The Challenge of Implementing Organizational Learning and What Organizations Can Learn from It

This paper shows how the theoretical view of learning as a pervasive, systemic and complex activity taking place in a specific ecology is often challenged by existing assumptions about what learning is and by various constraints aimed at 'streamlining' and reducing complexity in the name of 'organizational optimization.' This dynamic is shown through the specific example of how a large IT corporation set about developing and commercializing a distance learning application predicated on collaborative learning theories, at a time when the prevailing distance learning pedagogies revolved around solitary self-study. Even more than the specific outcome, the complexity of the uneasy interweaving of individual and collaborative paradigms is the best proof of how limiting it is to consider learning exclusively as an individual, private act. Understanding the irreducible complexity of an organization's engagement with learning and its implications is in itself a process of organizational learning