Contrasting Images: Implications

To talk about developing ‘learning organizations’ means focusing on certain prescribed organizational and managerial characteristics. With its emphasis on managerial initiatives to establish the pre-conditions or skills for learning, a research agenda based on the need for ‘learning organizations’ would be oriented towards micro or individual-based factors. Another key issue pertains to establishing a vision and moving the firm towards that vision. By invoking the need for ‘learning organizations,’ theorists lay out a prescription for organizational improvement. While visions are powerful tools that motivate, one effect is to denigrate rather than appreciate the strengths of an organization. This implication may be one of the liabilities of the learning organization fad as suggested by Calhoun et al., 2003. Also, to regard learning as somehow antithetical to organizations is contrary to appreciative inquiry (Shrivastava, 1999).

To consider ‘organizations as learning portfolios’ produces a view of learning and organizations that is fundamentally different from the prescriptive vision of the ‘learning organization’. Instead of focusing on some future state to be attained through managerial action and executive leadership, any desire to enhance an organization’s learning must focus on understanding the organization as it now exists through its culture and differentiated structures. Organizations house diverse learning activities and styles that ideally are complementary but may, in fact, be in conflict.

Instead of perceiving organizations as some unified, homogeneous, or monolithic entity that does or does not learn, one can view learning as innate to all organizations but allow for its different manifestation in different parts of the organization. Instead of focusing on the dilemmas:—Why don’t organizations learn, or how do we build learning organizations?—the focusing questions become: What do organizations learn and in how many different ways? More specific research questions can then be derived, such as: What’s in the portfolio? How are the contents of the portfolio aligned with the mission/vision of the organization? What are the complementarities of learning styles across the organization? How are learning processes aligned across the organization? What are the ROIs of the different learning styles?

The notion of an ‘organization as a learning portfolio’ helps us recognize that firms may simultaneously support multiple and diverse learning activities (DiBella and Nevis, 1998; DiBella, 2001). Rather than view an organization that as a whole progresses through a series of learning stages, different components of a firm can function in different stages. Instead of learning stages being regarded or treated as sequential stages (Carroll, Rudolf, and Hatakenaka, 2003), they are seen as concurrent ones; and learners themselves function simultaneously in multiple learning environments (Plaskoff, 2011, this volume).