I totally agree with your point about the needless focus on individual learning. I’m totally mystified by the fact that organizations routinely require at least a high school education for the most menial jobs involving manual labor and a college education for jobs involving knowledge work. Yet, HR continues to remain focused on whether individuals can be trusted to learn on their own. If the current TRAINING mentality must remain as the dominant focus then I can only surmise that what organizations need to do is develop competency tests, like reading, writing, arithmetic, and reasoning to determine who they hire. Forget about the degrees. Otherwise, organizations need to trust that people who made it through a university education actually do know how to learn. The current focus on TRAINING is in fact condescending to most individuals with a modiocre degree of cognitive competence.

All of this, however, doesn’t deal with the basic question about learning in groups, or teams, in complex organizations spread across various locations. I wrote about that today,

http://skilfulminds.com/2010/03/04/social-learning-collaboration-and-team-identity/

Regards,

Larry

The organization should be concerned with how people work together and find ways to help them cooperate and collaborate. There is no need to manage individual learning. We don’t manage what or how our employees eat and we don’t need to manage their knowledge or learning. We can make it easier for them to learn and share knowledge though, just like putting in a cafeteria or a water fountain. Workers need support and tools to develop these personal processes but the organization should stay out of the business of individual learning and instead focus on collaboration. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing.