The Twelve Organizational Capabilities

The Twelve Organizational Capabilities

Bob GarrattHarper CollinsISBN: 0 00255 870 X2000£19.99

Keywords Learning organizations, Organizational theory, Strategy

Bob Garratt in previous books has made an excellent contribution to, and given a much higher profile to, issues of learning and organisation at the most senior levels. This book is an interesting continuation of these themes.

It is explicitly and sometimes acerbically critical of some aspects of modern management, particularly the damage caused by downsizing and rightsizing in many organisations. Garratt's reasons for this are of particular interest to those of us for whom learning is our core concern. One of the consequences of getting rid of experienced staff is that you get rid of a great deal of both effectiveness and memory which leads to effectiveness.

Perhaps even more interestingly, and as a reflection of the breadth of his interests, Garratt describes the three fundamental building blocks of organising as the achievement of tasks, the use of appropriate social processes, and learning regularly and rigorously from the total activity. The task and process duality is very familiar. For someone of Garratt's experience and credibility to adopt learning as a third major building block is exciting and encouraging. In his view, it is "only by combining all three that good business results can be sustained". This is a particularly powerful statement coming from someone who, though he is of course one of our major management writers interested in learning processes, is a wider thinker on a broader range of management subjects than others in the field of significant thinkers about learning.

Garratt makes an interesting, though not I think fully fulfilled, distinction between operational learning and strategic learning. In the first case, he adopts the relatively familiar process of asking "what went right?","what went wrong?", "what can we do about it?", but adds to that three-stage process, "who else needs to know?".

He offers in distinction the term strategic learning, which he wants really to attribute to directors and the most senior people in organisations. They should be conducting systematic audits of learning and of course should be setting themselves the tasks of learning and building the processes of encouraging others. This distinction is not wholly worked out, and indeed one example he gives of strategic learning seems to me to be rather more operational.

However, his basic theme, for example of a bank which by setting up a bad service operation overplayed operational learning at the cost of its strategic learning, is very appropriate. I would like to see the operational learning/strategic learning dimensions worked out more fully. There are further illustrations of learning day by day in the work group and how a board must capture through strategic learning both its internal and external learning.

I have emphasised for readers of this journal those aspects of this interesting book that are central to our concerns about learning. But, as I have already implied, there is a great deal more in the book than this. For example,it deals with issues of organising to deal with complexity, developing the emotional climate of the organisation and issues of integration.

Alan Mumford