Hi, my name's Candice Elliot. I am a human resources strategist. Today, I'm going to just talk with you about the concept of the learning organization. The idea with a learning organization is that the organization is continually learning from itself. It is a theory of internal business development that creates sustainable ways for an organization to continually reinvent itself as it is exposed to external and internal influences.
Practically, what does that look like? All of that is lovely, but what does it really look like? A learning organization provides ways for its employees to intake information from the outside and from the inside, and then to be able to make changes to policy and procedure that make the organization more effective in achieving their strategic goals. There's just so many examples all the time.
I really recommend the book, The Lean Farm. It's really a great metaphor for creating ways to develop a learning organization. For example, there's an item on the menu. There's one item that is a [00:02:00] part of that-- say, a salad. There's some fruit that's really hard to get. The menu always lists the specific fruit. There's a lot of procedures that have to go into when a new fruit comes in.
Then, you have to update the menu, and the menu isn't getting updated on time, and there's just problems in the chain. Instead of listing on that menu every single time the different fruit, then the manager decides to just put seasonal fruit on the menu, for example. That's one very small example.
The thing is, if you have a lot of small examples, a lot of these small things like that, they build up over time. The more roadblocks that your employees are able to move out of the way before you even have to know about them, the better that is for you. They shouldn't be diverting the company off the path. That's not what you want, but if, in delivering the product that you want to deliver or delivering the service that you want to deliver, they find a better, more efficient, more effective, streamlined way of doing that, then you want to be able to support those changes within the environment of the organization.
Part of that is culture. Part of that is training your employees well. Part of that is then allowing them to present you with changes and allowing them to make changes as they deem them necessary. Then, as you say, "You're right, let's do that change. That's that makes sense for us. It's time for us to move forward in this new way--" I hope that helps you understand what I mean by the learning organization and the importance of really continuing to allow your people [00:04:00] to learn and to grow and to input information into your organization to really help it to thrive, especially if you're growing. Thank you for taking the time today.
.