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The purpose of this paper is to challenge how we have traditionally thought about organisations and introduce two frameworks to enable us to understand how change in organisations might be facilitated better.

The paper discusses organisations as complex adaptive systems and uses complexity theory to inform two new frameworks for facilitating organisational learning and change.

In order for organisational learning to occur we need to change our mind-set of how we see organisations and to think of learning not just as individual but also as generative “communicative action” that emerge out of collaborative relationships.

The frameworks proposed are grounded in organisational learning literature and the experience of the author. The proposed agenda for organisational learning has yet to be acted upon and evaluated.

The frameworks can be used to enhance understanding of learning and change in organisations. The agenda for enabling organisational transformation identifies key steps to put the ideas developed in the paper into practice.

The approach advocated for use within organisations is one of empowerment and collaboration rather than top down direction.

The paper introduces new frameworks and a practical agenda to bring about organisational transformation through work-applied learning.

Lord Young, Secretary of State for Employment (centre), shows his support for the hotel and catering industry at Spring Open 86 Exhibition. He was visiting the stand of the Hotel & Catering Training Board, where a new open learning management programme was on display. The nine units which make up the programme together offer “the new way to catering management”, according to Open Learning manager Peter Critten (right). Open learning students successful in a unit are rewarded with the Training Board's Open Learning certificate. The management programme aims to provide greater access to qualifications for the 350,000 managers and supervisors working in catering. It has been funded by MSC's Open Tech project, led by director David Tinsley (left).

The ways in which the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) intends to move towards “an organismic commonality of value directions” (i.e. once people open themselves up to an experience, they discover others of like mind who are able both to support and reinforce them in their own development) are outlined. The MSC needs to ask their students the kind of questions that help them make their experience explicit and thereby make it accessible and open to others. A model is presented that can give a clue as to how to present open learning material to potential students to evaluate what is an offer and what is possible. Quality can only be appreciated and not experienced. It is a function of what is best for an individual in a particular context. It is a unique interaction between what is best from the provider's point of view, what is best from the learner's point of view and what is best in the particular context in which the material will be used.

The need to understand chaos and complexity in organisations has particular importance for health which is bedevilled by the complexity of organisations and the sometimes chaotic nature of its core activities. This article seeks to explore these issues in the context of one of the key functions which is expected to hold together this diversity: Human Resource Management (HRM). An exploration of the nature of HRM in health care as it has evolved indicates that in order for it to have a pivotal role for the future it will need to rethink this role in the changing paradigm which is now emerging; in so doing it could develop as the organisational intelligence for health care in the future facilitating organisational learning and creativity.

Makes a case for a new kind of partnership between universities and their local communities within which organizational as well as individual learning can be recognized, developed and accredited. Describes Middlesex University’s new MA in personal and organizational development and suggests that a programme of this kind could be a catalyst for such a change to be brought about.

From the perspective of being engaged with training, learning, development over four decades, my view is that HRD has never quite been able to decide whether its focus should be on individual needs (personal development as well as skills and knowledge improvement) or the organization’s business and strategic needs.

More places are needed on full‐time hotel and catering courses at all levels, and more part‐time courses are required, if the already low proportion of qualified managers, supervisors and craftspeople in the industry is not to decline. The Hotel & Catering Industry Training Board's response to the National Advisory Body's consultative document on the future of public sector higher education for hotel and catering points out that:

The Economic and Social Science Research Council’s Innovation Agenda singled out “more innovation” as a key weapon for UK companies to outperform world competitors. This research explores this Innovation Agenda from an HE perspective, and reports on a study of a final year undergraduate course in Creative Management. Students, in syndicate groups, were asked to invent their own business idea. By simulating make‐believe situations in the classroom, we aimed to approximate feelings purportedly experienced by business managers as they innovate, such as “creative tension” and “strategic discomfort”. This article argues that preparedness for creative tension is now a necessity for business graduates. Additionally, it proposes that an awareness of discomfiting strategic effects of renewal is worthwhile. For example, how might students have coped with the shock to IBM during the demise of the computer mainframe market?

Using data drawn from two cohorts of learners studying the Bachelor of Arts (Professional Practice) programme at Middlesex University, the purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the effectiveness of work based learning in improving the skills bases of early career arts professionals in the twenty‐first century and to explore the changing place and role of “traditional” concepts of knowledge and teaching.

This study utilised a collaborative action research approach in order to categorise and theorise the themes that have emerged from the practice of delivering the programme, and to provide data that informed the on‐going curriculum development.

The study identified three emerging themes in terms of the role of knowledge attainment for the early career arts professional undertaking work based learning. First, knowledge attainment processes shift from a push model to a pull model, second the authors noted a change in the inequalities in knowledge attainment facilitated by the use of the web 2.0 platforms and third it is argued that there are recognisable differences in the value and use of experientially gain knowledge in the establishing and in the established practitioner. The study then suggests changes that may occur in terms of curriculum design, delivery and pedagogy to support establishing arts professionals through a work based learning programme.

There is a limited research discourse on the authenticity of the use of work based learning with early career professionals. Further, the study of this emerging cohort for work based learning programmes at Middlesex University points to a wider discourse in terms of positioning work based learning in volunteer environments, third sector and other creative industries contexts where the notion of work is challenged and the connection of learning to practice less firmly set in the established identity of a workplace.

I suppose that most noticeable of all the changes in our profession since I came into it has been the multiplicity of the methods by which one can become a librarian. A. E. Standley says in a recent article in the L.A.R., in 1970: “The term librarian includes the Library Association chartered librarian, the graduate with a degree in librarianship, the scholar librarian, the information and intelligence officer, the translator, the abstracter, the non‐library‐qualified subject expert”.