1. Building a Learning Organization
Kelly Papa, MSN, RN
Corporate Director of Learning
Masonicare

2. Learning Objectives
Recognize the role of the leader in building trusting relationships and bringing a clarity to an organization’s vision.
Discuss how a culture of learning and collaboration can make an organization more adaptable to change.
Explore ways to develop the potential for learning and growing in every team member.

3. LeadingAge Leadership Academy
Action Learning Project (ALP)
Change the World!!!

4. The 5th Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Learning Disciplines
Five disciplines: theories and techniques
Combine to “expand its capacity to create its future”

5. Learning Organizations
Continual expansion to create desired results
New patterns of thinking are nurtured
Collective aspiration is set free
People learn to learn together
New knowledge and capabilities remain even if individuals leave

6. The Need
As leaders in aging services we are challenged by creating systems to engage staff as learners in order to enhance our organization’s ability to adapt to change, innovate and meet the changing needs of those we serve.

7. High-Impact Learning Culture
HILOs that have the strong learning foundation in place tend to significant out perform their peers in several areas:
37% greater employee productivity
34% better response to customer needs
26 % greater ability to deliver quality
58 % more likely to have skills to meet future demands

9. What is a Corporate University?
How does it act as a catalyst for building a culture of learning?
Traditional Inservice Based Approach vs. Learning Organization Model

10. The 5th Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Learning Disciplines
Five disciplines: theories and techniques
Combine to “expand its capacity to create its future”

11. The 5 Disciplines Shared Vision Personal Mastery Mental Models
Team Learning
Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking
Seeing wholes, perceiving the structures that underlie dynamically complex systems, and identifying high-leverage change opportunities
Personal Mastery
Individual learning, without which organizational learning cannot occur
Mental Models
Constantly surfacing, testing, and improving our assumptions
Shared Vision
Generating a common answer to the question, “What do we want to create?”
Team Learning
Creating alignment
Team members think insightfully about complex problems, synergize their knowledge and skills, and produce coordinated action

12. 1) Shared Vision
By far the biggest struggle of a learning organization is to get the vision off the wall and into the hearts and actions of the employees.
Traditional organizations lead by fear, policy and manipulation.
Learning organizations lead by shared vision, shared values and inspiration.

13. Tools for Shared Vision
Values Audit
Appreciative Inquiry
Golden Circle: WHY
Visual Exploration

14. 2018 Report (A 2015 Visual Exploration of the Future)

15. 2) Personal Mastery
How well do we build capacity for each employee to pursue and develop?
Mastery is continuous learning of a skill or craft.
Couple that sense of mastery with, personal why and organizations mission…now you have personal mastery!
Without it you have hard working competent people, stuck in compliance and job description purgatory.
A commitment to personal mastery ensures that people are motivated, inspired and empowered.

16. Tools for Personal Mastery
Learning Needs Assessments
My University and Academic Partnerships
Academy style team learning over time
“Bright Spots and Knowledge Gaps”
Creative Tension

17. What do we need to do to get there?
Creative Tension
Current Reality
2015
Creative Tension
What do we need to do to get there?
Vision of the Future
2020

18. 4) Mental Models
Learning organizations seek to identify and smash mental models.
Mental models are assumptions, beliefs and attitudes that have been embedded for years and go unchallenged because they lie so deep at the heart of the organization.
They are hard to see and harder to get at, thus the best planned out change efforts can fail.
Smashing mental models gets the unlearning done in order to create space for the new learning.

19. Tools for breaking down Mental Models
Coaching
The L.I.D. Template for Meetings
Rule of 6
Rule of 9
Headline News
Ladder of Inference
Left Handed Column

20. The Left Handed Column What I was thinking and feeling :
What was actually said:
Kelly –
James-
Kelly- .

22. 3) Team Learning
One of the most basic mental models is that learning is centered on the individual.
Learning organizations try to find ways to build continuous learning into teams in order to maximize knowledge management and promote faster learning.
Fostering trust through vulnerability as a path to trusting relationships.
Appreciating the unique perspectives and talents of all team members.

23. Tools for Team Learning
MIT’s Check in and Check out
The Stand-Up
Academy style learning
“Traditions” and Club 332

24. 5) Systems Thinking
The shift from seeing organizations and problems as a series of pieces in a puzzle, to seeing the whole puzzle at once.
The shift from fixing the crisis driven problems and start fixing the systems that inadvertently cause the problem in the first place.
Go deeper and find the root cause.

25. Tools for Systems Thinking
Iceberg Analogy
The Five Whys
The Process Map
Job Shadows

26. The Iceberg Analogy

28. Action Learning Project---9 years later!
The Fifth Discipline flourished in the 1990s
Ideal visions of skilled employees, transferring knowledge and adapting nimbly to change.
It is a beautiful vision!

29. Is Yours a Learning Organization?
Researchers David Garvin, Amy Edmondson and Francesca Gino
Harvard Business Review Tool Kit
Los.hbs.edu
Diagnostic Survey
Self Assessment to asses the depth of learning in your organization

30. Why is this so hard?
Early discussions about Learning Organizations where tributes to a better word, lacking the navigation to get there.
Concepts are aimed at high level leaders rather than those in roles where the most important work is carried out.
Standards and tool for assessment and measurement were lacking to measure changes, to compare and/or to set benchmarks.

31. Building Blocks of the Learning Organization
A supportive learning environment
Concrete learning processes and practices
Leadership that reinforces learning

32. Supportive Learning Environment
Psychological safety
Appreciative of differences
Openness to new ideas
Time for reflection

33. Concrete Learning Processes and Practices
Experimentation
Information Collection
Analysis
Education and Training
Information Transfer

34. Leadership That Reinforces Learning
Appreciative Inquiry/behaviors
Where the leader places their time
How the leader inspires innovation
Open minded questions
Actions in times of “failure”

35. My ALP----Moving Forward
Leadership alone is insufficient.
Comparative performance is essential.
Learning is multidimensional.
We need to create a dialogue, not a critique.
This tool offers us a reflective process, a tool to foster more learning.
Yet we need the “space between the logs” to create thoughtful approaches to learning.

36. Kelly Papa, RN, MSN kpapa@masonicare.org