Guidelines for Building a Comprehensive Organizational Learning Program
by Chris Argyris
[in his book 'Flawed Advice and the Management Trap, p 220]
Any program intended to produce changes in actual behaviour must begin by:

  • STEP 1:  Focusing on the behaviour as it is being produced in the everyday life in the
    organization.  This means that the participants must be willing to have their actual behaviours
    observed (tape recording sessions or observed by competent outsides with the hope that as
    participants become skillful, they themselves will begin to take on the role of the observer).  
    If the observations were true, then the quality of the dialogue produced is consistent with
    the observation, i.e. Participants:
  • make evaluations and attributions;
  • craft these attributions in a way that is not testable;
  • use of self-referential logic, and;
  • defensive reasoning.
    Even one example to the contrary would jeopardize the causal claims (see below)
    hypothesized because individuals with Model I theories-in-use will continue to produced
    Model I actions and consequences, even if they realize that these theories-in-use are a causal
    factor.  Focusing on these behaviours will create awareness of the causal factors of the
    behaviours:

  • STEP 2:  However awareness alone will not get at these causal factors.  It is also necessary for
    the participants to explore their:
    Such a commitment requires that they will strive to be:
  • be open;
  • try not to bypass, and cover-up these factors, and;
  • commit to having their bypass and cover-ups discussables

  • STEP 3:  In order to make a genuine commitment, the participants will have to learn to be
    skillful at:
  • productive reasoning and;
  • to reduce the use of defensive reasoning

  • STEP 4:  Evidence for the quality and depth of the commitment will come from:
  • tape recordings of actual sessions, and;
  • "scoring" them
    Tape recordings help to close the gap when executives report changes that they honestly
    believe occurred ad be unawre that no changes in theory-in-use, social virtues or
    organizational defensive routines have occurred.  It is also possible to use the analysis of the
    tape recordings to redesign change programmes in order to make them more powerful.

  • STEP 5:  Learn to engage the above productive conversations on personal visions and shared
    aspirations and uncovering underlying structures that interplay with each other to create the
    complexity we see today.  The central practice of Learning Organisations involves learning to
    keep both a personal (or shared) vision and a clear picture of reality (results) before us.  Doing
    this will generate a force within ourselves called "structural tension”.  Tension by its nature,
    seeks resolution, and the most natural resolution of this tension is for our reality to move
    closer to what we want.  It's as if we have set up a rubber band between the two poles of our
    vision and current reality.