Managing learning

The importance of learning is linked to the current pressures for change facing most, if not all, organizations. Within a stable, unpressured environment, the need for organizational learning on a major scale is seen as unnecessary. In fact, stable environments rarely exist, just environments which are perceived as unthreatening where organizations fail to detect the small signs of emerging change and threat or react to them confidentially in terms of established ways of doing things. The concept of managing learning implies that organizations encourage their staff to be better at recognizing key signals: at analysing data, at seeing possibilities, at thinking the unthought and the unthinkable, at challenging their own and others' assumptions. None of this is new, but the notion of the learning organization seems finally to have come of age. And with maturity come hard questions: can learning actually be managed by an organization or does it just happen?; does the definition of competencies clarify or confuse when recruiting, promoting and training staff?; why do some organizational norms quench learning, while others promote it as a way of life?; do self directed teams represent a