"The term 'Organisational learning' is, strictly speaking, false: organisations cannot learn - only people can learn". Walsh and Ungson (1991)

If this is the case, the idea that an organisation is more than the sum of its parts is also strictly speaking, false. Whilst the process of learning requires cognition, and this is a human attribute, my view is that organisations can and do learn. To say otherwise would be to suggest that the football team does not score a goal, or that a Formula One racing team do not win a race. Organisational objectives are beyond the reach of individuals.

Chris Argyris ('On Organisational Learning' - 1999) states that "Organisations do not perform the actions that produce the learning. It is individuals acting as agents of organisations who produced the behaviour that leads to learning". The ability to learn is a predisposition, not a given. While most of us like to think that we are thinking, in reality, very few of us do.

Learning does not require us to think however, only to acquire ability or capability. Certain individual high flyers, once removed from their organisational incubators are unable to reproduce their performance elsewhere. The learning organisation, one assumes, must be capable of collectively learning from the collective mistakes that it makes. Just because an organisation is comprised in large part from tacit knowledge that can get up and walk away, doesn't mean that it's not capable of learning. In a large organisation, the strategy makers don't always know what the shop floor are up to, at least not all the time, and they have to be able to take it for granted. They use business models for cognition of their business just as they use 'world models' for cognition of their role in life.

It could be argued that ideas are in themselves a single entity, and that only those minds that are receptive to them will assimilate them. Group behaviour such as that seen in Mi Li during the Vietnam conflict and elsewhere, muddies the idea of individuality, explained away by 'groupthink' and 'mob mentality'.

That may be so, but surely it boils down to a question of levels of entity. Strictly, an individual is not a single entity, but a collection of thoughts, pre-dispositions, attachments, weaknesses, capabilities, futures, commitments, fears, past achievements, strengths etc. Is it the intangible nature of this collection that leads us to arbitrarily collect them into 'one individual'? We tend to think of a person as a tangible being, whereas in reality the parts of you that you would really describe as 'you' are not in general physical. Similarly, an organisation comprises many intangible elements that are embodied by our perception of the organisation.

So…do organisations learn?

Any thoughts?

Chris