1. Knowledge management
   1. Emphasis on capturing, managing and leveraging the information, experience and knowledge held by the firm’s employees for the organisation’s benefit.
   2. The development of the individuals is somewhat incidental; rather, emphasis is placed on knowledge itself.
   3. Much consideration given to the notions of tacit and explicit knowledge - difficulties managing different types or forms of knowledge
   4. Explicit knowledge is that which can be easily codified, articulated and shared; whereas tacit knowledge is personal, practical and context-specific, and therefore difficult to formalise or communicate. Based on Polanyi’s writing (e.g., 1962; 1969)
   5. Lam (2000) provides a four-way classification that takes account of both the tacit/explicit categorisation of knowledge and whether it is individual or collectively owned.
   6. Lam (2000)
      1. This results in a definition of knowledge as embrained - dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities - (individual/explicit), encoded (collective/explicit), embodied (individual/tacit) or embedded (collective/tacit).
      2. knowledge management thus becomes to identify, capture, store and share these forms of knowledge effectively within an organisation, ensuring knowledge can flow freely across different roles and functions but critically preventing its escape to, for example, competitors.
   7. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995)
      1. ‘knowledge spiral’ is one of the most influential models of knowledge processes
      2. Outlining the processes of transition between explicit and tacit, this model is firmly orientated towards managing knowledge to achieve competitive advantage
   8. However, there are many critics of such approaches to knowledge management who highlight issues of separating a concern with knowledge from a concern with people, alongside an over-reliance on technological means of capturing and sharing knowledge.
   9. HRD practitioners often find themselves working in parallel to such knowledge management programmes, which may have different aims and priorities from learning and development strategies within an organisation.
2. Approaches to organisation learning Helen Shipton (2006)
   1. Provides a useful typology featuring these and other organisational learning (OL) approaches,
   2. The horizontal axis distinguishes between OL perspectives that focus on the organisation as an entity and those that focus instead on individuals and individuals within their communities.
   3. The vertical axis distinguishes between descriptive theories (what OL is) and prescriptive theories (what it should be).
   4. The concept of learning organisations falls in quadrant 1, having a focus on the individual within the organisation and a prescriptive perspective, while literature on knowledge management falls in quadrant 3, having a focus on the organisation rather than the individual and an explanatory perspective.
3. The learning organisation
   1. (Senge, 1990).
      1. An organisation in which individuals know how to learn and to manage their learning and are willing and able to work with others to create learning
      2. The system’s structures and processes must be designed to support continuous learning and members of the organisation must be committed to continuous learning, both individually and in teams, and all would be working towards a shared vision of the organisation’s future.
   2. Senge (1990, 2006) Five disciplines
      1. Personal mastery
         1. Individuals need to be able to manage and direct their own learning.
      2. Mental models
         1. These need to be surfaced and challenged to make way for new ideas and thinking.
      3. Building shared vision
         1. To be successful, organisations need a genuinely shared vision of their future, and the principles which inform their practice.
      4. Team learning
         1. Enabling teams to overcome barriers to learning so that team members learn together.
      5. Systems thinking
         1. In which organisations are regarded as a system in which all parts are interrelated. This raises the importance, for instance, of considering the influence of the whole system when making changes in specific areas of practice within the organisation and vice versa. This discipline is the one that holds together the other four.
   3. (Senge, 2006, p. 3).
      1. Senge defines learning organisations as ‘places where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free’
   4. Argyris, (1999) Double-loop learning
      1. ‘Double-loop learning’ is the idea that learning from experience in the workplace should not by simply about reflection on what happened (single-loop learning), but should also mean challenging the assumptions underpinning the action, making it possible to alter the paradigm of thinking within which actions are decided on
   5. (Arie De Geus, 1997, p. 56)
      1. New technologies come on the scene, markets shift, interest rates fluctuate, consumers’ tastes change, and the company must enter a new phase of life. In order to stay in sync with the outside world, it must be able to alter its marketing strategy, its product range, its organizational form, and where and when it does its manufacturing. And once a company has adapted to a new environment, it is no longer the organization it used to be; it has evolved. That is the essence of learning.