Org. learning + managing change and conflict

Organizational learning in very simple words can be explained as the way that a company learns to process, adapt and react when there are changes in the environment, and with the information gathered from the inside and the outside the company they react to improve and provide a better service. The information derives from tact sources (like intuition or a felling) or from an explicit source (like financial information, political information, etc), if the organizational learning is done right this will reduce future conflicts created because of an adaptation problem.

There are four orientations to theorizing learning:

1. The behaviorist orientation refers to the use of an experiment procedure to study what is the relation between a behavior and how is affected by the environment.
2. The cognitive orientation they are concerned that in every environment an individual knows how to adapt and change.
3. The human orientation is centered around human growth (read Maslow and Rogers)
4. the social/situational orientation refers to how a community or organization act, a person adapt according to how a group acts

There are two process of managing change that is associated with organizational learning

1. Adaptive learning refers when organizational changes happen because of the environments
2. proactive learning is an organizational change that happen because of willful thinking

there are two theories that are very used when explaining org. learning, The single loop and double loop learning, in the single loop learning you reach a decision with the same reasoning all the time, but in the double loop learning, you change your reasoning in order to reach a solution to the problem, the reasoning can be considered as standard process that a company or person does to reaches a decision regarding a topic.




"Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous".
- Confucius.

"Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked".
- Lord Chesterfield


http://www.sfb504.uni-mannheim.de/glossary/orglearn.htm
http://www.infed.org/biblio/organizational-learning.htm#_Learning_in_organizations
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm#_Single-loop_and_double-loop