I recently returned full time to Leeds Met as a Professor of Organisation Learning. When I told one of my clients, his first response was ‘Yes, well done and about time too’ and his second response, after a moment was “but what does ‘organisation learning’ mean?”. And, what relevance does this have to leaders in manufacturing businesses in the current economic climate? Read on.

Consider the two terms, Organisation and Learning. The first implies co-ordinating and bringing things into some kind of order – you get things organised and working with some kind of clarity and direction. Learning is about upsetting the status quo or the current kind of order. Hence the contradiction.

To understand the value of thinking in contradictions requires a bit mental gymnastics and is one of the reasons so many businesses have been unable to cope in recent years. Organisation and Learning may be in tension, but they have to be reconciled. The danger of missing this trick can be found by considering each part in separation, for example by putting effort into organisation at the expense of learning. This can appear very enticing, after all to be organised means that work is proceed as planned, against targets with great clarity. Things are done on time and efficiently. People know how to do things right and any training can correct those who don’t. Continued emphasis on organisation allows improvement by eliminating waste and doing things faster by resetting targets, etc.

The danger is that you sucked into what is clear, ignoring other possibilities or assuming that things will carry on as before, so that any changes from outside are not considered before it’s too late. As the saying goes, ‘if you do what you always do, you get what you always get’. But supposing the customers change their minds about what you do? So concentrating on doing things right, could mean you miss doing the right thing. This is where learning as a disturbance comes in.

The disturbance could involve changes for what people do at work, the things that are produced and how they are produce. Learning as disturbance can also come from exploring what customers and suppliers think and want.

The idea of the Learning Organisation became very popular in the 1990s. It was a lovely ideal that could help any business change radically. However, many managers and leaders found they simply did not have the access within their organisations to enable them to initiate, promote or sustain approaches that required an organisation that ‘continually transformed itself’. Another problem is that when business is struggling to meet or even find orders, there is not a lot of time for learning, even if the evidence says you should (findings from a very important piece of research on creating space for learning in SMEs can be found at; http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-334-25-0015 ).

The problems of being too organised are tackled by more space for learning as disturbance. And the problem of wasting too much time exploring for learning is to make sure you are better organised. This sounds like setting up a competition between organisation and learning but that’s the nature of contradiction and the source of its potential for responding to difficult times now and in the future. You need to consider the interplay of these two processes by providing support for both organising and learning. If you can do this, you become a two-sided thinker and doer or, in a word that reconciles contradiction, ambidextrous

If you would like to read more about the Ambidextrous Organisation, contact me at j.gold@leedsmet.ac.uk and I will send you a very useful article with key ideas for what to do.