

Transformative Learning Theory

Let’s go back to the middle part of the diagram – Mental models – and the idea of transformation. You can divide all learning in too different sections: learning through information and learning through transformation. And may I remind you that all learning is through the reflecting and changing our mental models. It helped me to see the difference between information and transformation when I read about the etymology of these two words. Form is a mold, that enables you to imprint identical objects. So IN-FORM-ation means practically that you stick to this same mold time and time again and produce the same results. TRANS-FORM-ation suggests, that we are outside the mold. So we swich the mold to something else which means that also the outcome is different. If you have made cookies, you know that with that same angel formed mold you will get angels into the eternity.

Jack Mezirow was one of the pioneers in adult learning circles. Until the 70s it was common knowledge that there isn't much development in human consciousness after adolescence. Mezirow changed this view with his work. Another influential researcher in this area is Robert Kegan. He has divided human development in 5 stages. Two of the first ones happen before adolescence and most of the people land on stage three, which is called "the Socialized mind". Kegan describes this as being psychologically "written by" the socializing process. In a way we become what our surrounding culture expects us to be. But when you are transformed to the fourth stage – "Self-authoring mind" – YOU become the author. You start to "write upon" the culture and mental models you have been raised into. You take the authorship and leadership of your own life. The final stage is called "Self-transforming mind", which we will come back later.

Philosophical and metaphysical roots

Coming soon!