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368 Chapter 11

newcomers (connections), will help mitigate the cost of lost, forgotten, or untrans-
ferred knowledge and know-how.

How Do Organizations Learn and Remember?

Organizational learning (OL) can be defi ned as learning what worked and what
did not work from the past and effectively transferring this experientially learned
knowledge to present-day and future knowledge workers. Organizational learning is
therefore a process through which an organization is said to improve over time — by
making innovations available for reuse and by taking steps to ensure that mistakes do
not occur again or that someone else begins from scratch, not realizing they are
redoing work that has already been done. We can say that OL has occurred if we can
easily fi nd success stories and lessons learned from the past and from other offi ces
around the world. This implies a documentation “ process ” of what has worked and
what has not, a technological “ container ” (e.g., LotusNotes, a knowledge repository)
to allow us to plug in to this collective experience of the organization, and the ability
to obtain help in reusing or putting this collective knowledge to work — so each can
better perform their job.
The technological container (referred to above) represents organizational memory
(OM). The OM is a centralized technological system (often an intranet) where we can
fi nd all the by-products of OL: primarily the best practices and the lessons learned.
An OM is largely made up of the accumulated and aggregated experience of all the
knowledge workers of that organization. The role of an organizational memory is to
preserve valuable knowledge for future access and reuse, for example, from employees
who leave the organization to new hires who join the organization. OM is thus “ the
means by which organizational knowledge is transferred from the past to the present ”
( Stein and Zwass 1995 ).
The underlying assumption is that organizations capable of learning will be more
effi cient, more effective, more competitive, and more viable than those that cannot
( Senge 1990 ; Garvin 1993 ). A learning organization (LO) is a type of organization that
has successfully implemented the processes of organizational learning. Typically, an
assessment is done on an organization and if it meets the required features of an LO,
then it is said to be a learning organization. For example, Senge (1990) lists fi ve key
attributes that a learning organization should have. His book, The Fifth Discipline , was
one of the fi rst to identify the core competencies a learning organization should have:

• Mental models
• Shared vision