Stephen Billing’s Blog

I have said in previous posts that organisations can’t learn and that it doesn’t make sense to talk of learning organisations. It t is unsatisfactory to think only of individuals learning without considering the impact of the social nature of organisations and groups.

In my last post I claimed, following Ralph Stacey’s article Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People, (subscription required, unfortunately) that organisations cannot learn because they are nothing more than the patterns of interaction between human beings. They do not have a body, they do not have consciousness and so they cannot be said to learn. In other words it does not make much sense to talk about a learning organisation.

I also stated, together with Ralph, that to say that it is individuals who learn in organisations is also not satisfactory because it ignores the impact of social processes and the influence of others on us.

Ralph points out that one way around this issue is to say that it is both individuals and groups who learn. But saying that groups learn has the same problem as saying that organisations learn. A group, like an organisation, is the patterning of interaction amongst humans, and, as Ralph says, "patterns can neither think nor learn."   

Further, Ralph Stacey also makes the point that this amounts to saying that the group exists in a different place or on a different level from the people themselves. It is a separation of the group from the people, and, in the process, creates the notion of the group as a "thing" that exists outside the people and acts back on them at the same time as the group is made up of the people. It is like saying the group is a living organism, but, other than as a metaphor, a group does not have a living body – it does not have an existence of its own outside the interaction of the members of the group and a sense of belonging felt by the members of the group as a "we-identity."  This latter term is taken from the work of Norbert Elias.

To summarise, in my last post I said that it is unsatisfactory to say that individuals learn in groups or organisations, and that it is also unsatisfactory to say that organisations (or groups) can learn.

Now I am saying that it is also not satisfactory to say that both individuals and groups learn.

I want to propose an alternative based on Ralph Stacey’s work that does not create fanciful notions of organisations having bodies and being able to think and learn, while acknowledging the social nature of human experience in organisations and groups.

This alternative is the idea that learning is an activity of interdependent people. More to come.