Page 179 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 10 ■ The learning organization
attitudes or customer loyalty or whatever. A chairman of Nestlé offered the fol-
lowing prescription for successful change and growth:
Be first, be daring, and be different.
But you cannot expect to be so by accident (by random mutation as it were). On
this view corporate success demands a high order of cognitive capability or, to
follow Argyris and Schon (1974), the capacity for ‘double-loop learning’, the
capacity to break the mould, to challenge the established norms, policies, objec-
tives, resource configurations and corporate architecture.
All of this argues for the notion of paradigm shift as an important element.
Capra (1986) defines a social paradigm as ‘a constellation of concepts, values, per-
ceptions and practices shared by a community which forms a particular vision of
reality that is the basis of the way the community organises itself’. He goes on to
argue that the social paradigm which drives ‘the modern world’ is evolving from
a mechanistic and essentially fragmented view into a new paradigm through
shifts on various dimensions, as follows:

■ from a focus on the part to the whole;
■ from a concern with structure to process;
■ from revolutionary to evolutionary change;
■ from objective science to an understanding of how we learn;
■ from hierarchy to network as the metaphor for knowledge;
■ from truth to approximate descriptions;
■ from domination and control of nature to cooperative approaches.

The reader should note that I have modified and thereby simplified the Capra
text essentially because I seek to summarize these ideas for a particular purpose.
It seems to me that we are in the midst of a shift in the mind-set (or paradigm)
related to economic activity towards one which emphasizes networks as learning
and collaborative resources, which emphasizes proximate to optimal solutions,
which emphasizes process and learning through evolution above all and which
depends less on a need for certainty to precede action and more on the use of

action as a means of achieving certainty.
Van der Erve (1994) describes this paradigm shift thus:
■ from quantification and certainty to differentiation and uncertainty;
■ from parts to wholes;
■ from organization to enable tasks to ‘self-organization’ to enable creation;
■ from single-loop to double-loop learning.
My view is that this shift in the paradigm has been associated with changes in
the language of business which, in turn, has provided the possibilities for new
solutions. Where once we talked of organization, tasks, systems, products,
technology and customers, we increasingly talk about competencies, capabili-
ties, added value, performance management, process design, information flow.
In turn this has happened in consequence of the increased competitiveness of
the world post 1970. Increasingly, when faced with tough competition the

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