Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino
hbr.org | March 2008 | Harvard Business Review 109
Is Yours a Learning Organization? Using this assessment tool, companies can pinpoint areas where they need to foster knowledge sharing, idea development, learning from mistakes, and holistic thinking.
by David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson, and Francesca Gino
L EADERS MAY THINK that getting their organizations to learn
is only a matter of articulating a clear vision, giving em-
ployees the right incentives, and providing lots of training.
This assumption is not merely fl awed – it’s risky in the
face of intensifying competition, advances in technology, and
shifts in customer preferences.
Organizations need to learn more than ever as they confront
these mounting forces. Each company must become a learning
organization. The concept is not a new one. It fl ourished in the
1990s, stimulated by Peter M. Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and
countless other publications, workshops, and websites. The result
was a compelling vision of an organization made up of employ-
ees skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge.
These people could help their fi rms cultivate tolerance, foster
open discussion, and think holistically and systemically. Such
learning organizations would be able to adapt to the unpredict-
able more quickly than their competitors could.
TOOL KIT D
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TOOL KIT | Is Yours a Learning Organization?
110 Harvard Business Review | March 2008 | hbr.org
Unpredictability is very much still
with us. However, the ideal of the
learning organization has not yet been
realized. Three factors have impeded
progress. First, many of the early dis-
cussions about learning organizations
were paeans to a better world rather
than concrete prescriptions. They over-
emphasized the forest and paid little
attention to the trees. As a result, the
associated recommendations proved
difficult to implement – managers
could not identify the sequence of steps
necessary for moving forward. Second,
the concept was aimed at CEOs and se-
nior executives rather than at manag-
ers of smaller departments and units
where critical organizational work is
done. Those managers had no way of
assessing how their teams’ learning
was contributing to the organization
as a whole. Third, standards and tools
for assessment were lacking. Without
these, companies could declare vic-
tory prematurely or claim progress
without delving into the particulars or
comparing themselves accurately with
others.
In this article, we address these de-
fi ciencies by presenting a comprehen-
sive, concrete survey instrument for
assessing learning within an organiza-
tion. Built from the ground up, our tool
measures the learning that occurs in a
department, offi ce, project, or division –
an organizational unit of any size that
has meaningful shared or overlapping
work activities. Our instrument enables
your company to compare itself against
benchmark scores gathered from other
fi rms; to make assessments across areas
within the organization (how, for, exam-
ple, do different groups learn relative
to one another?); and to look deeply
within individual units. In each case,
the power is in the comparisons, not in
the absolute scores. You may fi nd that
an area your organization thought was
a strength is actually less robust than at
other organizations. In effect, the tool
gives you a broader, more grounded
view of how well your company learns
and how adeptly it refi nes its strategies
and processes. Each organization, and
each unit within it, needs that breadth
of perspective to accurately measure its
learning against that of its peers.
Building Blocks of the Learning Organization Organizational research over the past
two decades has revealed three broad
factors that are essential for organi-
zational learning and adaptability: a
supportive learning environment, con-
crete learning processes and practices,
and leadership behavior that provides
reinforcement. We refer to these as the
building blocks of the learning organiza-
tion. Each block and its discrete subcom-
ponents, though vital to the whole, are
independent and can be measured sep-
arately. This degree of granular analysis
has not been previously available.
Our tool is structured around the
three building blocks and allows com-
panies to measure their learning pro-
fi ciencies in great detail. As you shall
see, organizations do not perform
consistently across the three blocks,
nor across the various subcategories
and subcomponents. That fact sug-
gests that different mechanisms are at
work in each building-block area and
that improving performance in each
is likely to require distinct supporting
activities. Companies, and units within
them, will need to address their partic-
ular strengths and weaknesses to equip
themselves for long-term learning. Be-
cause all three building blocks are ge-
neric enough for managers and fi rms of
all types to assess, our tool permits orga-
nizations and units to slice and dice the
data in ways that are uniquely useful to
them. They can develop profi les of their
distinctive approaches to learning and
then compare themselves with a bench-
mark group of respondents. To reveal
the value of all these comparisons, let’s
look in depth at each of the building
blocks of a learning organization.
David A. Garvin (dgarvin@hbs.edu) is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business
Administration and the chair of the Teaching and Learning Center, and Amy C. Edmondson
(aedmondson@hbs.edu) is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management and the
chair of the doctoral programs, at Harvard Business School in Boston. Francesca Gino
(fgino@andrew.cmu.edu) is a visiting assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Supportive learning environments allow time for a pause in the action and encourage thoughtful review of the organization’s processes.
A learning organization is a place where employees excel at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge. There are three building blocks of such institu- tions: (1) a supportive learning environ- ment, (2) concrete learning processes and practices, and (3) leadership behavior that reinforces learning.
The online tool presented here can help you assess the depth of learning in your organization and its individual units. The power of the instrument lies in the comparisons it allows users to make – within and among an institution’s functional areas, between organizations, and against established benchmarks.
Exploring how well your company learns relative to others reveals both the multidimensionality of the organiza- tional learning process and the specifi c areas where your company needs to improve.
Article at a Glance
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BUILDING BLOCK 1: A supportive learning environment. An environ- ment that supports learning has four
distinguishing characteristics.
Psychological safety. To learn, em- ployees cannot fear being belittled or
marginalized when they disagree with
peers or authority fi gures, ask naive
questions, own up to mistakes, or pre-
sent a minority viewpoint. Instead, they
must be comfortable expressing their
thoughts about the work at hand.
Appreciation of differences. Learning occurs when people become aware of
opposing ideas. Recognizing the value
of competing functional outlooks and
alternative worldviews increases en-
ergy and motivation, sparks fresh think-
ing, and prevents lethargy and drift.
Openness to new ideas. Learning is not simply about correcting mistakes
and solving problems. It is also about
crafting novel approaches. Employees
should be encouraged to take risks and
explore the untested and unknown.
Time for refl ection. All too many man- agers are judged by the sheer number
of hours they work and the tasks they
accomplish. When people are too busy
or overstressed by deadlines and sched-
uling pressures, however, their ability
to think analytically and creatively is
compromised. They become less able
to diagnose problems and learn from
their experiences. Supportive learning
environments allow time for a pause
in the action and encourage thoughtful
review of the organization’s processes.
To change a culture of blame and
silence about errors at Children’s Hos-
pitals and Clinics of Minnesota, COO
Julie Morath instituted a new policy of
“blameless reporting” that encouraged
replacing threatening terms such as “er-
rors” and “investigations” with less emo-
tionally laden terms such as “accidents”
and “analysis.” For Morath, the culture
of hospitals must be, as she told us,
“one of everyone working together to
understand safety, identify risks, and re-
port them with out fear of blame.” The
result was that people started to col-
laborate throughout the organization
to talk about and change behaviors,
policies, and systems that put patients
at risk. Over time, these learning activi-
ties yielded measurable reductions in
preventable deaths and illnesses at the
