L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning
Brain & Mind
Adaptive learning
It has been more than 30 years since Peter Senge1 became famous for his seminal work on learning organisations. But as learning managers are only too well aware, organisations as a whole do not learn unless individuals do. While ‘organisational learning’2 was much debated by learning professionals in the late 1990s, it never really engaged business leaders. However, the continued drive to improve knowledge management across organisations is a practical application of organisational learning readily grasped by leaders.
Until recently, knowledge management has suffered from being overly technology focused, losing its humanity and the key role it plays in organisational learning. In addition, while complexity theory was buzzing among learning professionals in the 1990s, it never moved far from being a fascinating solution looking for a difficult problem.
Now, complexity theory has found a practical application in its explanation of how living systems engage in adaptive learning – enter the learning organisation in action. This means organisations and individuals can benefit from a vital source of knowledge. Today’s learning managers have brought together the thinking and practice behind knowledge management, organizational learning and complexity theory to produce workable models for continuous learning and growth.
Information systems practitioners and learning advisers are routinely collaborating to bring an effective convergence of the hard end of knowledge management – information systems – and the human elements of an adaptive learning system, or true learning organisation.
Today’s intensive knowledge economy requires constant learning of far more than just basic skills. These higher order skills are more effectively developed in the collaborative problem-solving, but uncertain, world of adaptive learning. Such learning often gives better results than a formal classroom with its inevitable emphasis on abstract tasks.
Previously, company learning budgets were continuing to spiral upwards. Harnessing the power of information systems and mobile communications to an understanding of adaptive learning is giving organisations a way to keep costs in check. Adaptive learning to solve problems, share knowledge – and create new knowledge – in an unpredictable environment is a normal expectation of each day’s work.
A further, related shift is taking place. The business world up until 2000 had been dominated by logical, left brain thinkers with a narrowly reductive and deeply analytical approach. Since 2010, a radical shift has occurred. The CEO’s office now belongs to a different type of thinker – a creative empathiser, pattern recogniser and meaning maker. Increasingly, artistic and ‘feeling’ individuals – storytellers, not accountants – are leading today’s corporations.
Today’s leaders understand the subtleties of organisational interactions, while also detecting patterns and seeing the opportunities within them. Leadership development in turn now accommodates ‘complex ways of being’ by building on Dan Pink’s ‘six senses’3: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. These are often combined with expanding other senses such as smell, touch and auditory capabilities – through musical stimulation and directed meditation, for example.
1. http://www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm
2. http://www.solonline.org/res/wp/learning_sys.html
3. A Whole New Mind, Pink, D 2006
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