Page 185 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 10 ■ The learning organization

But an organization depending heavily on projects may be less effective in profes-
sional and technological development, and in particular not good at leveraging tech-
nology to maximum effect. Valuable gains in knowledge may be lost or not shared
around the business. Thus it was that the role of ‘guardian’ was created. Guardians,
often past functional managers, oversee the development of a specific professional skill
(e.g. marketing, finance, technology). They are expected to ensure that Oticon’s com-
petencies meet the developing strategic requirements of the business.

Of course, we need the IT infrastructure to capture learning, e.g. to create a
database of customer profile and customer complaints as a resource for product
development. But best practice increasingly seeks to provide by electronic means
building blocks of management knowledge, examples of best practice, best prac-
tice protocols, performance measures, diagnostic tools, etc. But new roles are also
implied (see above).
But then following Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) we can conceive of organiza-
tional learning as those processes we utilize to capture and convert tacit knowl-
edge into new explicit knowledge and/or to obtain new explicit knowledge. Tacit
knowledge is important because when organizations are faced with problems and
challenges they rarely emerge overnight. Normally people within the organiza-
tion have begun to recognize the problems and conceive solutions. Usually these
are incomplete solutions and not thought through. They represent tacit knowl-
edge. We need a process to ‘collect’ that emerging knowledge. The solutions we
adopt may need new knowledge as well – say of a new technology. Thus we
would seek new explicit knowledge.
Doing so, i.e. capturing and converting tacit and explicit knowledge to integrate
it into our business system (into our strategy, structure procedures, product portfo-
lios, etc.), helps the process of shifting mind-sets by adding new possibilities. Here
the thought is that mind-set change is unlikely to result from directly challenging
people’s ideas. Rather it follows by adding new ideas, and therefore new possibilities.
Such a view has something in common with Orgland’s (1997) concept of
‘vision influencing’. He describes his lack of clarity of the role middle and junior
managers had played in a major process redesign change undertaken by a con-

sumer goods manufacturer. He notes that when asked to contribute to a process
redesign project driven by consultants, 760 employees submitted nearly 1000
ideas. While we cannot judge the extent to which the ‘bottom-up’ dimension
was substantial, it may well be that, by adding new ideas and concepts, the
process redesign methodology created new possibilities for these managers thus
helping with mind-set change.
Therefore, the ability to capture and work with knowledge is a pivotal capa-
bility creating a:
1 Knowledge base – capture and convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
and create accessibility to this knowledge.
2 Knowledge base often organized to achieve:
(a) open access to all;
(b) effective sharing of information – conferences, meetings, etc.;

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