Does your organization have a learning disability?

As we progress through life we are required to learn new skills to advance to the next level. Even when we enter the working world we are required to learn new skills. We stop growing and advancing as soon as we believe we have learnt everything we need to know. At that point we begin vegetating.

The same can be said for organizations. Every organization grows with enthusiasm up to a point and then it slows and even stops. An organization needs to learn to grow. When an organization believes it knows everything it needs to know it will stop growing. The problem, in the case of an organization, is that it needs to learn just to stay in one spot let alone advance.

Think about how computers have changed the face of business. By refusing to learn about computers a company today could not hope to compete. Without computers there are very few companies that can survive and thrive.

In 1983 a Royal Dutch/Shell survey found that a third of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1970 had vanished. They were not just smaller but they ceased to exist. The survey estimated that the average lifespan of a large industrial company is less than forty years. Not long considering all the effort that goes into building a company.

Peter Senge in his book