Evolution of Structure in the Learning Organisation

In the introduction to the?Learning Science?book, i’ve been playing with language around structure. It’s partly a context setting piece: as the nature of?knowledge?changes, as learning technologies innovate and mature, and as the social context of work evolves, then we will need to rebuild our Organisations to suit, and part of that change may involved the evolution (and eventual abstraction of) the Learning function itself. In this initial piece of writing, i start to describe this in terms of the ‘High Structure’, ‘Mid Structure’ and ‘Low Structure’ Organisation. I’ve aligned this with broader work around the formal and social Organisation as well, and in the centre (of course!) sits the?Socially Dynamic?one.

I am unashamedly biased in this as this already forms the conclusion of my separate work on Organisational Design in the context of the Social Age: the best of the old, the best of the new. An Organisation that is guided, not simply governed, with diverse capability and reconfigurable structure.

Tomorrow i will unpack some of what’s in this illustration, but in general it relates to infrastructure, ownership, validation, agency, and control.

Legacy Organisations had a focus on infrastructure that was formal, heavy, and central. But most likely our adapted ones will not. So i think our target it ‘mid structure’, not an absence of it. The trick may be working out what we can dis-engineer.