How the LMS connects to Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline
While most of you know that this blockbuster seller has sold over a million copies and was a much recommended book referred by the leading Management Consultants/ Practitioners. During my last few years of interaction with the corporates and their challenges, it stuck me that the LMS fits in line with the book.
THE FIVE DISCIPLINES OF CREATING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION in more detail, are:
A Shared Vision: It is not always that a town-hall meeting or a training workshop can be used to re-iterate the vision to the employees. An LMS can be the one that can be used to groom, monitor and track employee alignment to organization values, culture and engagement.
Mental Models : One important Value Senge describes is openness. An LMS can serve as a platform that brings in transparency and openness. With leaderboards, discussion forums and knowledge sharing options, an LMS provides the perfect blend of employee participation and growth.
Personal Mastery: The LMS can play that perfect role that employees can look forward to, for their personal growth path and interact even outside office hours. Tests/ Assessments are the features that can help monitor their progress. As per Senge, two factors which are of importance in this discipline are: (1) defining what is important to us. (2) being able to see the current reality as it is.
Team learning : The two aspects are: (1) Effective teamwork leads to results which individuals could not have achieved on their own (2) Individuals within a team learn more and faster than they would have without the team
A modern day LMS provides that perfect way to promote the Team Learning culture in any organization. The team members have to be willing to shift their mental models and be open to learn from their colleagues.
System Thinking : is used to analyze patterns in an organization by looking at it from a holistic viewpoint rather than small unrelated manageable parts. A modern LMS can be enhanced to incorporate the sense of intelligence that can recognize patterns and provide pointers for growth and change.
Senge himself describes the elephant metaphor. When you split an elephant in two, you do not have two small elephants which you can take care of. You can take care of the one complete elephant only. An organization is like a living organism and should according to Senge also be managed as one.
Is your organization living? Is it learning? Is learning a part of your DNA? If not or if you intend to move to next level, get in touch with us. We @ME Educational Technologies and Consultancy Services would be happy to help and let you reap the rewards in no time.
