Do Organizational Learning Styles Affect Innovation?

In preparation for upcoming presentations at ACRL and MLA, I have been reading a lot about characteristics of innovative organizations.

Libraries are confronted with environments that are dynamic and uncertain due to the accelerated pace of technology and the changing nature of what we do. For libraries to survive I feel we must be able to adapt to rapid changes, not by making small changes to the way we do things, but overhauling the learning styles and behaviors of our organizations in order to enhance our ability to innovate.

It has been suggested by King and Anderson that the main factors that help or hinder an organization's ability to innovate are people, structure, organizational environment and climate and culture. An innovative organization is characterized by one that advocates change, takes risks, is creative, and has a willingness to experiment and tolerate failure.

Drawn from the works of Argyris and Schön as well as Miles and Rudolph, Proactive learning is when an organization bases innovation decisions on prior experience. The proactive organization makes its plans based on the anticipation of likely problems. They weigh all the the options, calculate the consequences of each, and then evaluate those consequences. For example, the proactive library may be more apt to perform usability testing using representative from primary user groups. Enactive learning is when an organization learns from action. They test innovations in the real environment amid real contingencies. They learn from experience through selective trial and error. An enactive library may be more apt to test its new web site by placing it into the public view and make changes based on feedback from customers that use it.

While a balance of these two styles is normally employed the enactive style may be more important when organizations are trying to become innovative. However, library organizations tend to be more proactive in approach. When working on a project we tend to think out and plan for every possible contingency. We want a complete solutions before they are implemented. A potential solution may not be considered simply because it didn't work in the past. Perhaps the underlying reason for the proactive approach it is at the core of why we became librarians: we like order. Libraies are relatively slow to adapt to change, we take only calculated risks, we tend to limit our experiments, and have a low tolerate for failure.

Innovative organizations do not only need to learn enactively , but how to modify their organizational behavior. Some organizations respond to problems by simply adjusting procedures or processes, but fail to recognize or deal with those problems which may challenge fundamental aspects of their organizational culture. There is often a strong pressure to suppress open discussion on such problems especially since innovative ideas are more likely to challenge the existing organizational culture, norms, objectives, and policies. When an innovation challenges the bases of an organization's culture, norms, objectives, and policies the organization needs to be prepared to discuss, reconsider, and if necessary make fundemental changes.

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