4 Learning Organizations: Striving by Transferring Knowledge Available to Purchase

The transfer of knowledge within a learning organization is a complex task. However, taken seriously and with the support of senior management it can be accomplished. Not that I have met any learning organization in its full sense; I haven't and I don't think I ever will. But such generative learning condition is to be cultivated, even though you may never be able to become a true learning organization. Achieving such a level is like achieving the full sense of personal humility, or even Zen. Once you believe and affirm you have reached it, you would have just missed it.

Nonetheless, organizational learning is very important, in particular in this fast-paced and multicultural business setting. Knowledge workers and executive staff must be aware that if organizations are not able to cope with the rapidly changing business environment, which also encompasses technology and human behavior within the organization, it will die. I strongly believe that organizational learning will become as important to corporations as vitamins and minerals are to the human body: depleted of it, the whole system gradually breaks down and becomes ill, and if not replenished, it eventually succumbs.

According to Garratt, loops of learning (and transferring of learning, I might add) allow the critical review of all levels of the organization. Such continuous learning enables the organization to sense and respond to the changes in its external and internal environments to ensure the survival and development of the energy niches that support it. This is a very holistic approach, much like nurturing a living organism, as most of the learning and transferring of it inside the organization is personal, private, very often uncodified, hidden and, most of all, a defensive way of coping with the effects of a seemingly non-learning employer.