Learning to learn

Just come across an old article by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn on the TrainingZone website, challenging L&D practitioners to check whether their organisation is really learning, or just has a fixation on training. Taking an "out-of-frame" viewpoint, they encourage looking across the whole organisation to search for learning and growth rather than focusing on the training department as the starting point - trying to look at the whole organisational system from the outside.

Where does real learning happen in the organisation ... in the training room or in the workplace - you probably know the real answer to that. And how does the organisation facilitate this learning - where are the encouragements to network outside the department, where are the means to quickly find corporate knowledge, where are the systems to record and re-use learnings? There are web 2.0 solutions for this, that the article seems to recommend, but there are older means of encouraging learning without focusing on the technology.  The culture of the organisation is the key to inspiring (or disabling) learning ... does your organisation have a learning disability (as Senge described the problem) or does it truly empower individuals to experiment, challenge norms, fail, learn from the failures and grow from the successes?

The challenge to L&D now seems to go beyond training, into helping your workers learn how to learn. Teach them to fish instead of spoon-feeding them fish ... to generate the new learning organisation.