All Posts Tagged With: "learning organization"
Baldrige Model: How do you manage information, knowledge and information technology?
Item 4.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you build and manage your knowledge assets. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
- Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
- Managing organizational knowledge
- Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
- Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies
Best practices to consider:
- The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
- In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
- Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.
Common problems areas:
- The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
- Knowledge is lost when employees leave the…
KEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
Learning is a keystone in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational and personal learning is one of 11 Baldrige core values, and learning is one of four factors used to evaluate every process. According to the Criteria, “learning refers to:
- refining your approach through cycles of evaluation and improvement
- encouraging breakthrough change to your approach through innovation
- sharing refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization”
Plan-Do-Check-Act is a learning cycle. Organizations in which PDCA is a natural part of how they do things are learning organizations. “Organizations that have acquired the learning habit are endlessly seeking new methods or new products, forever testing and then reflecting, consciously or unconsciously pushing round that wheel,” wrote Charles Handy in Learning Organizations (Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, 1995).
Creating a learning organization means creating a climate in which learning is encouraged, assisted, applauded, and rewarded. It also means engaging employees in the learning process. Peter Senge, one of the gurus of systems thinking and learning organizations, wrote in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, “People learn most rapidly when they have a genuine sense of responsibility for their actions. Helplessness, the belief that we cannot influence the circumstances under which we live, undermines the incentive…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLean and Baldrige
In “Lean Projects Are Defined by Lean Behaviors,” Hal, the author of the article, writes, “Lean is a mindset. It’s not a set of practices.” The same is true for Baldrige. He points out how lean has “a constant focus on learning…learning from everything that happens on an everyday basis. Lean companies are learning faster than their competitors.” That’s also true of Baldrige companies: Organizational and personal learning is a Baldrige core value.
I saw the parallels between Lean and Baldrige a few years ago when I contributed to a book on Lean called The Antidote: How to Transform your Business for the Extreme Challenges of the 21st Century. The book’s authors, Anand Sharma and Gary Hourselt, are senior leaders at TBM Consulting Group, a global leader in business performance improvement and the effective implementation of Lean. In a section of the book that defines transformational management systems, Sharma and Hourselt seem to be describing a Baldrige organization:
19Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThey execute superbly. To integrate a new management system, an organization has to change. Roles and responsibilities change. Expectations change. The culture changes. To successfully manage this change, companies must execute their plans day after day, month after month, and year after year. This isn’t another…
