Dr Haiyan Qian
Prof Allan Walker
Learning organizations readily adapt and renew themselves in response to rapidly changing client, community, societal and environmental factors.
This course examines how leaders can design and put into place the infrastructure (structures and cultures) necessary for their teams to function in support of their learning organization. This includes taking systems and strategic perspectives of organizational learning, establishing robust supports for individual and team professional learning, and utilizing knowledge management and the principles of organizational design to support an improvement orientation.
This course will examine how leadership is distributed and enacted in the process of designing and building learning organizations. This will help middle leaders to position their role as leaders of teams in a learning organization.
(a) Preparation Task (20%): Prepare initial analysis of organization in response to readings (900-1,000 words)
(b) Team task (30%): Analysis of a learning organization: Diagnose 1) a problematic case and develop an annotated map to show strategies of redesigning the organizational infrastructure to create conditions for successful organizational learning; or 2) a successful case and develop an annotated map to show the organizational infrastructure redesigning strategies adopted in the organization that lead to its success.
(c) Individual Task (50%): Leadership for Organizational Learning (2,500-3,000 words). With reference to literature, write a paper based on the analysis of task b that assesses the role and function of leadership in accomplishing the organizational redesign.