Development and the Learning Organisation

Excerpt

As development NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and official aid agencies embrace the idea of ‘becoming a learning organisation', they are increasingly concerned with some form of knowledge generation and organisational learning. To date, the literature on these issues tended to come out of the private sector and reflect a Western worldview. Development and the Learning Organisation is therefore unique in presenting contributions from development scholars and practitioners from a range of institutional backgrounds around the world, some introducing new approaches and models, others offering critical case studies of individual and group learning practice across cultures, and organisational efforts to put theory into practice. Among the lessons to emerge from this cutting-edge work are that learning is hard to do, that we often learn the wrong things, and that huge gaps often remain between our learning and our behaviour or practice. There are clearly no simple recipes for success, but when learning breakthroughs do occur, the organisational whole can truly become more than the sum of its parts.

Sections of the book:

• Power, culture, and gender - challenges to organisational learning
• Learning together: multi-institutional initiatives
• Levels of learning - organisational case studies
• Learning from humanitarian action
• Ways and means: tools and methods for learning and change