Learning Organization & Culture has been one of the most clichéd and misused terms. It is one of the terms which actually got highlighted and most of the organizations started including it in their sales pitch before actually implementing it. With my experience commonly the organizations have assumed the best way of implementing learning culture by having processes as – Submitting knowledge artifacts/ key learning documents after every assignment. All the artifacts are maintained in an accessible repository. But I don’t think it covers the essence of learning culture, as a matter fact the process is an important part of learning culture but the most mundane and easily replicated one. With my understanding I would believe following should be key criteria of a learning organization that can be identified and implemented practically-
1- The world culture in the term itself speaks volumes. A culture can’t be implemented through processes. A culture needs to be bred with in people through continuous orientation process. So the first part of a learning culture is the people orientation towards learning.
2- A learning culture should not only have a focus that ensures rewarding of continuous learning of people through their experience but also ensuring that the people leveraging their learning are consistently rewarded for their behavior.
3- A learning culture should also ensure that the learning is being converted in real time measurable deliverables like reduction in costs, enhancement in quality etc. If an organization fails to show the rise in this area then there is a high probability that either it is not a learning organization or it is learning a lot more noise than substance.
4- A learning culture should also ensure that knowledge is shared seamlessly and especially in the growth phase the knowledge should effectively be transferred or ramped up to maintain the learning standard across the organization.
I believe only the organization able to sustain above principles can be said as one breeding the Learning Culture.
by Prats | on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 8:31 am | 
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