After studying world class companies, Royal Dutch/Shell concluded that an important key to corporate longevity lay in an organisation’s ability to adapt to its changing environment. A common characteristic among many “elder” organisations was their active experimentation at the fringes of their knowing. They had in effect, institutionalised a process for constantly pushing the boundaries of their learning edge. Unfortunately, too many organisations are unable to learn from their experiences; they fail to adapt to customer needs and do not improve their processes to mere rising competitive standards. The main reason most organisations are inefficient learners is their lack of systematic processes to facilitate learning and build sustainable learning environments.
Only by identifying the current reality can the organisation identify the changes that need to be made and the direction in which it will travel. The Learning Organisation Practices Profile is a questionnaire based approach, that allows managers and HR professionals to examine twelve subsystems that affect organisational learning. Based on this, as software system has been developed that offers a questions catalogue reflecting these 12 subsystems. The questions can be changed and adapted to each organisation’s specific needs. The SW allows you distribute your questionnaires either paper based, electronically or via the Web. The returning answers are read in and analysed automatically by the tool.
