SMR Knowledge

Building the Knowledge Culture

  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About Us
    • The SMR Team
  • SMR’s Knowledge Services Blog
  • SMRShare
  • Contact SMR

Strategic Learning: The Learning Organization + The Teaching Organization

August 22, 2010 By Guy St. Clair

When we stop to give some thought to strategic learning and the role of training and development in the company, it’s easy to get side-tracked by searching for definitions, concepts, frameworks, and all those other distractions that strategic knowledge managers work with on a daily basis.

Here at SMR International, we recommend cutting through the layers and make some effort to keep it just a simple as possible.

When a client or colleague wants to talk about how to move forward with a program or a learning activity that will present the basics of, say, succession planning to middle management, and they are a little confused or awkward about the terminology, we try to guide the conversation. If they’re worried about how to speak with people about “strategic” learning, we simply switch the conversation over to our standard talking point: “strategic learning is anything you or your people share that makes them do their work better.”

Not a hard concept to get your arms around, and if we then want to push for a little more involvement, we bring up Peter Senge’s learning organization, and we tie it to Noel Tichy and Eli Cohen’s ideas about the teaching organization, and things start to fall into place.

In the learning organization, according to Senge, the “working” and the “learning” are inseparable, since all learning is contextual. Learning, therefore, is only successful when what is learned is put to work in context. Easy enough.

Then we bring in Tichy and Cohen, whose concept of the teaching organization caught on in many companies and enterprises a few years ago, and we’re still hearing about it. The point with the teaching organization is that it works with the learning organization, with both frameworks giving attention to continually learning new knowledge skills, concepts, ideas, and the like, all in the pursuit of better and smarter work. With the teaching organization, though, the additional purpose is that  everyone makes the commitment to share what they learn with others.

And isn’t that what strategic learning is all about? It’s simply knowledge sharing, in the best and most productive sense of knowledge sharing. It’s what we do – from the perspective of workplace performance – to get to excellence in our work.

Tagged With: Eli Cohen, learning organization, Noel M. Tichy, Peter Senge, Strategic Learning, teaching organization, training and development

About Guy St. Clair

Guy St. Clair is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services, from Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin, the scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. The series subject is knowledge services, the approach to managing intellectual capital that merges information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning, presenting and discussing new and innovative approaches to knowledge sharing in all fields of work.

With Barrie Levy, Guy  is the author of The Knowledge Services Handbook: A Guide for the Knowledge Strategist (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). He is also the author of Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). [Note: Go here for the free PDF version of this book: https://bit.ly/3msI27V. ]

Guy is also the author of Knowledge Services: Five Free Webinars from Guy St. Clair, available to anyone who wants to learn more about knowledge services. The webinars are offered at no charge.

Guy’s other professional writings are listed in SMR International’s corporate website, at SMRShare. 

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

SMR’s Knowledge Services Blog Archives (since 2009)

Tags

archives management Conversational Leadership corporate archives corporate records COVID – 19 Healthcare Hovell (John) IAO ICT ICT training Information Africa Organization information and communications technology information management information technology KD/KS KM KM KM/Knowledge Services KM training knowledge asset management knowledge development/knowledge sharing knowledge development and knowledge sharing knowledge networking knowledge services knowledge sharing Knowledge Strategy Knowledge Thought Leaders Manion (Kevin) organizational archives organizational behavior organizational effectiveness organizational management organizational records Peter F. Drucker records management social networking Special Libraries Association strategic knowledge strategic knowledge management strategic knowledge services Strategic Learning strategic planning strategy development The Knowledge Culture ” management

Contact Information

SMR International
10 Park Avenue, Suite # 4-F
New York, NY 10016 USA

+1 917 797 1500
info@smr-knowledge.com
www.smr-knowledge.com

Follow Us

  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Recent Blog Posts

  • Five Free Knowledge Services Webinars August 1, 2022
  • KM/Knowledge Services Community: Humanist Management and Knowledge Services (Part 2) January 24, 2022
  • KM/Knowledge Services Community: Guy St. Clair on Humanist Management and Knowledge Services ( Part 1) December 28, 2021

Copyright © 2023 · SMR International · All Rights Reserved