To appear in the ACM SIGOIS Bulletin, December 1996
To forge a link between organisational learning and CSCW would
seem to be a good thing, especially at the level of work studies.
I think groupware might also have some application to the learning
organisation, though it might be well not to over-stress this
application: most descriptions of the learning organisation, such
as Senge's five disciplines and Pedler et al's eleven characteristics
are solidly based on people and human activity systems rather
than technology. Argyris & Schön's model of double-loop
learning might be held to be an exception to this, based on lines
and boxes as it is, but even that is an extension of Bateson's
earlier work on learning types, which was distinctly humanistic
in its orientation. So my first point would be to beware of taking
groupware as the driver for the learning organisation - people
are the driver for the learning organisation.
But I shall pass over such questions in this paper. I shall also
pass over the interesting question of the link between organisational
learning and organisational memory. This seems to point up fairly
clearly the fact that both these concepts are metaphors (cf. Morgan,
1986): people can learn, but organisations can't. However, if
an organisation is to 'learn', it must surely keep its learning
somewhere, in a transient or permanent store (whether of a formal
or informal nature); and maybe it's a good idea to call this its
memory.
My main interest in CSCW at present is evaluation, and in particular
steps towards an attempt to make this area rather firmer than
its current somewhat fragmentary nature. One of the crucial things
to me is to consider the purpose of the evaluation. It is often
held that evaluation is primarily conducted for one of two key
purposes: to assist in the systems development process by critiquing
the evolving system (formative) or to determine the effects of
a groupware system upon an organisation (summative). I would suggest
that a third purpose can be seen - to enable a process of learning
among all stakeholders in a system.
This ties in with the other purposes - so for system developers,
the learning that goes on in an evaluation (whenever it takes
place) may concern how their system could be changed to better
fit the needs of real or hypothetical people; but it may equally
well be at the level of transferable information, such as the
'post-mortems' that Microsoft are reported to hold at the end
of a project, to allow lessons learned to be used in the next
project (Cusumano and Selby, 1995). For managers, the learning
from a system implementation may be technical ("don't use
Appletalk, use Ethernet instead"), strategic ("don't
buy from company X, their products are terrible"), organisational
("groupware will really undermine our hierarchy") or
various others. For evaluators, learning may be in terms of methods
that did or didn't work (what you might call action research).
And so on along the list of stakeholders - but for each the key
is that learning takes place (both the everyday but important
sort that Bateson calls Learning I and the more complex kind involving
questioning of assumptions that he calls Learning II).
An interesting effect of looking at evaluation as learning is
that we become aware of how much learning goes on simply because
of the evaluator's presence. It is now commonplace for various
kinds of social researchers, especially ethnographers, to take
a reflexive stance - to be aware of their own effects upon a situation
under study (Plowman et al, 1996). Evaluators, as deliberately
interventionist researchers, can build an awareness of their effect
into the process of evaluation - such as by raising the consciousness
of one group of stakeholders to the perspectives of other groups.
Guba and Lincoln (1989), for example, use an evaluation strategy
they term "hermeneutic/dialectic", which involves confronting
one group of stakeholders with the conflicting views of another
group, the better to facilitate open discussion about what is
Good or Bad for all stakeholders.
I have discussed so far my view of evaluation as learning - in
how evaluation becomes part of the organisation's learning processes.
My other recent interest in CSCW and organisational learning has
been in an evaluation of learning. I have been acting as an evaluator
of the learning going on within a research team at another university
in the north of England. The team there are researching organisational
learning in the surveying profession (which, in the UK, means
those who determine the value and condition of property and land),
using the definition of the learning company provided by Pedler
et al (1991), and a questionnaire devised by the authors to measure
the eleven characteristics they identified.
However, the project team became aware a few months into the project
that they while they had much focus on the learning processes
of these surveyors, they had very little focus on their own learning.
This awareness led them to two results: they began to focus on
individual learning within the project team, and they asked me
(as an outsider) to hang around and comment on their learning.
I have therefore spent time watching the team at working, talking
with its members (informally or in interviews) and attending a
number of the project's meetings. Through this involvement with
the team, I have periodically made comments about their ongoing
processes; acted as scribe for, and commentator on, their own
self-examination exercises (such as a brainstorming session of
what was going well or badly, held at the project steering committee);
and facilitated them in a stakeholder mapping exercise. Also,
similar to the above discussion of the effect of the evaluator,
I have to some extent acted as a reminder of the need to consider
their learning simply by being there and asking questions.
Has my involvement, and the other self-examination going on, changed
the way the project works? I believe it has to some extent. They
have certainly been fairly unusual in the way they have presented
themselves to the outside world - their project report (Matzdorf,
1996) was written in a light and readable style (most unlike the
usual style of surveyors); and they have given a number of "roadshow"
presentations of their work to different groups, where instead
of a formal talk they exhibited a number of different people's
views on the project (written or spoken on tape), which then served
as the basis for informal discussion. This style has much to do
with the views of members of the project team as to informative
methods of presentation, but the fact they have been focusing
on their own processes makes something of a difference too.
So I argue that evaluation needs to be treated, not as a process of producing judgements, but as the facilitation of organisational learning. Researchers at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations have done much to bring in this new view of evaluation - they write:
"learning from innovation is often a more important 'outcome'
of the innovation process than the expected achievements of innovation
- which are frequently only partially realised." (Cullen
et al, 1993, p.118)
Argyris, Chris and Donald Schön. Organizational Learning. Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Bateson, Gregory. The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chandler, 1972.
Cullen, J., J. Kelleher and E. Stern (1993). Evaluation in DELTA. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 9: 115-126.
Cusumano, M and R Selby. Microsoft Secrets. Free Press, 1995.
Guba, Egon and Yvonna Lincoln. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Sage, 1989.
Matzdorf, Fides (et al.) Learning to succeed: organisational learning in the surveying profession. School of Urban & Regional Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, UK / Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 1996.
Morgan, Gareth. Images of Organisation. Sage, 1986.
Pedler, Mike, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell. The Learning Company: a strategy for sustainable development. McGraw-Hill, 1991.
Plowman, Lydia, Richard Harper and Yvonne Rogers (eds). The 'Professional Stranger': A Collection of Papers on the Role of the Fieldworker in Workplace Studies for CSCW. CSRP 428, University of Sussex, UK, 1996.
Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. Doubleday, 1990.
Magnus Ramage 7 November 1996