Leading Adult Learning in Organizations

Introduction

It’s been a long time since the Industrial Revolution. The world has changed dramatically since then, with technological and scientific knowledge advancing at an unprecedented pace. The nature of society and therefore the nature of organizations and work has changed too. Most of the routine, manual tasks are automated or digitized and only a very few workers engage in predominantly skill based routine tasks (Tamm, 2018). Contrasting with the relative stability and simplicity of the industrial age, the digital age in which we now find ourselves is characterized by change, uncertainty, and complexity. The hierarchical, static organizations of the industrial age are a poor match to change, uncertainty, and complexity of the present time. Whereas in the past, one ‘hero’ leader could adequately lead an organization, contemporary conditions mean that the ‘job is simply too much for one person’. No single individual can hold all the knowledge and expertise required to deal with the multi-disciplinary, globalized, and rapid-change state of human activity. Subsequently, organizations are progressively becoming flatter, with power and decision making distributed among many others, in many different roles.

In the face of rapid change, at a time when a single tweet can reverberate globally in a matter of seconds to trigger rapid economic and social change, organizations must also be agile. Organizations must be quickly responsive to change and importantly, if they are to survive and prosper, the organization must be capable of innovation, creativity and of leading change. All of this has significant implications for all the employees that are the organization. A flat, more distributed organization model means that for the organization to flex, change, or innovate all its employees must be capable of flexing, changing, and innovating. The upshot is that all organizational members must have the capability to learn continuously. In other words, organizations must necessarily become learning organizations. All organizational members must not only learn but learn how to learn continuously. Organizational leaders must be cognizant of this and strive for systematic learning within the organization.

It is important at this juncture to clarify what is meant by ‘learning’ in the context of learning organizations. The ‘learning’ in learning organizations is not referring simply to training. Traditionally, training takes place for the purpose of improving employees’ work performance (Antonacopoulou, 1999). The concept of training is rooted in the industrial context of World War II when thousands of people had to be trained in mostly routine tasks to meet the needs of the war effort. The concept of training in organizations persisted beyond the war to the post-war effort for economic recovery from the war. Although the volume of training has since been scaled down, the idea of training is cemented in organizations (Torraco, 2016). Although there is some shift occurring in the conceptualization of training, the concept remains rooted in its behaviorist beginnings (Torrisi-Steele & Carim, 2019) and is more suited to the learning of the repetitive, routine tasks that are associated with static organizations rather than learning organizations.

The kind of learning required to create a learning organization is the opposite of the traditional view of training. In learning organizations, “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together” (Senge, 1990, p. 3). Implicit in Senge’s definition of a learning organizations are several pivotal concepts: self-directed learning, motivation to learn, innovation and creativity, and systems thinking. For leaders of organizations to nurture a learning organization they must challenge and resist the bureaucratic organizational models. While bureaucratic models served the needs of the industrial era organizations, they are not suited to modern organizations in the digital era (Mirci & Hensley, 2011).