The quote above is from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, which I’m slowly working my way through. But when it came up in my Readwise review today, it reminded me of another piece that recently came across my desk, asking if universities are learning organisations?
We have:
- A culture that encourages perfectionism, where learning from mistakes is far from normalised.
- A precarious work-life balance, which can have consequences for well-being.
- A rather hierarchical environment which can pose structural and bureaucratic barriers to learning.
- Often impossibly busy schedules that hardly leave us any time to reflect (although we often encourage our students to do it).
If we really want higher education institutions to be learning organisations, I think we need a radical change in culture.