Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

Chapter 5. The Learning Organization

"In the accumulation of over 20 years of studies, they [organizational learning writers] have not developed a comprehensive view on what constitutes 'organisational learning'."

—Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995)

So far, I have described the role of learning and knowledge in the creation of software development and suggested some means of enhancing learning. During this discussion, the ideas of organizational learning and the learning organization have arisen. In this chapter, I want to explore these ideas in more detail and consider what such an organization would look like and what it would do.

As I noted in the introduction, Agile teams need to be learning organizations in their own right. The term learning team is probably a more accurate description of an effective Agile team. Such teams need to learn together to create large pieces of software in the application, solution and process domains. Learning teams need to help individual members learn and learn collectively. Such learning teams form building blocks of the bigger learning organization.

For those working in a large organization, it can often seem that the company is determined to restrict our learning. A constant focus on making money deprives us of time to learn, and the need to drive down costs stops us getting the resources we need. Corporate organization and internal politics seem to create barriers to our learning.

It seems that we have a contradiction: we need to ...