Editorial:

Learning how organisations learn. I have seen two documents recently talking about organisational learning in NGOs. One is the brochure sent out by Oxfam's "Development In Practice" journal, advertising their upcoming issue on organisational learning in NGOs. The other is a Discussion Paper by BOND on "NGOs and the Learning Organisation." Both papers make use of a very normative model of organisation learning. They both describe in some detail what are thought to be the attributes of an ideal organisation - in terms of learning. The trouble is that there is little empirical evidence that these ideal models are in fact an optimal form. Quite the contrary, the apparent rarity of these ideal forms, and the diversity of organisations that can be found around the world suggests that there may not really be an optimal form to aspire to. That is, unless these ideas about ideal organisations are relatively new discoveries, which seems unlikely. If we are going to learn how organisations learn then we need a much more descriptive approach, which looks at how organisations adapt, and proliferate, survive or fail, in different types of environments. For a critical but constructive overview of the literature on organisational learning up to 1998 see."Contending Perspectives on Organisational Learning", a chapter from my thesis on organisational learning in NGOs.(Posted 25/04/01)