I wonder if LOers might find this thread more useful if we were to get a
bit more specific: What measures do organizations use to assess
"organizational learning", and team learning, and individual learning
(they may be different measures at different levels of aggregation).
Although I have seen many measures of the Quantum of learning in
organizations (# of courses taken, hours of classroom training, degrees
and diplomas received etc.) what I haven't see are good measures of the
Value (to the organization) of learning. For example, I can accept on
faith that if my employees learn more about their customers (and
customers' needs) that has value to us as measured indirectly along all
four dimensions of the Balanced Scorecard:
-- financial (because it will enable my company to sell more)
-- customer (because the learning will strenthen relationships)
-- innovation (because learning will identify new product ideas)
-- people/process (because our people will be happier and will
operate more productively)
The problem is, these measures (revenue, relationship strength, new
product volume, employee satisfaction and productivity) are all INDIRECT
results of learning, and we cannot isolate the differential performance
that is ascribable to learning, I don't think. So nay-sayers claim that
learning is just "nice to have" rather than strategic.
Anybody have any thoughts on this, or other measures of the Value of OL?
--"Dave Pollard" <pollardd@inforamp.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>