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.

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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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hbr.org | March 2008 | Harvard Business Review 111

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