Career advice from the experts on organizations, managing change, leadership, organizational development and factors that encourage learning in organizations stress on a number of factors most important of which is to learn from successes and failures. Personal interaction in all fields of organizational experience can build your professional skills – conceptual, social and technical. Learning about the whole organization rather than just one part is vital and has to be based on volunteering for assignments in various divisions and departments, offering interesting challenges from within or outside organizations. It is also important to set learning goals and monitor your progress carefully, making adjustments as needed.
The question is what are learning organizations? Learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create, where innovation and cooperation are nurtured, and where knowledge is transferred throughout the organization. The five disciplines of learning organizations (stated by organizational and management expert Peter Senge’s) are personal mastery, mental models, a shared vision, team learning and systems thinking. Organizational learning disabilities include having isolated jobs, blaming others, ignoring gradual change, following a tendency to take charge and emphasize events, and allowing skilled incompetence.
Openness, encouraging local solutions, providing time for learning and reflection, and implementing new leadership skills encourage learning in organizations.
Implementing change is one of the biggest challenges organizational leaders and managers face. Change in any part of the organization has a ripple effect that spreads to other parts. It is therefore essential to bring about change in a systemwide strategic fashion. To implement change successfully it is vital to manage all five contextual strategic forces: the environment, technology, strategy, structure and culture. Reading the environment accurately and recognizing the need for change is essential. Being aware of globalization and the impact of culture is one key challenge. Another is focusing on rapidly changing technologies. Organizational leaders and managers must change their strategies, structure and cultures in response to environmental and technological pressures for innovation and change. They must devise new missions, recognize people, and change their assumptions and values. Ignoring any one of the strategic factors for any length of time can be disastrous at worst. At best, it hampers organizational flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness.
A discipline devoted to the implementation of systemwide change with a focus on people and the organizational climate is known as organizational development (OD). OD principles include commitment to long-term change and a humanistic approach, action research, and a focus on developing effective internal processes. OD methods include survey feedback, sensitivity training, process consultation, and team building.
One of the most-used OD methods is the managerial Grids development by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. The grid focuses on teaching managers to increase their concern for people and their concern for production, which according to the theory, are both essential for organizational performance. Like any other change effort, OD requires strong support from the organization’s leadership.
OD steps include: Entry, contracting, Diagnosis, Feedback, Planning change, Intervention, and evaluation. OD implies a continuous process of Intervention and Evaluation and requires expert knowledge of the elements and processes of the planned change. Elements of Lewin’s and Nadler’s model of planned change include: 1) Lewin’s force field analysis – which proposes that all organizations contain forces that drive change and forces that resist change; 2) the three stages of change are unfreezing, change, and refreezing; 3) Nadler proposes a model of organizational change based on the systems view of organizations. It assumes that change is a process in which inputs become outputs and change in any part of the system has the potential to affect all parts.
The following global trends give an indication of the types of change that will be called for:
A shift away from a teaching to learning process and from individual training to learning organizations;
A shift away from standardized programmes and formal training to self-development, and flexible, result – oriented, learners – controlled training systems; and
A shift away from viewing training as a cost to realizing that it is an investment.
There is a need to update management training and development approaches, methods, techniques and institutional mechanisms if we are to cope with these changes and new management practices.
The most successful organizations worldwide recognize that human capital and human resource development are the key factors for enterprise competitiveness and survival in market – oriented economies.
It is increasingly being recognized that in order to manage complex, changing, diverse organizations, above all, one must learn to manage oneself.
We need to improve performance and delivery system of Pakistan’s Public Service Organizations, public enterprises and private sector organizations to effectively address many of the national issues that have direct bearing on the lives and life-style of our people. Planning and managing organizational change is the key that holds the solution.

 The writer is a former director NIPA, a political analyst, a public policy expert and an author.

iftahmad786@hotmail.com