Learning Organization – Nurture, not Manage
The common theme of today’s managerial publications is human - or people - first. Human dimension, people-first, knowledge management, and learning organization are a few examples of current managerial consultant’s slogans. The main focus of those managerial researches is how to exploit the knowledge that individual employees have learned in a way that an organization use it to maximize its productivity and efficiency. An organization, with aid of complicated computer network system, creates, receives, processes, stores, and disseminates a large amount of information. These are discrete and encoded – information. Whereas, organizational knowledge is more tacit and hard to capture because it exists within complicated human interactions and emotions. Employees would share their own knowledge more easily and freely with others when they feel comfortable and belonged. Many cases, the brain metaphor is useful way to analyze how an organization process information and learn from it since brain is the ultimate processing center for an organism, especially human brain. Therefore, consideration of how human brain learns would provide glimpse of how an organizational learning program should be in order to produce desirable results. In order to ensure the organizational learning program is successful, the top managers of the organization must personally involved in developing and executing the organizational learning programs, like teachers in the grade school. They must recognize and nurture, but not manage, many informal social communities within or across the boundaries of the organization, which are the actual knowledge enabler in the oragnization.
How human brains learn?
As with a brain, organization collects and processes a large amount of information to stay in competitive edge. However, it is only one of many aspects of a brain could do. One of interesting feature of our brain is the way it expresses feeling...