Opportunities and Challenges for the Library as Learning Organization

This brief essay examines management literature on the Learning Organization to consider its applicability to the library context.

It is a truism in library science literature and increasingly in popular discourse that the field of librarianship is in crisis. In a recent article in The Boston Globe, for example, the president of the American Library Association (ALA), Brey-Casiano, explains with Margolis (2005) that despite the growing demand for library services, “[m]ore than $80 million has been cut from public library budgets in the past year alone, which has weakened or closed libraries in more than 40 states.” In addition to these financial pressures, the increasing generational and educational diversity of library staffs, the depth and breadth of technological change, and the ever-increasing speed of change in all areas, among other factors, have also generated the sense that libraries are under increasing pressure and that these pressures seem to converge on the human resources of library organizations (Farrow 1997; Rubin, 2004 pp. 112-116). Perhaps surprisingly, this crisis has also generated a productive turn within the field, in particular, toward Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) and its close relative, the “learning organization.”

As Pynes (2004) defines it, SHRM is “the implementation of human resources activities, policies, and practices to make the necessary ongoing changes to support or improve the agency’s operational and strategic objectives” (p. 23). This move is a powerful one in the ways it allows organizations to be proactive with their strategic planning regarding their human and other resources. This organizational approach has the potential to go far beyond good strategy alone, however. The success of experiments over the last ten years in one manifestation of SHRM—the “learning organization” model—suggests that within the field of librarianship, at least, thoughtful change management can help organizations achieve more than was possible before crisis and can help them do so in ways better aligned with their core values. In the case of librarianship, the implementation of learning organization strategies is especially valuable for its potential to support the democratic and humane ideals central to the field.

Pynes observes that crisis and change management benefit from the SHRM approach because of the flexibility it provides in responding to (impending) “changes in their external and internal environments” (p. 19). This flexibility emerges from the integration of longer-range, proactive strategic planning and the day-to-day management of an organization’s human resources. Much more than other SHRM approaches, the learning organization model introduced by Senge (1994) at MIT in 1990 offers benefits especially suited to the library environment, professional/philosophical orientation, and the crises it is facing today. Within this model, Giesecke and McNeil (2004) explain, following Senge, that a learning organization is:

Skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. Without accompanying changes in the way that work gets done, only the potential for improvement exists. Learning organizations translate new knowledge into new ways of behaving. . . . In a learning organization, learning takes place at the individual, group, and organizational levels. (p. 55)

Within this model, organizational energies are directed to encouraging risk-taking, flexibility, communication, individual and group empowerment, and other attitudes and behaviors that enable the individual and collaborative development of new knowledge, its communication to all members of the organization, and its application in the service of large organizational values. Senge describes the learning organizations he envisions as “organizations 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, and where people are continually learning how to learn together” (p. 3). Here then, it is clear that not only are the attitudes and behaviors that create the learning organization the very ones needed to help libraries become “lean, mobile, and strategic” as Schreiber and Shannon (2001, p. 38) observe they must, but, also that the vision at the center of the learning organization model is virtually identical to the highest ideals of librarianship.

This said, however, the learning organization approach is not without its critics and drawbacks. As Senge himself notes in an interview this model is both “daunting” and difficult for the ways it demands people shift their fundamental beliefs about organizations and management from more mechanistic and rigid approaches to more humane and flexible ones (Webber, 1999). For Lucas, on the other hand, the key limitation to Senge’s organizational model is its lack of “passion” and the mistaken conviction “not only that knowledge is power but that knowledge is enough” (p. xvi). He argues that “[p]assion can help us make shifts and leaps that strategic planning can neither envision nor imagine. . . . And passion is even more fundamental than the learning organization, because it is passion that gives us the driving reason to learn and to apply our new knowledge effectively” (p. xvii). While these cautions may be well-placed in the general application of SHRM and the learning organization, in the world of librarianship in which the facilitation and application of knowledge is the driving passion, and in which a profound concern with the democratic and humane distribution and uses of knowledge is the goal, Senge’s and Lucas’s critiques seem less ominous.

If the learning organization model is provocative and promising for librarianship theoretically, experiments in its implementation in public and academic libraries make it all the more so. In their work to move the North Suburban Public Library System of Chicago to a learning organization model, for example, Hayes, Sullivan, and Baaske (1999) found that the improvements in inter-staff communication that emerged from implementation of the model went far beyond simply allowing for improved change management. These improvements also “helped [them] to be much more responsive to members’ needs” (p. 6). Even more powerfully given today’s economic realities, the learning organization’s emphasis on cross-training, continual staff learning, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing “made it possible for [them] to offer more services using existing staff” (p. 7) even if a given staff member were called away for an emergency or to work on another deadline (Long, 2002).

The University of Maryland Libraries (2004) are experiencing similar success in their implementation of the learning organization approach to management. For them, the emphasis on the relationship between continued individual learning and the larger goals of the organization has been important for empowering and valuing each staff member in contributing to the larger organizational progress (S. Baughman and B. A. Hubbard, 2001). With the increasing generational, educational, and experiential diversity of the profession, this valuing of the particular contributions to be made by each staff member is an especially important contribution of the learning organization to the field of librarianship.

These and other real-world experiences of library implementation of the learning organization model reflect the near-inextricability and mutual support of the approaches of the learning organization, SHRM, and the specific capacities, challenges, and philosophical/professional orientations of public and university libraries. This unity of vision and similarity of strategy suggests that in this time of crisis for librarianship, SHRM generally and the learning organization approach specifically may represent a special space of opportunity.

References

Baughman, S., & Hubbard, B. A. (2001). Becoming a learning organization. University of Maryland Libraries Working Paper #3. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from http://www.lib.umd.edu/PUB/working_paper_3.html

Brey-Casiano, C., & Margolis, B. A. (2005, January 5). Don't close the book on libraries [Electronic version]. Boston Globe.

Farrow, J. (1997). Management of change: technological developments and human resource issues in the information sector. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 12(5), 319-324. Retrieved October 2, 2004, from EBSCO database.

Giesecke, J., & McNeil, B. (2004). Transitioning to the learning organization. Library Trends, 53(1), 54-67. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from Academic Search Premier database.

Hayes, J., Sullivan, M., & Baaske, I. (1999). Choosing the road less traveled: the North Suburban Library System creates a learning organization. Public Libraries, 38(2), 110-114. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from Academic Search Premier database.

Long, S. (2002). Seeking a shared vision to create better libraries. Sarah Long - The Daily Herald. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from http://www.sarahlong.org/article.asp?articleID=36

Lucas, J. R. (1999). The passionate organization: Igniting the fire of employee commitment. New York: AMACOM.

Pynes, J. E. (2004). Human Resources Management for Public and Nonprofit Organizations. (2 nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rubin, R. E. (2004). Foundations of Library and Information Science. (2 nd ed.). NY and London: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc.

Schreiber, B., & Shannon, J. (2001). Developing library leaders for the 21st Century. The Learning Organization: An International Journal, 32(3/4), 35-60. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from Academic Search Premier database.

Senge, P. M. (1994). The fifth discipline: The art & practice of the learning organization. (1 st Paperback ed. ed.). New York: Doubleday.

University of Maryland Libraries. (2004). The Learning Organization. Retrieved December 30, 2004, from http://www.lib.umd.edu/groups/learning/learningorg.html

Webber, A. M., & Senge, P. (1999). Learning for a change [Electronic version]. Fast Company, (24), 178. Retrieved December 30, 2004.