When an organization’s learning portfolio is examined in its entirety, several questions and concerns come to mind. First, what’s in the portfolio now? Answering this question requires having an inventory of the learning practices and profiles that exist throughout the organization or firm. This inventory of data about learning provides the basic building block for analysis. At FIAT Auto, knowledge acquisition, adaptation, correction, and communities-of-practice are all supported and used.
A second concern pertains to the relatedness of the items in the inventory. To what extent are the learning practices and styles complementary, in conflict, or redundant? We should expect, for example, that what gets learned at FIAT Auto through its internal methods of self-correction and communities-of-practice would complement the more externally focused activities of acquisition and adaptation. In another work context, nuclear power plants, we would expect to see incremental learning taking place among operations plant staff which would complement the learning of a research and development unit engaged in transformative learning. A transformative or double-loop style, which may lead to unanticipated consequences, would be inappropriate in an environment like nuclear power operations where controls are needed to avoid disastrous outcomes.
A third concern about learning portfolios is the extent to which current practices or styles align with or match learning needs and work demands. Consider a team or organization that is in a new industry where innovation is critical to success. If it has an overemphasis on learning practices that support formal dissemination or incremental learning, then what’s getting learned (and the speed whereby that learning is disseminated) is apt to be less than helpful to the firm’s competitiveness practices that support transformative learning. In another scenario, if a firm wants to emphasize teamwork, then it should give more support to learning practices that promote group rather than individual learning. In the auto industry where product innovation is becoming increasingly more critical to success, FIAT Auto’s relative emphasis on learning through communities-of-practice should outweigh its investments in learning through correction.
The idea that a firm’s learning portfolio might be misaligned with its learning needs or competitive demands raises the possibility of portfolio management. How can a firm manage its portfolio for maximum advantage? What criteria should be followed in making portfolio management decisions? How would a managed learning portfolio differ from an unmanaged one? These questions suggest that instead of blindly supporting learning practices or not supporting them at all, companies allocate their learning resources within their portfolio in such a way as to maximize their effectiveness. Learning capability and effectiveness must go hand in hand.