Transcript Slide 1

MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING
CE 726 – STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT OF CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES
LEARNING ORGANIZATIONS
Nizami ÖZÇELİK - 1623156
Can Barış AĞBAY - 1492974
OUTLINE
• Learning Notion
• What is Learning Organization?
• Basics of Learning in Learning Organizations
• Founders of Learning Organization Concept
• Organizational Learning in Construction Industry
• How Construction Companies Learn
• Strategic Role of Organizational Learning
• Obstacles to Becoming a LO in Construction Sector
• The Learning Organization Audit
INTRODUCTION
 A world of rapid and accelerating change in today’s markets
 These organizations must learn as fast as their environment
changes in order to stay relevant and competitive.
 Learning organization develops due to changes and
pressures of modernization of the human and organizational
life cycle
 Being better placed to respond to external pressures
 Having the knowledge to better link resources to customer
needs
Learning Notion
 Gaining experience and taking lessons from experiences
Chris Argyris
 A relatively permanent change in behavior that results from
practice
Atkinson et al.
 Learning process could be achieved by various methods
with different percentages of retention.
The National Training Laboratories created a learning
pyramid illustrates the percentage of learning retention
Learning Notion
 Learning approaches were shifted in the latter half of 20th
century that is giving rise to existing new fields such as;
• Active learning
• Collaborative learning
• Organizational learning
 “This shift eliminates the separation of teacher from student
and replaces it with dialogue between teacher and student to
encourage joint responsibility for learning and growth.”
Burkey (1997)
Learning Notion
 Shana Ratner (1997) explains that this shift, from thinking
of learning as a transaction to learning as process.
Old Answers (~1980s)
New Answers (~2000s)
Knowledge is a “thing that is transferred
Knowledge is a relationship b/w the knower
from one person to another.
and the known
We all learn in the same way.
There are many different learning styles.
We learn best passively, by listening and
We learn best by actively doing and
watching.
managing our own learning.
We learn alone, with our minds, based on
We learn in social contexts, through mind,
our innate abilities.
body, and emotions.
Our “intelligence” is based on our individual Our intelligence is based on our learning
abilities.
community.
What is Learning Organization?
 A company that facilitates the learning of its members and
continuously transforms itself
 People are in a continuous search for new and better ways
to adapt to change and improve performance.
 Learning organization enables organizations to sustain
competitive position in the business environment.
Traditional vs Learning Organization
What is Learning Organization?
According to Peter M. Senge, an organization where;
 People continually expand their capacity to create the
results they truly desire
 New and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured
 Collective aspiration is set free
 Anwhere people are continually learning how to learn
What is Learning Organization?
Rowden (2001) states that a organization in which;
 Everyone is engaged in solving problems, enabling the
organization to continuously experiment, change, and improve
 Increasing its capacity to grow, learn, and achieve its
purpose
What is Learning Organization?
Garvin (1993) tells that learning organizations are
specialists at 5 activities:
 Systematically problem solving
 Testing for new approaches
 Learning from own past experiences
 Learning from others’ experiences and successful
applications
 Transferring knowledge to each member of organization
rapidly
Basics of Learning in Learning Organizations
 The smallest elements of organizations are persons and
learning process starts from persons.
 Individual learning is the basic of the learning by group.
Individuals turn towards a common aim and share personal
knowledge.
 After personal learning, learning by groups comes into play.
Further, the results reached by group learning should be
transmitted to all members of organization and OL could be
achieved.
Learning Loop in Learning Organizations
Founders of Learning Organization Concept
 Sandra Courter states that in literature and conversations
with practitioners, the authors whose names came up again
and again as "founders" of this approach are;
• Chris Argyris,
• Donald Schön,
• Margaret Wheatley , and
• Peter Senge
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
 Chris Argyris
The father of organizational learning
 Donald Schön
Harvard scholar of Chris Argyris
 They identified two methods as the theories of action. The
theories of action are divided into two parts:
• Espoused Theory: Are essentially the words individuals
use to convey what it is we do or would others to think we
do in a particular situation.
• Theories-in-use: Are the theories that govern the actual
behavior of what we do in a particular situation.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
 Argyris and Schön addressed the issue of learning by
developing two distinctions which involve the methods
individuals solve problems.
• Single Loop Learning: Routine learning which involves
individuals solving problems within structured guidelines.
• Double Loop Learning: Questioning the structured
guidelines and determining if they are indeed the best
method for resolving the issue.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
 Argyris states “double loop learning is necessary if
organizations are to make informed decisions in rapidly
changing and often uncertain contexts”
 With the purpose of illustrating this view, Argyris and Schön
developed two models:
• Model I: Inhibiting double loop learning
• Model II: Enhance double loop learning
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
 Model I: Making inferences about behaviors without
checking whether they are valid and advocating one’s view
without explanation.
 Model I is found harmful to organizations in that it leads to
defensive routines which are governed by 4 basic principles:
1) To remain in unilateral control;
2) Maximizing “winning” and minimize “losing”;
3) Suppressing negative feelings; and
4) To be as rational as possible.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
 Model II: Calling upon good quality data and to make
inferences. It looks to include the views and experiences of
participants rather than seeking to impose a view upon the
situation.
 Argyris argues that Model II fosters productive reasoning.
Despite the challenges of breaking individuals away from
defensive reasoning, it is not impossible.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön
To sum up, Argyris and Schön call for;
 The adjustment of the thinking and behavior to ensure that
the best possible outcome is achieved at the individual level.
 Individuals must not fear failure or become defensive when
encountering new challenges
 Persons should question old theories and must instead
embraces the possibility of learning.
Margaret Wheatley
Wheatley offers these core ideas:
1. Everything is a constant process of discovery and
creating.
2. Life is intent on finding what works, not what is right.
3. Life is attracted to order.
4. Life organizes around identity.
5. Everything participates in the creation and evolution of
its neighbors.
Margaret Wheatley
 Using a spider's web as a metaphor, Wheatley demonstrates
how organizations are living entities and that learning
strengthen their structure.
“... feeling its resiliency, noticing how slight pressure in one
area jiggles the entire web. If a web breaks and needs repair, the
spider doesn't cut out a piece, terminate it. She reweaves it, using
the silken relationships that are already there, creating stronger
connections across the weakened spaces. We have not yet
learned how to be together.”
Peter M. Senge - FIFTH DISCIPLINE
 System Thinking
 Personal Mastery
 Building Shared Vision
 Mental Models
 Team Learning
• Challenging since integrate new tools than
simply apply them separately. That is
the
reason why system thinking is the fifth
discipline.
• Brings and integrates other disciplines.
• Create an assemble logic for theory and
practice.
• Focusing on whole pattern of change
instead of snapshots of isolated parts of
the systems. In fact, not only manage the
results, it manages the the process as well.
System thinking requires; the disciplines of building shared
vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to
realize its potential. Building shared vision helps to think, plan, act, and
behave in the long term. Mental models focus on the openness
required to root out drawbacks in our present ways of seeing the
world. Team learning improves the skills of groups of people to
look for the whole picture that lies beyond individual perspectives.
And personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually
learn how our actions influence our world.
Systems Thinking
System thinking makes understandable the elusive and
subtle aspect of the learning organization. Individuals
perceive themselves and their world. A shift of mind is the
critical point of learning organization such as from seeing
ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world,
from seeing problems as caused by someone or something "out
there" to seeing how our own actions create the problems
we experience.
How To Read System Diagram
•
The key to seeing reality systemically is seeing
circles of influence rather than straight lines.
•
Breaking out of the reactive mindset that
comes inevitably from "linear" thinking.
•
Every circle tells a story. Any change made to the
faucet position will alter the flow of water. As
the water level changes, the perceived gap
(between the current and desired water levels)
changes. As the gap changes, my hand's position
on the faucet changes again.
•
When reading a feedback circle diagram, the main
skill is to see the "story" that the diagram tells:
how the structure creates a particular pattern of
behavior (or, in a complex structure, several
patterns of behavior) and how that pattern might
be influenced.
•
Personal Mastery
 Individual learning does not guarantee
organizational learning. But without it
organizational learning would not occur.
 Kazua Inomari, says whether it is research and
development, company management, or any
other aspect of business, the active force is
"people." And people have their own will, their
own mind, and their own way of thinking.
If the employees themselves are not sufficiently
motivated to challenge the goals of growth and
technological development, there will simply be
no growth, no gain in productivity, and no
technological development.
 continually expanding ability to create the
results in life we look for and want.
Personal Mastery
 Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills
 It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening.
 Approaching one's life as a creative work, living life from
a creative as opposed to reactive viewpoint.
 A series practices and principles such as personal
vision, holding creative tension, structural
conflict,
commitment
to
truth,
using
subconscious.
 Personal vision comes from within. We have goals
and objectives, but these are not visions. The ability to
focus on ultimate desires, not only on secondary
goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery as having
vision. Therefore, idea of purpose is important to
understand the real vision.
 Most directly a result of living consistently with your
purpose. This is a critic for personal mastery.
Personal Mastery
 The principle of creative tension is the central
principle of personal mastery.
 Creative tension can appear when you bring the
vision and a clear picture of current reality to
juxtaposition. The significance of personal mastery is
learning how to generate and sustain creative
tension in our lives.
 not mean acquiring more information, but expanding
the ability to produce the results .
 Need lifelong generative learning.
 learning organizations are not possible unless they
have people at every level who practice it.
Personal Mastery
 Many people, even highly successful people, harbor
deep beliefs contrary to their personal mastery.
 these beliefs are below the level of conscious
awareness.
 hold one of two contradictory beliefs that limit our
ability to create what we really want.
 powerlessness—our inability to bring into being
all the things we really care about.
 unworthiness—that we do not deserve to have
what we truly desire.
Personal Mastery
 Robert Fritz uses a metaphor to describe how contradictory underlying beliefs
work as a system, counter to achieving our goals.
 Imagine, as you move toward your goal, there is a rubber band,
symbolizing creative tension, pulling you in the desired direction.
 But imagine also a second rubber band, anchored to the belief of
powerlessness or unworthiness. Just as the first rubber band tries to pull you
toward your goal, the second pulls you back toward the underlying belief
that you can't (or don't deserve to) have your goal. Fritz calls the system
involving both the tension pulling us toward our goal and the tension
anchoring us to our underlying belief "structural conflict," because it
is a structure of conflicting forces: pulling us simultaneously toward and
away from what we want.
Personal Mastery
 Commitment to the truth often seems to people an inadequate
strategy.
 not mean seeking the "Truth," the absolute final word or ultimate
cause.
 root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing
what is.
 It means continually broadening our awareness.
 When personal mastery is realized as a discipline—an activity we
integrate into our lives—it involves two underlying movements. The
first is continually clarifying what is important to us. We often
spend too much time coping with problems along our path that we
forget why we are on that path, in the first place. The second is
continually learning how to see current reality more clearly.
We've all known people have in counterproductive relationships, who
remain stuck since they behave as pretending everything is all right.
Personal Mastery
 mastery means a special level of proficiency.
 People with a high level of personal mastery are able to
consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to
them in effect.
 They approach their life as an artist would approach a work of
art, by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
 The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the
things that really matter to us, of living our lives in line
with our highest aspirations.
Mental Models
 Many brilliant ideas do not get put into practice most of
time. Best ideas and strategies fail to get translated into
action. This is not due to weak intention, wavering will or
non systematic understanding but from mental models.
Particularly, new insights fail to get put into practice because
they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world
works. Those images limit us to familiar ways of thinking and
acting. Therefore, managing mental models as a discipline surfacing, testing and improving our internal pictures
of how the world works- promises to be a major
breakthrough for building learning organizations.
 Why are mental models so powerful in affecting what we do?
In part, they affect what we see. As Albert Einstein once
wrote, "Our theories determine what we measure." For
many years, physicists ran experiments that contradicted
classical physics, yet no one "saw" the data that these
experiments eventually provided, leading to the revolutionary
theories—quantum mechanics and relativity—of twentiethcentury physics.
Mental Models
 The inertia of deeply entrenched mental models can overwhelm even the
best systemic insights.
 To illustrate, business skills and interpersonal issues, sides of the
discipline, are very important. On the other hand, most of managers are
inherently pragmatic. They are motivated and willingness to learn when they
need to learn in business context. Training them in mental modeling or
"balancing inquiry and advocacy," with no connection to pressing business
issues, will often be rejected. On the other hand, without the
interpersonal skills, learning is still fundamentally adaptive, not
generative. Generative learning requires managers with reflection and
inquiry skills, not just consultants and planners. Then, the individuals with
groups in whole organization realize the learning within an assemble cycle.
Mental Models
 To sum up, mental models are deeply ingrained
assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures
of images that influence how we take action. Very
often, we are not consciously aware of our mental
models or the effects that they have on our behavior.
 Many insights into new markets or outmoded
organizational practices fail to get put into practice
because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental
models.
 Institutional learning is the process whereby people
change their shared mental models of the company,
their markets, and their competitors.
Building Shared Vision
 A shared vision is not just an idea.
 It is like attractive force in people's hearts, a force off

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



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impressive power.
Once it is realized, then it is no longer an abstraction.
It is concrete. People begin to see it as if it exists.
Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as
shared vision.
Answer to the question, "What do we want to create?"
Create
sense of commonality that permeates the
organization and gives coherence to diverse activities.
truly share a vision
common aspiration.
creates energy with focusing on the things.
While adaptive learning is possible without vision,
generative learning occurs only when people are
striving to accomplish something that matters and
carries a meaning deeply to them. In fact, the whole
idea of generative learning—"expanding your ability to
create"—truly want to accomplish. will seem abstract
and meaningless until people become excited about
some vision they
Building Shared Vision
 Encourage members to develop their personal visions as building
shared vision. Knowing that if individuals do not have their own
vision, they can only adapt and sign up for someone else’s vision.
This causes a result which is compliance, not commitment.
 As a metaphor, hologram, can be given. if you cut a photograph in
half, each part shows only one part of the whole image. But if you
divide a hologram, each part shows the whole image intact. Similarly,
as you continue to divide up the hologram, no matter how small the
divisions, each piece still shows the whole image. Likewise, when a
group of people come to share a vision for an organization, each person
sees his own picture of the organization at its best. Each shares
responsibility for the whole, not just for his piece. But the component
"pieces" of the hologram are not identical. Each represents the
whole image from a different point of view
Building Shared Vision
 Senge states that “visions spread because of a
reinforcing process of increasing clarity,
enthusiasm, communication and commitment.
 As people talk, the vision grows clearer. As it
gets clearer, enthusiasm for its benefits builds.
And soon, the vision starts to spread in a
reinforcing spiral of communication and
excitement. Enthusiasm can also be reinforced
by early successes in pursuing the vision”. It is
represented in the below figure. If the
reinforcing process continues, it would lead to
growth in clarity and shared commitment
toward vision as more people join.
Building Shared Vision
 However, any kind of limiting factors can come into play to slow down
this cycle.
 To illustrate, as the number of people increases, number of
different views grows as well. This would generate unmanageable
conflict. This is called as a classic "limits to growth" structure,
where the reinforceing process of growing enthusiasm for the vision
interacts with "balancing process" that limits the spread of the
visions, due to increasing diversity and polarization.
Team Learning
 Relatively unaligned team waste energy.
 Aligned
with commonality of direction, individuals’ energies
harmonize. As a result, there would be much less wasted energy.

There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision,
understanding of how to complement one another's efforts.
and
 Alignment as a whole team is the requirement condition before
empowering the individual.
 Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low
level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing
the team even more difficult.
Team Learning
 Need for mastering team learning in organizations.
 Individual learning, at some level, would not be so important for
organizational learning. But if teams learn, they become a microcosm
for learning throughout the organization. However, it is known that
team skills are more challenging to develop than individual
skills. This is why learning teams need "practice fields," ways to
practice together so that they can develop their collective learning
skills.
 The almost total absence of meaningful "practice“ is probably the
predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being
effective learning units.
Team Learning
Team learning has three critical dimensions.
1. thinking insightfully about complex issues. Teams ought to know
that potential for many minds is more intelligent than one mind.
2. need for innovative coordinated action. Outstanding teams in
organizations develop the same sort of relationship—an "operational
trust," where each team member remains conscious of other team
members and act in ways that complement each others' actions.
3. role of team members on other teams. For example, most of the
actions of senior teams are actually carried out through other teams.
Thus, a learning team continually fosters other learning teams
through inculcating the practices and skills of team learning
more broadly.
Team Learning
 The discipline of team learning involves mastering the practices of
dialogue and discussion, the two distinct ways that teams converse.

In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex
and subtle issues, a deep "listening" to one another and suspending
of one's own views. Moreover, to a large degree, the skills that allow
dialogue are identical to the skills that can make discussions
productive rather than destructive. These are the skills of inquiry
and reflection, originally discussed, "Mental Models." In fact, one of
the reasons that dialogue is so important is that it offers a safe
environment for honing these skills and for discovering the profound
group learning that they can lead to.
 By contrast, in discussion different views are presented and
defended and there is a search for the best view to support
decisions that must be made at this time.
 Dialogue and discussion are potentially complementary
Team Learning

It is important to mention about team learning and fifth discipline together .
 the tools of systems thinking are significant because virtually all the prime tasks of
management teams—developing strategy, shaping visions, designing policy and
organizational structures—involve wrestling with enormous complexity.
 Perhaps the single greatest difficulties of management teams is that they confront
these complex, dynamic realities with a language designed for simple,
static problems. Management consultant Charles Kiefer says it this way: "Reality
is composed of multiple-simultaneous, interdependent cause-effect-cause
relationships. From this reality, normal verbal language extracts simple,
linear cause-effect chains. This accounts for a great deal of why managers
are so drawn to low leverage interventions." For example, if the problem is
long product development times we hire more engineers to reduce times; if the
problem is low profits we cut costs; if the problem is falling market share we cut
price to boost share.
 This occurs due to fact that we see the world in simple obvious terms, and we
believe in simple, obvious solutions. This leads to searching for simple
solutions and fixes.
Organizational Learning in Construction Industry
 The outputs of construction works are unique projects that involve the integration
of different subsystems and components by a range of participants such as
clients, advisors and subcontractors who come together for a temporary cooperation
(Barlow, 2000).
 Having a project-based nature, characterized as short-term and task-oriented,
construction industry does not allow a culture for continuous learning. For this
reason, construction companies should be more careful in developing and measuring
OL so as to benefit from OL principles (Kululanga et al., 2001).
 A learning organization in construction should be skilled at five main activities as
Garvin (1993) suggests: systematic problem solving, experimentation with
new approaches, learning from their own experience and past history,
learning from the experiences and best practices of others and
transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization
(cited in Love et al., 2000).

A construction company learns from its internal resources as well as from the other
organizations through partnerships and benchmarking. (Özorhon, 2004)
How Construction Companies Learn
 As Nevis et al. (1995) state learning is concerned about the production
and delivery of goods and services. Since in construction works, the unit
of production or service is the project then, the most important
source of learning is the project-related activities. Project knowledge
includes;
the technical knowledge concerning the product, its parts and
technologies,
 procedural knowledge concerning producing and using of the product
and
 organizational
knowledge
concerning communication and
collaboration between the work teams (Kasvi et al., 2003).

How Construction Companies Learn
 Love et al. (2000) argue that lean production, concurrent
engineering, benchmarking, partnering and supply-chain
management can be effectively implemented when construction
companies learn.
 Benchmarking is a popular means of learning the best practices
used by other companies, including the competitors (Mann,
Samson and Dow, 1998 cited in Robey et al., 2000).
 Cooperative strategic alliances encourage partners to commit
resources to the relationship. By the help of alliances, companies
learn from each other, compensate their lacks in the market.
Strategic Role of Learning Organization
 OL can influence performance, long-term effectiveness and
survival
 Ability of searching, encoding, distributing, and interpreting
the external information (cited in Hong, 1999).
 More attention to sharing, interpretation and utilization of
knowledge to integrate this asset in their daily activities.
 Effectively used techniques and technologies such as; the
telephone, Internet/intranet/e-mail and documents and reports for
knowledge sharing among employees in construction organizations
 Face-to-face meetings and interaction with the supply chain
(Egbu and Botterill, 2002).
Obstacles to Becoming a Learning Organization
in Construction Sector
 Becoming a learning organization is an evolution in mind
and system; therefore some obstacles arise:
 Project based teams
 Limited time and budget in construction industry
 No allowance for continuous learning culture in
construction industry
 Taught thinking way and communication habits
Obstacles to Becoming a Learning Organization in
Construction Sector
 Limited support from top management
 Apparently given lessons, not practical and applicable
lessons
 Upright hierarchy in many companies
 Lack of collaboration due to competition
 Not having an innovative company culture
 Not sharing personal knowledge with other members
The Learning Organization Audit
Measuring and evaluating those learning organizations are
important.
 Mainly two evaluating methods are proposed;
• Organizational Learning Profile (OLP)
• Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
Organizational Learning Profile (OLP)
This approach measures 4 factors that describe important
elements of LOs:
a) information-sharing patterns,
b) inquiry climate,
c) learning practices, and
d) achievement mindset.
 The OLP consists of 34 items about these 4 factors
 Respondents agree or disagree by using a six-point scale
Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
 Rather than focus on learning processes, focus on primary
characteristics of a LO.
 Watkins and Marsick (1997) identified 7 dimensions of a LO:
(a) creates continuous learning opportunities,
(b) promotes dialogue and inquiry,
(c) promotes collaboration and team learning,
(d) empowers people to evolve a collective vision,
(e) establishes systems to capture and share learning,
(f) connects the organization to its environment, and
(g) provides strategic leadership for learning.
Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
(DLOQ) consist of 55 statements about organization
practices. Respondents indicate the degree by using a 6-point
scale (almost always to almost never).
Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ)
DLOQ is applied for a project-based construction organization
No success in being a LO in this case.
Conclusion
 An excessive literature study about LO is shared with you.
 LO have important benefits such as maintaining levels of
innovation, remaining competitive, being better placed to
respond to external pressures.
 In spite of mentioned obstacles, construction LOs could be
achieved by following the guidelines proposed by the founders
of the concept.
References
Please see the attached report for detailed reference list.