The evolutionary success story of humans is that they “put their heads together” (Michael Tomasello). In our opinion, this also applies to effective organizational learning.
From Alexander Klier and Siegfried Lautenbacher
(German version can be found here)
Organizational learning with impact
At this point, we would like to comment on a megatopic that is clearly articulated in the form of requests for help: the previous or classic corporate learning no longer works. Various phenomena are cited as evidence, such as the lack of willingness on the part of employees to attend the seminars on offer and, above all, the ever-increasing transfer problem, i.e. the failure to transfer this knowledge to the respective practice in the company.
All the attempts — especially in the area of e-learning — to make learning as pleasant as possible for the individual (learner journey), to reward learning progress (gamification) and finally to break down learning itself into the smallest steps (bite-sized learning), so that it can be completed even 5 minutes before the end of the working day, are considered by us to be extremely problematic support in this regard. In the end, according to the providers, it is even a matter of reinventing learning itself. This creates a lot of learning myths, because the problem is not the people involved at all (see Klier 2020).
In our view, the almost exclusive focus on individuals makes them responsible for a dilemma that arises at the level of the organization’s structures — and can only be solved there. Now, it is no secret that we at Beck et al. have always taken a different perspective regarding the idea of social collaboration. In the meantime, however, empirical evidence also shows that the associated social learning is a central prerequisite for effective learning in an organizational context.
With this food for thought on how to get back to effective organizational learning, we want to reignite and hopefully enrich the debate. To this end, we will formulate a few theses at the end.
Behaviorism, again?
“Programmed instruction and teaching machines — these are concepts that are almost one hundred years old” (Watters 2017).
Learner journey, gamification, learning reinforcement, forgetting machines, or simply quizzes and rewards are wonderful terms in the field of corporate learning. Unfortunately, they — along with the multiple-choice tests that go with them — are not coincidentally reminiscent of the learning theory of behaviorism. In the field of e-learning and corporate learning, behaviorism is making a merry comeback. This can be seen in the example of “microlearning” as well as in “learning-enhancing” quizzes. That’s why everyone is now clamoring for gamification, the extrinsic rewards that behaviorism presupposes for learning success.
Behaviorist learning theory is neither fundamentally wrong nor new. The theoretical idea behind it is that people learn as “learning machines”, programmed in the smallest units of time and in the smallest steps. The blueprint for organizational learning processes that follows behaviorism provides organizations with an industrialized notion of learning — very much in the spirit of the Taylorist operational organization.
However, if it is consistently transferred to organizational structures, this leads to extremely problematic structural course-setting in the design of corporate learning. We would like to refer to the processes behind this as the in-depth structure of organizational learning. From our point of view, organizational learning is therefore structurally, i.e. blueprint- and thus complexity-related, in an extremely awkward position, because the in-depth structure no longer fits the current challenges.
Very quickly after behaviorism, there was a further development of learning theories in the form of cognitivist, constructivist and finally social possibility of how people learn. Much of organizational learning no longer fits together. Especially because behaviorism never really worked in the organizational context because it only covers a very specific part of human learning (predominantly memorization & retention).
Knowledge expropriation and systematic isolation
“If there is something fundamentally blocking self-determined work and learning, it is ultimately not the lack of intellectual openness and curiosity on the part of individuals, but the underlying DNA of the organization itself” (Lindner 2017).
The fact that employees and learners systematically do not (or no longer) participate in organizational learning is not because they are not still willing to learn. It is just that they behave quite rationally in relation to their previous organizational experiences. This experience consists, for example, in a structural “knowledge expropriation” because management decides what is to be learned in the organization. In addition, there is the experience of a systematic isolation of learners in the organizational structures, which does not fit at all with the new paradigm of agile collaboration in teams.
The expropriation of knowledge, which is caused by the structure and intended by the management (often totally unreflectively), in turn constitutes a systematic disenfranchisement in learning at the level of the in-depth structure of organizational learning. Due to the specific process design, other or external persons (in their own departments, such as the HR department) determine what the learners have to or should learn.
In our view, however, it is even more consequential that the learning goals or what is to be learned have been constantly decontextualized and torn out of the context of collaboration through isolation. After all, Taylorist collaboration is a hierarchy-determined form of collaboration among individuals, not self-determined collaboration in a group. Supposedly, therefore, the learning contents are also interchangeable. At any rate, they currently have nothing to do with concrete collaboration in a team or at the workplace.
Both are accompanied by a clear break in self-determination in learning and a lack of meaning in learning efforts. Here, it does not help either to want to “take” those affected along or to hand them suitable learning materials — or even to “take them by the hand” right away. All these things only lead to further systematic disenfranchisement, because, to stay with the structural question, it is not a question, for example, of enabling self-determination over the learning process, and at the workplace at that.
In our view, focusing on the individual is simply the completely wrong way to go. Intrinsic motivation for relevant courses cannot be achieved in this way either. Rather, it is a matter of shifting learning (back) into the collaborative context, i.e., of organizing learning in a meaningful way via collaboration in groups and teams. For us, the sense of meaning and purpose, not the reward, represent the productive opportunities of individual learning because they intrinsically motivate.
New learning?
“Once we have learned something, we can unlearn it. But once understood, we cannot ununderstand it” (Beck 2017).
Anthropologically, humans, as a standard biological endowment, so to speak, and thus contrary to behaviorist theories of learning, have an intrinsic motivation to learn. And they even have it throughout their lives. However, this intrinsic motivation cannot be activated automatically in the organizational context, because it requires corresponding structures and rules, such as the self-determination in learning already mentioned.
If we now follow the basic anthropological assumptions further, then human learning has not really changed since about 40,000 years ago. This means that what needs to be rethought is not learning, understood as the ever-present competence of individuals per se, but actually the learning processes that are intended to support certain kinds of learning, or the learning structures that result in the setting.
Productive learning opportunities can certainly be realized through a variety of methods, which we will call, in distinction to in-depth structure, sight patterns. However, learning effectiveness only results when the structures and processes of the organization fit the methods. In other words, only when the depth structure of organizational learning, understood as a collaborative opportunity for self-determined learning and shared thinking, is methodically paired with the meaningfulness of individual learning, does effective organizational learning become possible for us.
Organizational learning with impact
“It strikes me as a little odd that we seem happy to devote so much energy into defining what we do, yet seem to spend less time thinking about why we do it or, more to the point, who we are doing it for” (Harris 2018).
So what might effective organizational learning be more specifically? A common definition of being effective is something like having an intended effect or making a difference with success. Both aim to achieve a meaning or purpose that is-or should be-associated with an action.
Further, this purpose of action, in our view, is fundamentally related to the organization and the collaboration within it, because it is about being able to do the work reasonably. In this respect, it is also fundamentally about collaborative goals that can be pursued by effective organizational learning.
From this, we can now indicate some very concrete design tasks, which we would like to present for discussion in the form of theses.
1. Effective organizational learning must start with the in-depth structures, i.e. the teaching-learning processes in an organization that are not so easily observable. These have “greater explanatory power for learning success than the sight patterns” (Trautwein, Sliwka & Dehmel 2018, p. 2).
2. Effective organizational learning must first and foremost provide collaborative structures (i.e., organize something) so that the individual learning purpose is achieved or the meaning of learning can be grasped and acted upon by individuals.
3. Sense making learning is profoundly a group phenomenon and is clearly different from a behavioristically conceived “retention” in memory. It can only emerge where the purpose is also implemented, i.e. in the context of the particular use case.
4. Collaborative learning, understood as a very real opportunity to put heads together, ensures that employees are intrinsically motivated to tackle learning tasks. Communities of practice are the repeatedly important empirical example of this.
5. The organization must provide the structures and freedom to think together, for example, in order to solve a problem. Only then can something new, something not yet thought about, i.e., new knowledge, emerge.
6. The design of the organizational or individual setting in such a way that independent thinking becomes possible again — and not always only what has already been thought is presented — is a digital challenge for educators and didactic experts, but not of e-learning, learning snippets or webinars.
7. It can also be fun to develop your own ideas collaboratively and test them out together. However, this is not available for free and after the day’s work is done. It is an achievement of the organization to guarantee free space and thinking time for this during the working day.
We are looking forward to the reactions!
Literature used
● Beck, H. (2017): Lernen ist gut, verstehen besser. Text verfügbar unter https://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/trends/entzauberte-mythen-lernen-ist-gut-verstehen-besser/19241822.html
● Harris, T. (2018): Let’s ditch 70/20/10 and all L&D mantras. Beitrag verfügbar unter https://learn.filtered.com/thoughts/lets-ditch-70/20/10-and-all-ld-mantras
● Klier, A. (2020): Lerndogmen und Bildungsmythen. Erscheint in: Schmidt/Killait — Schulleitung / Ein Lernsystem Bd. 4. 34. Ergänzungslieferung, LE 41.04
● Lindner, M. (2017): Anmerkung als Moderator im Disqus Thread des Corporate Learning Moocs 2017 / Viessmann Woche. Abrufbar unter
● Trautwein, U.; Sliwka, A. & Dehmel, A. (2018): Grundlagen für einen wirksamen Unterricht. Wirksamer Unterricht — Band 1. Verfügbar unter:
● Watters, A. (2017): Driverless Ed-Tech: The History of the Future of Automation in Education. Blogbeitrag verfügbar unter http://hackeducation.com/2017/03/30/driverless
