 Today we are going to start our last module of the organization development and change in 21st century this course. This module has four lectures and the focus of all the four lectures are basically on some specific context. So, the context like non-industrial setting or small enterprises there we will be discussing the plethora of OD interventions which are relevant for a specific purpose or a specific context. So, this session is about organization learning, knowledge management and innovation. You can appreciate that organization learning and innovation are some of the most important capabilities of organization. The new form of industrial revolution which Peter Senge has explained says that in the new form of industrial revolution knowledge creation and learning are going to be the cornerstone of competitive advantage. In the long run competitive advantage can be sustained by the firms which can learn faster and better in comparison to their counterparts. So, we are going to look at organization learning and innovation in this module. Knowledge management is a tool or a mechanism which facilitates the organization learning and also facilitates the nurturance of innovation in organization. Before we start talking about organization learning or learning organizations, let us look at what learning is. So, learning is a natural process in living systems. All living systems demonstrate some type of learning. It is defined as a permanent change in behavior or a skill. Learning is also a process of acquiring new understanding, new knowledge. Learning is also acquiring values, attitudes and preferences. Learning happens at 3 levels, behavioral level, cognitive level and emotional level. Learning is essential process in adaptation, development and evolution. You might remember our discussion about the living system and one of the features of living system is feedback. All living systems receive feedback from their environment. What do they do with the feedback? Feedback helps them to learn something new and it is through the learning process they adapt to the environment. So, learning is essentially a knowledge creation process. Knowledge may remain with the learner or may or may not validate it or it may be shared and get validated and progress further through other social interactions and reflections. So, you can see that learning and knowledge creation are intertwined processes. Learning if remains to the individual level, the knowledge created in that process may also remain at the individual level. But when knowledge created through the individual learning process is disseminated when shared it becomes the property of collective system that collective system can be family, team or whole organization. So, we need to realize that relevance and possibility of organization learning has to be understood clearly because learning and knowledge creation are the cornerstone of competitive advantage for any organization. We have discussed in the previous session that organizations have to innovate, they have to adapt and they have to develop and wherever there is a process of adaptation and development learning is inevitable and knowledge creation is inevitable. Organization have to learn because they have to survive in this process, survive in the market and they have to grow in the market. In fact, in order to survive organizations have to constantly grow or constantly innovate in the market because there is there are always environmental factors including the competition which can make the organization redundant, which can make the product and services offered by organization less competitive in comparison to others. This lecture is getting recorded when world is facing the global pandemic. There can be no more crucial time than the current one to recognize the importance of organization learning when the whole world is dealing with this pandemic. Most of the organizations are struggling to either remain in the business or to restart their operations. Just to understand the scale of the pandemic some data points might be useful. For example, 4 out of 5 members of workforce around the world globally is affected by the lockdown caused by COVID-19 pandemic. There are huge losses are expected across different industries and these losses will far exceeds the effects of 2008-2009 financial crisis. The sectors most at risk include accommodation and food services, manufacturing, retail, business, administrative activities where employees are facing drastic and devastating increases in the layoffs, reduction in the wages and working hours. So, this is a time of crisis and this is the time where organizations have to learn very fast something which they have not learned earlier. So, there is no precedence of dealing with this kind of pandemic. Most of the organizations have to learn how to survive in this phase and how to come out of the recession and come out of this lockdown. So, the question is what is needed to deal with this global pandemic and restarting the operations? Organizations have to learn solving problems systematically. They need to adopt a scientific process data-driven process to solve their problems. There may not be a primary solution which is correct and effective as well. So, they have to experiment with new approaches to work. They have to experiment with new probable solutions. So, this is another very important aspect of dealing with this global pandemic. Organizations have to also learn from past which are the occasions where they faced some kind of crisis and how they came out of that. There might be some learning in reflecting about those past crisis or past situations as well. Organizations also have to learn from other companies. In a given industry, there must be some companies, some organizations which would be able to restart their operations much earlier and much faster than other organizations. Across the industry, organizations need to look at such exemplars and try to learn from them. These are very important points being identified by the experts being talked about by the experts in the current times. But these are the same points which David Garvin talked about in 1993 in his famous article on building a learning organization. We also need to look at the transferring knowledge throughout the organization. Some employees in the organizations, they might be at the interface, they might be more conscious, may learn the new processing system faster than others. It is important to identify the learning points by the organizations centrally, but also propagates those points expand that learning throughout the organization. So, there is discussion about organization learning and learning organization was popularized immensely by a very famous and successful book called The Fifth Discipline in Early 90s. This book was written by Professor Peter Senghi. He is the senior lecturer at MIT in Boston and he says that there are five disciplines or five practices, theories or methods which organizations have to follow in order to develop the core learning capabilities. So, there are three core learning capabilities identified by Peter Senghi. First one is fostering aspirations, second is developing reflective conversations and third is understanding complexity. In the next part of this session, we are going to talk about some of these components in more detail. So, five disciplines the learning organization talks about is personal mastery, mental model, shared vision, team learning and systems thinking. Now, we will try to understand all these five components one by one. So, personal mastery is discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, focusing our energies and developing patience to see the reality objectively. Personal mastery involves embracing the creative tension arising out of the difference between what is desirable state and what where we are. In that creative tension, personal mastery emerges if we reflect consciously about what is needed to fulfill that tension between what is required and what we are. Second component or second discipline of the of this book is about mental models. What are the mental models? Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations or pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. A correct understanding of who we are will enable us to visualize where to go and how to develop further. The organizations have to be flexible in accepting changes to new mental models and new image of the company. The most successful companies are those who can learn and adapt to new models to become faster than its competitors. We must understand that reality is socially constructed. Mentality many a time is precursor to reality. Mental model talks about the mentality and embracing the right kind of mentality to create a desirable reality. Third discipline Peter Singh talks about is shared vision. Organizational leaders might have vision. That vision might remain at their personal level. That vision may not get translated may not get transferred to the people in their teams or in their organization. Organizations which aspire to be learning organizations cannot afford to have visions to remain limited to few of the leaders and do not get translated or transferred to large number of employees and associates of the organization. In a learning organization vision must be created through interaction with the employees. Many leaders may have personal visions but if that lack transferring to the collective level organization may not develop a shared vision. The only way to create a shared vision is by compromising the organizations and individuals visions. People who do not share the same vision might not contribute as much to the organization. The effect of sharing the same vision is that employees do task because they want to do so instead of they are told to do so. It changes the relationship with company and it turns its performance in a learning mechanism. It result into a practice of unearthing shared pictures of future and that fosters the genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. Just by giving instructions by ensuring compliance no organization can afford no organization can think about becoming a learning organization. Learning organization requires commitment of their people and that requires that commitment requires a shared vision. If they are driven by a shared vision employees will contribute wholeheartedly to realize the potential of organization. For the discipline in learning organization is about team learning. To accomplish excellent functional team dynamics team learning is very important. Team learning is something by which personal mastery and shared vision are brought together. It is crucial for the workforce to consider its colleagues as team players instead of their rivals. It is the first step to set up dialogues wherein people dare to be vulnerable and express their real personality. The working environment must be safe where honest mistakes are forgiven otherwise no learning can be experienced. Teams are the basic constituents of the organization. Now we see more and more organizations are adapting the organization design which is team based. Teams not the individuals are increasingly recognized as the functional units of the organization. If teams learn organizations can learn. Fifth and perhaps the most distinguishable aspect of work of Peter Senge is systems thinking that simply means instead of focusing on individual issues systems thinking is about reflecting about the whole system. Considering the whole system in order to make a decision decision making not solely based on individual benefits individual performance management system team performance or even the department performance. Whenever a decision is to be made individuals or employees in the organization must be capable of seeing the implication of that discipline at the organizational level or even beyond the organizational level that is what Peter Senge calls systemic level. Many times it happens that managers focus on individual actions and therefore forget about seeing the big picture. When executives and managers are not able to see the correlation between organizational outcome and individual outcome they may not be able to make the most appropriate decisions. So, executives and managers must understand the cause and effect of their work at the systemic level. So, these are the five factors based on which the learning organizations can be created. The discourse of Peter Senge is at the organizational level that is why the title is learning organization. But in due course two more terms have come up these are organizational learning and learning in organization. Organizational learning is also a collective level process based on individual and group level processes. So, learning in organization means individuals, teams, departments and functions learning individually and together. So, organizational learning is the term used at the organizational level learning process. Now the question is what are the processes and activities through which learning organizations can be created? We again go back to the work of David Garvin he suggested few ways of building learning organizations first of them is solving problems systematically. You might remember we discussed about the action learning and we also talked about the action research. You might remember that action research is actually operating on the field on the real life problem, but working as a scientist what does that mean? It means collecting data systematically developing our hypothesis making the if it is about the organization development then making the OD intervention collecting the data again and testing our hypothesis whether it support whether it is being supported by data or not. If it is supported by the data we can continue with that intervention if it is not supported by the data we need to think we need to re-examine our assumptions we need to re-examine the data or we have to we might have to collect the new data to identify what are the challenges and problems and accordingly we can redesign the OD intervention. So, this is a scientific way of going about the OD intervention which we follow in the action research and that is what probably Thomas Garvin is talking about when he is advocating this solving problem systematically. So, instead of relying on the gut feeling or untested assumptions we need to rely on the hypothesis development data gathering testing hypothesis by using appropriate tools those appropriate tools can be various they can be quantitative as well as qualitative. I will give two three examples here. Six sigma process is something which many of you must be familiar to. Six sigma process is used to standardize any process and it goes through five stages. First we have to define the problem that problem definition has to be in the context of the customers meaning how customer experiences that problem the customer can be internal as well as external customers. Based on that definition we have to do the appropriate measurement what are the indicators of the efficiency or standardization of that process accordingly we have to measure the specific aspects of that process. Then data has to be analyzed data analysis is done based on various quantitative methods then improvement is identified improvement is in introduced in the process and if the improvement is correct and if the data suggests that improvement is effective then controlling the other processes and controlling the situation controlling the extraneous variables to ensure that a standardized process is being followed. Lean is another process lean management philosophy is based on reducing the waste there are eight types of waste or muda lean philosophy talks about like defects over production waiting non-utilized talents transportation inventory motion extra processing etc. Six sigma and lean can be practiced together that is called lean Six Sigma that has become a very important intervention to ensure that organization keeps learning and keep innovating. This is one example there can be multiple examples of the systematic problem solving approaches there are some great examples like GE general electricals which has implemented Six Sigma process in most of its companies in most of its functions including HR function. There is also an example of Toyota which has implemented lean Six Sigma in a very effective way. Toyota is considered one of the fastest learning organizations another example is of the Xerox. Xerox as an organization has ensured that wide range of the problem solving in creative thinking tools are being taught to their employees. Tools can be as simple as force field analysis of fishbone diagram and it can be as complex as we use in the machine learning and other sophisticated statistical statistics based analysis. What is important in all the three cases the GE Toyota or Xerox that they have adopted different approaches for solving problems systematically but they have after choosing one approach they have propagated that idea propagated that approach across the organization. The greatest benefit of using one method across the organization or using one philosophy or approach across the organization is that people use same language they understand when they use same language they are able to understand each other better. They are understanding about the problem and the probable solution and ways of achieving those solutions also become little more uniform and that helps in building the synergy. So, there can be various OD interventions about systematic problem solving but it is important to integrate them within across the culture of the organization.