Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

Leading Organizational Learning brings together today’s top thinkers in organizational learning—including Jon Katzenbach, Margaret J. Wheatley, Dave Ulrich, Calhoun W. Wick, Beverly Kaye, and other thought and industry leaders. This handbook helps business, government, and nonprofit leaders understand how to master learning and knowledge sharing within their organizations. This one-of-a-kind volume is filled with chapters that directly address the most current ideas, concepts, and practices on the topic of organizational learning. Acclaimed authors, world-renowned thought, global, and industry leaders, managing directors, and presidents of leading organizations have contributed their original essays to this provocative collection. Leading Organizational Learning Offers ten guidelines to help key employees and knowledge workers do a better job of influencing upper management Demonstrates the best way to move ideas through an organization Outlines the principles that facilitate knowledge management Explains how people learn on the job Discusses how larger organizations can leverage their “bigness” Proposes a method of knowledge mapping to effectively organize and use knowledge in decisionmaking Outlines the knowledge and attributes integral to the success of today’s executives Discusses passing knowledge from person to person Explains how consultants can help organizations develop ideas Debunks the myths and explores the realities of knowledge management

Learning communities transform organizations through sharing knowledge, spearheading practice, solving problems, seeding innovation and supercharging development. So how can you develop a culture of learning in your organization? Organizational Learning Communities answers this question and explains how and why this approach can improve individual employee performance and drive overall business results. Written by a leading voice in the learning profession, this book contains everything that Learning and Development (L&D) practitioners need to know to successfully embed learning communities in their organizations. Following the 7Cs model of Cause, Culture, Conditions, Cadence, Content, Contributions and Credit, the book establishes the key factors that underpin thriving learning communities as well as the benefits of social and collaborative learning in the company. This practical guide establishes strategies to drive community impact and report success to stakeholders, drawing widely on evidence-based research and real-world examples. Each chapter ends with reflective questions to support transfer to the reader's context. This is essential reading for those involved in facilitating learning communities, or planning on pioneering one, to empower their organization's productivity and performance.

Promoting organizational knowledge is an important consideration for any business looking toward the future. Understanding the dynamics of knowledge-intensive organizations is a crucial first step in establishing a strong knowledge base for any organization. Organizational Knowledge Dynamics: Managing Knowledge Creation, Acquisition, Sharing, and Transformation introduces the idea that organizational knowledge is composed of three knowledge fields: cognitive knowledge, emotional knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. This book is useful for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in knowledge management, intellectual capital, human resources management, change management, and strategic management.

The book offers important insight relevant to Corporate, Governmentand Global organizations management in general. The internationallyrecognised authors tackle vital issues in decision making, howorganizational risk is managed, how can technological andorganizational complexities interact, what are the impediments foreffective learning and how large, medium, and small organizationscan, and in fact must, increase their resilience. Managers,organizational consultants, expert professionals, and trainingspecialists; particularly those in high risk organizations, mayfind the issues covered in the book relevant to their daily workand a potential catalyst for thought and action. A timely analysis of the Columbia disaster and theorganizational lessons that can be learned from it. Includes contributions from those involved in the InvestigationBoard report into the incident. Tackles vital issues such as the role of time pressures andgoal conflict in decision making, and the impediments for effectivelearning. Examines how organizational risk is managed and howtechnological and organizational complexities interact. Assesses how large, medium, and small organizations can, and infact must, increase their resilience. Questions our eagerness to embrace new technologies, yetreluctance to accept the risks of innovation. Offers a step by step understanding of the complex factors thatled to disaster.

Organizational Learning and Knowledge: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications demonstrates exhaustively the many applications, issues, and techniques applied to the science of recording, categorizing, using and learning from the experiences and expertise acquired by the modern organization. A much needed collection, this multi-volume reference presents the theoretical foundations, research results, practical case studies, and future trends to both inform the decisions facing today's organizations and the establish fruitful organizational practices for the future. Practitioners, researchers, and academics involved in leading organizations of all types will find useful, grounded resources for navigating the ever-changing organizational landscape.

Providing the Skills to Successfully Manage Change Managing Organizational Change: A Multiple Perspectives Approach, 3e, by Palmer, Dunford, and Buchanan, offers managers a multiple perspectives approach to managing change, which recognizes the variety of ways to facilitate change and reinforces the need for a tailored and creative approach to fit different contexts. The third edition offers timely updates to previous content, while introducing new and emerging trends, developments, themes, debates, and practices.

Companies around the world are beginning to recognize that only by increasing the speed and quality of their learning can they succeed in the rapidly changing global marketplace. Developing organization-wide learning and becoming a learning organization has become critical for adaptation and survival. Organizational Learning: From World Class Theories to Global Best Practices starts with a review of significant learning theory and research accomplished over the past 20 years. This research is integrated into an action-centered theory of organizational learning. The book then explores in depth the Organizational Learning System Model developed by David Schwandt that has been applied in a variety of public and private organizations. Recognizing that companies now work with multicultural groups in a global marketplace, the authors also examine cultural implications of the Model. The authors present best-practice application of the Organizational Learning System Model by companies from around the world, including Arthur Anderson, Price Waterhouse, Beloit Corporation, Motorola, and Meralco. These are companies that have taken the leadership in developing learning systems on a organization-wide basis. Organizational Learning: From World Class Theories to Global Best Practices provides practical steps and strategies for developing and applying organizational learning in the workplace. Features

Groups and organizations vary dramatically in their ability to learn. Some acquire substantial knowledge as a function of experience, while others do not. In groups, learning can occur at the level of the individual member and/or the group as a whole. In organizations, learning can occur at both of these levels as well as that of the wider collective. Besides varying in the amount and kind of information they acquire, groups and organizations also vary regarding their success in retaining knowledge and transferring it to other units. In general, groups and organizations that are proficient in acquiring, retaining, and transfering knowledge are more productive and more enduring than their less able counterparts. The goal of this handbook is to bring together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work on group and organizational learning by leading scholars from several disciplines. Because many of the same processes influence learning in groups and organizations, including both kinds of learning in the same volume has the potential to facilitate the integration of knowledge and the cross-fertilization of ideas. These benefits are reciprocal, in that research at the group level can shed light on how organizations learn whereas research at the organizational level can illuminate how groups learn. By clarifying similarities and differences in the processes that underlie learning in groups and organizations, the handbook advances understanding of the causes and consequences of learning in collectives of varying size and complexity.

Learning from Failures provides techniques to explore the root causes of specific disasters and how we can learn from them. It focuses on a number of well-known case studies, including: the sinking of the Titanic; the BP Texas City incident; the Chernobyl disaster; the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia accident; the Bhopal disaster; and the Concorde accident. This title is an ideal teaching aid, informed by the author's extensive teaching and practical experience and including a list of learning outcomes at the beginning of each chapter, detailed derivation, and many solved examples for modeling and decision analysis. This book discusses the value in applying different models as mental maps to analyze disasters. The analysis of these case studies helps to demonstrate how subjectivity that relies on opinions of experts can be turned into modeling approaches that can ensure repeatability and consistency of results. The book explains how the lessons learned by studying these individual cases can be applied to a wide range of industries. This work is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and will also be useful for industry professionals who wish to avoid repeating mistakes that resulted in devastating consequences. - Explores the root cause of disasters and various preventative measures - Links theory with practice in regard to risk, safety, and reliability analyses - Uses analytical techniques originating from reliability analysis of equipment failures, multiple criteria decision making, and artificial intelligence domains