on:
|Evolution of OL and LO in Higher Education:
|Current uses of OL:
|Lessons for Higher Education
|Glossary of Terms
Senge (1990) - The Leader’s New Work: Building Learning Organizations
|Building Learning Organizations (287-288)
||Humans are designed for learning. Infants learn walking and talking on their own and have an insatiable drive to explore and experiment. Society in which we live tries to control, rather than promote organic learning. By focusing on performing for someone else’s approval, corporations create a mediocre achievement level. Superior performance depends on superior learning.|
|Adaptive Learning and Generative Learning (288-289)
||Learning organizations are those that are fit to grow and survive and are characterized by adaptive learning (coping) and generative learning (creating). Adaptation is essential for ever-changing business environments and also includes perceiving future needs of customers. Creativity is cornerstone to competitive advantage and output and requires new ways of looking at the world.|
|Creative tension is the ability to recognize “vision,” or where one wants to be, and “current reality,” the truth of where one is. The gap between the two generates natural tension. Solutions to creative tension include raising current reality towards the vision or by lowering the vision towards current reality. Without vision there is no creative tension.|
|New Roles for Leaders (290 - 293)
||The traditional authoritarian image of a leader is inadequate for learning organizations. As Edgar Schein recognized, “Leadership is intertwined with cultural formation” and should represent the culture of the organization.|
Leader as Designer: craft the ideas of “purpose, vision, and core values by which people will live.
Leader as Teacher: Define reality and act as a coach for the organization. Identify mental models and guide those to restructure views on reality. Influence people to view reality at three distinct levels: events, patterns of behavior, and systemic structure.
Leader as Steward: A critical attitude for learning organizations. As Robert Greenleaf states, “The Servant leader is servant first...This conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead”. Stewardship operates on two levels: for the people they lead and for the larger purpose or mission of the enterprise.
|New Skills for Leaders (293-297)
||Leaders in learning organization must develop new skills through a lifelong commitment. These skills must be widely distributed throughout the organization.Three critical discipline areas:|
Building Shared Vision: encouraging personal vision, communicating and asking for support, visioning as an ongoing process, blending extrinsic and intrinsic visions, distinguishing positive from negative visions.
Surfacing and Challenging Mental Models: challenge existing mental models without invoking defensiveness. Characterized by seeing leaps of abstraction, balancing inquiry and advocacy, distinguishing espoused theory from theory in use, recognizing and defusing defensive routines.
Engaging in Systems Thinking: Leaders focus less on day-to-day events and more on underlying trends and forces of change. Often engage in systems thinking intuitively and cannot explain their intuitions. Key skills: seeing interrelationships, not things, and processes, not snapshots; moving beyond blame; distinguishing detail complexity from dynamic complexity; focusing on areas of high leverage; avoiding symptomatic solutions.
|Leaders of learning organizations will need to develop skills to enhance conceptual abilities and foster communication and collaborative inquiry. These include identifying system archetypes that occur repeatedly in organizations.|
Archetypes include: balancing process with delay, or knowing the time necessary to complete a project and deciding its relevance upon completion; limits to organizational growth; shifting the burden, or focusing on a short-term solution without considering the long-term negative impacts; eroding goals, or lowing standards; escalation, or employees attempted advantages; trage