A Learning Organisation Approach to Software Project Management: Promoting Knowledge Transformation and Interprofessionalism through Crowd-Funded Agile Development

The Learning Organisation

A learning organisation is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality (Gibb, 1997). Many would naïvely think that a school or university is a learning organisation, when not all are, even if they are all teaching organisations. A university which only hires staff who already have all the experience needed for a particular job is not a learning organisation, as actual learning organisations invest in the development of their staff, choosing them on the basis of what they could achieve and not only with reference to what they have already achieved. Thus, a learning organisation is one that facilitates learning for all of its members, and thereby continuously transforms itself and knowledge within it (Rowley, 1998). What is central to the concept of a learning organisation is both organisational learning, defined as the intentional use of learning processes to continuously transform the organisation, and the related concept of knowledge (Thomas & Allen, 2006). Whilst a teaching organisation will focus on the knowledge transformation of its customers (i.e. students), a learning organisation invests in the personal development of all those that are part of it. Even so, whilst learning organisations are founded on the learning process of individuals in the organisation, individual learning does not necessarily lead to organisational learning (Wang & Ahmed, 2003). A whole organisational strategy that applies a learning culture to include customers, suppliers and other significant stakeholders, is essential (Barlow & Jashapara, 1998).