Working, as I have been doing, in a psychiatric institution, and doddering, as I am, towards the end of my working life, the metaphors of geriatric psychiatry come easily to me. Any organisation which fails to learn both from its own and from other organisations' mistakes will naturally fall into a state of senility. On the other hand, an organisation which repeatedly restructures itself simply in order to keep up with current fads in management thinking is likely to lose contact with its past and to suffer a form of institutional Alzheimer's disease, reliant on outsiders for what should be its own operating memory. National Health Service managers please note.
Management types tend to like buzz words. “The learning organisation” is just the sort of phrase that leaps naturally to their lips. All too often it is merely a meaningless slogan, used to give the manager a professional leg up, but having no effect on the real running of the organisation. At its best, however, it is a concept which empowers (currently another useful buzz word) junior staff and service users, creates a bottom‐up working drive and allows the organisation to remain fluid and flexible in a changing environment.
There is a sizeable literature on the subject of the learning organisation. Most of it, however, emanates from private sector Western commercial corporations. Developing non‐government organisations (NGOs) and aid agencies differ in some respects from these. Most notably, of course, they are dealing primarily with end‐users in the third world, and in order to do their job properly they deal with “users” rather than “consumers” of their services. An aid agency which only has consumers is failing in its real task of developing a society that is not dependent on its services. An aid worker who claims to have a deeper understanding of the problems being dealt with than the people actually suffering from the problems may be a “development professional” but is not really encouraging development. The journal Development in Practice commissioned a whole series of papers on the learning organisation, ranging from pure management theory to on the ground practical descriptions of work on individual projects. Most of these were published in a special issue of the journal (Vol. 12 Nos. 3/4, 2002) and are reproduced here.
I am not particularly in favour of reproducing special issues of journalism in book form. Some publishers, such as Haworth Press do it incessantly, and it always strikes me as a form of cheating. Most managers in NGOs and aid agencies presumably have access to their professional literature without needing it to be published twice. Much of this volume is dryly academic, making very heavy reading for the non‐specialist, and the individual cases described are not always easy to generalise from. Libraries catering for development professionals will, I assume, already have access to the original journal and will not need this. Libraries catering for management trainees may, however, find it useful as a way of broadening the horizons of their customers. Libraries ought to be learning organisations par excellence, and do have some factors in common with development agencies in that they are dealing with a multicultural range of people who are service users rather than customers or consumers. Librarians who are interested in developing their service as a “learning service” may find it worthwhile pondering some of the lessons taught by this book.
