By the end of the week, you will be better positioned to:

• Define the learning focus that will give your organization the greatest impact
• Assess your organization’s preferred learning style and develop plans to enhance the effectiveness of that style
• Enhance your organization’s ability to create and implement ideas with impact
• Remove barriers to learning and cultivate supportive learning levers
• Explore the many methods for ensuring that new lessons and insights will be shared across boundaries (temporal, geographical, horizontal, and vertical)

a) What is Organizational Learning Anyway?

We start by reviewing the literature on learning in organizations, beginning with classic theories of how adults learn, moving to pivotal theories for wider system learning and building to a comprehensive model for organizational learning, based on three building blocks.

b) Identifying Enablers and Barriers to Learning

Research by Queen's IRC and others have identified a number of systemic learning barriers that prevent people in organizations from acquiring, applying, sharing, and embedding new knowledge. Left unchecked, these barriers reduce and often block important learning in organizations. You will learn more about the barriers and acquire critical antidotes for developing an enabling learning culture.

c) Identifying Learning Needs

A first step is to identify what individuals or units or departments need to be really good at. What are the competencies that your organization needs to excel at? Which resources (technology, tools, systems, processes, access to data) do people need in order to leverage these core competencies? With the needs assessment complete, there will be greater clarity and commitment for building core capabilities.

d) Acquiring Core Capabilities

Given those competencies, how will you acquire, hone, and apply them? Traditional classroom training is one way to acquire new skills, however it is overused and often ineffective as there is no plan for how new knowledge will be adapted and applied. Four primary styles for how organizations can acquire new skills will be explored, with best- practice examples for each style. You will have an opportunity to identify the strengths and drawbacks of your own organization's preferred learning style.

e) Transferring Core Capabilities

Perhaps the area of greatest challenge for organizational learning practitioners is the ability to share ideas across organizational boundaries. Here we explore ways that successful organizations capture, store, and disseminate knowledge in useful ways. Systems, practices, and cultural levers will be explored.

f) Assessing your Organization's Capacity for Learning

You will diagnose your organization's capacity for learning using our comprehensive field-tested instrument. Based on the assessment results, you will begin to design a process for enhancing the capacity for learning in your organization.

g) Building Organization Learning Capacity: Putting it all Together

How can we, as practitioners, influence and facilitate real learning in our organizations? We will pull together the critical insights from each step of the model and give you, the practitioner, an opportunity to begin to design your blueprint for success.

Takeaways

• Organizational Learning Workbook

Organizational benefits

• An environment in which skills and knowledge are shared and enhanced, making best use of talent
• Increased employee flexibility to address changing needs and roles
• A strategic edge in recruiting, retaining high potential employees
• Ability to effectively manage succession planning on a large scale

This program is designed for learning and development practitioners, knowledge managers, organization development and human resources practitioners and leaders, who are aspiring to build learning capacity in their organizations.

Brenda Barker Scott

Brenda Barker Scott has extensive experience in all aspects of organizational development acquired over a twenty-year career in teaching and consulting. When working with leadership teams she combines strong theoretical knowledge with practical methodologies to ensure that the right people are engaged in the right conversations to design robust and workable solutions.

Brenda is an instructor on a number of the Queen's IRC programs including Building Smart Teams, Organization Development Foundations, Organizational Design and Organization Learning. A frequent presenter, Brenda has been a keynote speaker for the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Conference Board of Canada, the Human Resources Planners Association of Ontario and the Canadian Institute for Health Research.

Brenda is co-author of Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance. She is a graduate of Queen's University and lives in Kingston with her husband and two sons.

Brenda presents at the following IRC program(s): OD Foundations, Organizational Design, Organizational Learning, Building Smart Teams

Kingston: Four Points (Apr 03-05, 2012)

Queen's University IRC is proud to hold this session at Four Points by Sheraton Hotel, located at 285 King Street East, in historic downtown Kingston. Hotel rooms are available to participants at a special rate until one month prior to the program. Following your registration for the program, we will provide you with an unique link for hotel reservations. For more information on the hotel visit http://www.fourpointskingston.com/.