Learning-centered Organization

             In today's learning-centered business environment, focus is gradually shifted from individual performance and competition to a more congenial relationship, towards being cooperative and building excellent performance through team effort and coordination. These seemingly group-oriented characteristics of the new business environment have become the thrust of MIT's Organizational Learning Center, which specializes on the creation and development of organizations to becoming "learning organizations.".

             This program proposes a radical change using a simple approach: by shifting the members' perspectives from being individualistic to being collectivist. This proposal is simple in that a learning organization should adapt the values of coordination and cooperation-generally, collectivism-in order to induce this radical change in perspective. In Senge and Kofman's article, "Communities of Commitment," they explicated the roots of the creation of and necessary requirements for a learning organization. In it, they also introduced the analytical model called the Galilean Model, which effectively explains and illustrates the core principles that every learning organization should be and have. This paper posits that the pursuit for a learning- centered organization, i.e., building 'communities' through organization-based commitments, require a deviation from the norm of today's business organizations, which are primarily individualistic and competitive, to being collectivist and cooperative for the success, mainly, not of the individual, but of the organization or community.

             One of the important findings from Senge and Kofman's analysis was the use of the systems perspective in explaining the importance of collectivism, cooperation, and principles of the Galilean model. As explicated by the authors, the systems perspective allows organizations and its members to ".move from the primacy of pieces to the primacy of the whole, from absolute truths to coherent interpretations, from self to community, from problem solving to creating.

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