Facilitating Learning Organizations: Making Learning Count

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2000), "Facilitating Learning Organizations: Making Learning Count", Library Management, Vol. 21 No. 9, pp. 501-508. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.2000.21.9.501.5

There is so much about learning organisations and about facilitation these days that it is no wonder the authors subtitle this book “Making learning count”. If it does not count, after all, there is no point in doing it. The case for the learning organisation is made on the rhetorical level, but it is when managers carry it out that problems start. All the examples in the world are no good unless they relate to what we are trying to do here and now. This is the kind of sceptical baggage, then, which appears when any potential buyer for books with titles like this comes along.

I approached it wondering how and if the authors would change my mind. They know the literature – from the seminal work of Argyris and Schön to people like Senge and Pedler, on learning organisations, writers like Nonaka and Davenport, on knowledge creation, and Revans, on action learning. They know how to use it and have three books of their own, published through the 1990s, on learning organisations (one with a very useful questionnaire on learning, Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire, published in 1997).

They create a change model (diagnose, vision, build, collaborate, monitor, reframe), apply it to three levels (individual, team, organisation), claim they are being holistic (i.e. not just systems thinking but work‐plus‐home, multiple stakeholder viewpoints, community accountability and long‐termism), and apply all this in an action‐based way. Learning is not just cognitive but behavioural and, without falling into deterministic traps, they take leadership and facilitators, equate the two, integrate them into the learning and change process, and come up with quite a convincing holistic approach to what can easily become a rather tiring buzzword‐laden topic.

They should know what they are doing: Marsick is Professor of Adult and Organisational Learning at Columbia University, and Watkins is Professor of Adult Education at the University of Georgia. Four other contributors help with case studies and act as exemplars of change agents and facilitating leaders. There are some 11 case studies, all American, in health care and education, food manufacture and Web‐based intellectual capital, electricity and gas. All demonstrate transformational journeys in learning, where the model worked, change took place and endured, and people were included and empowered.

But what makes the book really useful, relevant, transferable, and where does learning really count? There is some useful advice and wisdom: the model works, it is always worth asking: “Why are we here?”, the “test” for learning organisations (with categories like create learning opportunities and promote collaboration, and follow‐through implications for your workplace) which can be built into training and development.

It convincingly goes on beyond mere training to a “learning infrastructure” (building in knowledge creation), it brings together the tacit/explicit knowledge debate and ethnographic managerial evidence in a neat way by asking us to consider what people are really feeling when they do and say things at work, and it shows how the personal biographies of managers are in fact reflective stories which tell any learning organisation a great deal.

All this is applied to case studies which offer very little new for most well‐informed readers and, for people in information/library management, nothing specific. I kept looking for why all this activity “counts” and think that, after all is done, the case is still to be made (I mean, beyond the rhetoric). Not a book I would buy. What a pity that, so far as I know, nothing quite like it has been targeted at library management. Now that is something I really would buy. Probably the time for generic works on learning organisations is running out and now we are looking for specific applications, and Gower has got a lot of those in its generally excellent front‐ and backlist.