by Todd Warner March 22, 2018

We make many assumptions about organizational learning. Most of them are wrong.

On the surface we seem to know what organizational learning is: People attend programs or complete e-learning modules, they learn something new and they somehow become better. But this approach doesn’t represent how people in organizations actually learn. Hence we see massive failures across the board in the effectiveness of organizational learning.

As a result of this quandary, most organizations pursue efficiency in learning. They drive down internal learning budgets and replace costly face-to-face programs with less expensive e-learning solutions despite the fact that the completion rates of many e-learning modules are in the single digits. The thinking is “if it isn’t going to work it might as well be cheap and we should have a lot of it.” As a result, organizational learning is caught in a downward spiral of ineffectiveness.

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