Strategic Organizational Learning

Book excerpt: This book discusses the successes and challenges of leveraging organizational learning in effective strategy development and execution. The authors introduce a framework that helps organizations develop core capabilities to enable them to shift direction rapidly and proactively shape future environments. They also offer a wide selection of cases to illustrate this framework. While some cases highlight fundamental strategic change over time, others are snapshots of mechanisms gradually put in place to jointly optimize learning and performance. There is no one best or right way to leverage strategic organizational learning; different practices may lead to the same outcome and similar practices may lead to different outcomes. The system dynamics underlying such learning — not the simple adoption of one or other practice — are key to success in institutionalizing a performance-based learning approach.