Blocks to Learning in Organizations

 

Figure below represents the actors that prevent organizations from learning. These factors are organizational learning disabilities of sorts. They are patterns of thinking and behavior that members have adopted that block change. These block or disabilities stem from lack of system thinking and lead to looking at tasks, jobs, problems and goals as separate and isolated from one another.

 

In addition, leaders that are focused on large-scale change may fail to ignore the gradual and incremental change that may be occurring and likely to lead to the same outcome. They also may focus on specific events or causes of problems without considering the context in which they may be occurring or all the system wide factors that may be contributing to them. The focus on events results in trying to find someone or something to blame for the problems.

 

Identifying these enemies detracts from fully considering the problems and focusing on solutions. Another organizational learning disability is skilled incompetence, which refers to relying on people with highly developed but narrow expertise who are celebrated and expected to provide some answer. Because they are there to solve problems, they often cannot admit to lack of understanding or knowledge or to making mistakes.

Finally, another factor related to leadership is the illusion of taking charge and of one person being responsible to lead all others through the problem, instead of having shared leadership, empowerment and cooperation.