What is Organizational Learning?
When I was in the 5th grade, my teacher, Dr. Gray, taught us that when you learn something new, you get a new wrinkle in your brain. She also told us that when we intentionally decided to remember and retain information it would stay with us. Being the rule follower I am, I internalized these two pieces of information, and can now recall the outfit Dr. Gray was wearing when she imparted this knowledge upon a class of 10 and 11-year olds.
In the social sector, we are constantly tasked with sharing what we are learning for the sake of mission-related activities, revenue development, or awareness building. We, of course, employ the more professional word of “outcomes management” instead of “new wrinkles in our brain.” While an organization may have a standard practice of gathering, analyzing, and sharing outcomes and data, how do you know if you are actually part of a true learning organization?
I dusted off the bookshelves from grad school to call upon the Godfather of Systems Change and Organizational Learning: Peter Senge. For my fellow organizational leadership theory nerds, you are most likely well acquainted with Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. And, for those of you for whom learning about learning is not your jam, you and/or your organization have almost certainly been impacted by his theories and research.
One of Senge’s core tenets is that organizations struggle or ultimately fail due to developing “organizational learning disabilities.” These faults are a result of organizations “learning poorly” by design. The antidote of addressing or avoiding these learning disabilities comes in the form of systems thinking, which Senge writes is “a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots’.”
Here is one of my favorite examples of a true learning organization: The National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) was founded in 1938 to combat and end the polio epidemic. Thanks to the coordinated door-to-door fundraising campaigns of mothers, Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1949. With the success of NFIP’s fundraising, awareness building, and education efforts, the polio virus was eradicated in the US by 1979.
With widespread vaccinations underway by 1955, the NFIP could have dissolved; mission accomplished. However, the structures and practices in place at NFIP were ripe for early systems thinking and organizational evolution. The NFIP had nearly 20 years of research, education, success, ability to generate revenue, community trust, and meaningful relationships with the science community. What else could they put these resources toward?
Equipped with all of those valuable resources, the NFIP began to evolve, shifting their thinking from a singular childhood disease toward the whole: infant, childhood, and eventually maternal health.
Today, their current mission statement is to “lead the fight for the health of all moms and babies,” through “ending preventable maternal and infant risks and death, ending preventable preterm birth and infant death, and closing the health equity gap.”
Some 50+ years after the founding of NFIP, Senge would argue that the systemic structure, patterns of behavior, and events are part of the “systemic perspective” that helps break down a complex system and learning behaviors. The March of Dimes was able to learn, adapt, and evolve from the complex structures of children and maternal healthcare to respond to the next emerging need.
I encourage you to read further into the March of Dimes story as well as Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, however, if this has felt informative yet overwhelming, here are some starting questions and ideas to consider fostering a learning organization:
What official feedback or learning loops does your organization have in place?
If your staff attends a conference, how do you share what you learned? How did you put it into practice?
Are you regularly collecting feedback and experiences about your environment, from your clients, volunteers, donors, staff?
How does this challenge currently held assumptions?
Does your organizational structure support learning?
This includes piloting new programs or initiatives, or being allowed to fail?
Do you have a tool or mechanism in place to share information and resources asynchronously?
Does your team have a shared vision for how you live out your mission day-to-day?
A final brain wrinkle for you is to share why March of Dimes picked that name. Certainly, it is more palatable than their original name, but why dimes? The name celebrates the early fundraising efforts of mothers soliciting dimes for polio research, referred to as the “Mothers’ March'' in 1946. This is the same year that the most recognizable national symbol of polio affliction was posthumously memorialized on the dime: FDR.
For nonprofit organizations, we want to be good stewards of the resources provided to us, therefore pilots and accepted failure may be scary concepts to try. However, breaking through an organizational learning disability and creating learning networks can start small, on the individual level, and embody the best stewardship of all: adapting from what you’re learning.
One of our core values at Elevate is Learning, and if you are interested in creating a culture of learning at your organization, we’d be happy to talk with you further.
References:
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, 2nd edition. (New York: Random House Publishing, 2006)., p.18, p. 68, p.52
History of March of Dimes: https://www.marchofdimes.org/about-us/celebrate-our-history