Abstract:

Organisational learning has aroused the attention from management researchers in practice-oriented to address the perspectives of productivity of knowledge generation and motivation of engaging people within an organization to create, implement and transfer organisation knowledge. Many management researches have endeavoured to examine the critical factors for organisational learning. These factors include: conflict management, inquiry skills, system thinking for actionable model, single loop verse double loop learning process, and learning in action. In recent years, some studies also explore the roles of knowledge agents who take action for learning and contributing knowledge. The feature of a knowledge agent is that he is willing to pay effort to acquire knowledge for helping an organisation achieve something, which may be a business goal or a solution. The autopoietic characteristics of knowledge agent, however, may be a burden of individual to contribute to the organisational learning. Organisation, therefore, requires providing a supportive structure and mechanism to arouse knowledge agent’s self-referential capacity for self-producing knowledge components to extend his knowledge boundary through group learning, at the same time, to make collective decision for action. Universities, as a human capital supply institution, should prepare students with group learning ability and collective decision capacity. In many education institutions, however, look at learning as a personal intuitive process to gain knowledge and skills and may not focus their teaching activities to prepare students acquiring knowledge in collective manner. Indeed, the assessment of students learning always reflects their individual learning results only. It results the autopoietic characteristics are magnified but the group learning manner is understated.

Although many educational institutions increasingly promote the importance of lifelong learning, teamwork and collaborative activities to the students, not many of them provide real, complex and interdependent environment to students develop their capacity of group learning or make decision for an organisation. In this paper, we establish the Experiential Learning Model (ELM) that integrates the classroom taught knowledge with the real world situation to allow and enable students develop the skills for lifelong learning, build up the capability to make collective decision, deepen and concrete their knowledge and extend their ability to group learning. With the dimensions of learning process, contents, and theory verse practices, the ELM in this paper is constructed into four stages: 1. awareness of a real life issue that needs a solution, 2. usage of learned knowledge to evaluate the gap between the knowledge inventory and expected knowledge for the issue, 3. implementation of knowledge and 4. generalisation of the experience into new knowledge. The expected learning outcomes via the model are establishing students an ability of predicting problems, making better decisions for group and making sense of the signals from the environment. We introduce a case study of adopting the model in an outside classroom learning project to confirm the authenticated results of building up students’ group learning ability and collective decision making capacity to solve legitimised and real life problems so that they could contribute to organisational learning in their career.

Keywords:

knowledge management, organisational learning, autopoietic living system, knowledge agent model.