Three ways to tell if your company can think

THESE days, it is about as common for a company to declare itself to be a "learning organisation" as it is to say its people are its greatest asset, writes Roger Trapp. And yet there is much evidence to suggest that success increasingly comes to those enterprises that set themselves on a course of continuous learning.

With this Thursday labelled "Learning-at-work day", training departments throughout the land will no doubt be dusting off materials ranging from Peter Senge's pioneering The Fifth Discipline to the more basic texts that have followed in its wake.

It should be stressed that there is no shortcut to becoming a learning organisation. Nevertheless, the Industrial Society has come up with a concise book that sets out the principles behind the concept.

At the heart of Fifty Ways towards a Learning Organisation by Andrew Forrest (the body's learning and development director) is the assertion that employers wanting to go down this route need to "work smarter, not harder, by making better use of the knowledge and ideas employees possess, and stop rating their learning credentials by the size of the training budget".

Organisations should match individual learning with corporate learning through such steps as identifying good practice and making efforts to spread it. The solution is not necessarily spending more money "but using a variety of ways to harness the full brain-power, knowledge and experience of your employees".

The book points to three "tell-tale signs" of a true learning organisation. These are:

n top executives are as likely to take part in learning programmes as anyone else;

n mistakes are treated as opportunities for everyone to learn from, and there is no culture of blame; and

n learning happens as much through transfers of knowledge within the organisation as through learning imported from outside.