HOW TO MEASURE AND EVALUATE ORGANISATIONAL CAPABILITY TO LEARN: A TOOL SUGGESTION FOR AN APPROPRIATE TREATMENT OF A CRUCIAL COMPANY RESOURCE

Christof Baitsch and Ralf Wetzel
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Christof Baitsch: Baitsch Organizational Consulting, Badenerstr. 41, CH-8004 Zürich, Switzerland
Ralf Wetzel: Department of Business Administration, Innovation Research and Sustainable Resource Management, Technical University of Chemnitz, Erfenschlager Str. 43, House E, room 003, D-09112 Chemnitz, Germany

Chapter 30 in Knowledge Management:Innovation, Technology and Cultures, 2007, pp 349-362 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: AbstractNothing is more enduring than change, that's a common insight, but it's as much common as wrong. The forms, triggers and conditions of change are themselves subject to radical change and produce a steady challenge for adjustments in radical organizational transformation as well as in gradual organizational development. That complicates an appropriate knowledge management to analyse, evaluate and to decide, which knowledge, organizational structures and practices should be saved, improved or forgotten. Conventional general and normative suggestions as they were employed increasingly loose their efficiency. So, the call for a possibly better ‘contextualisms’ is already out there. But how to translate the heed for context specific observation, measurement and appraisal into a pragmatic orientation beyond the simple denial of general recommendations in the “check-this-and-do-that” style? To meet that challenge, we need certain monitors for a.) a stable and routinized comparison of inside and external observation and for b.) a routi-nized observation of an organizations capability to compare, evaluate and influence that difference of inside/outside. The latter form of monitoring we call an organizations ‘capability to learn’. If an organization is in a position to observe its own capability to learn and to judge external demands to learn, a profound background is given for a sound decision about what to learn and what not to learn. In the paper, we firstly show seven dimensions, which could represent moments of that observational capability. Secondly, we present a tool that helps to analyse, measure and assess these dimensions and how to make them ‘manageable’. The tool stimulates the internal discourse of what to check and gives outlines on how to transform that into an organization-styled language and knowledge. Thirdly and finally, we illustrate the dimensions, the tool and the conditions of appropriate handling with case study vignettes. This is to illustrate a special way of tool treatment necessary to transform generalisms into contextualisms.

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Discovery; KM Tools and Technologies; Communication and Organization Culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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