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Strategic organisational learning for the super-knowledge economy

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About me: Graham Lauren

I am a journalist and have worked over recent years as an editor on the pages of various Australian Financial Review group titles, including both its newspaper and BRW magazine. I was previously a web architect at ACP Magazines, upon many of whose titles I have also worked in editorial roles.

I hold a Master of Business and Technology degree from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and have a particular interest in organisational learning. I have a model to apply, using social technologies and established journalistic-editorial and learning methods, that focuses learning within organisations on strategy development and execution.

I am keen to learn more about how organisations learn, and to find the leading thinkers in this area, and I research and blog on the subject at Cloud Citizen.

My work is now based on an educated bet that the importance of next wave of technology adaptation will be far less about the technology itself than it is the way in which it is used to build competitive workplace learning, in strategy, innovation, sustainability and technology and change management.

Shared learning and improved system design enhances the effectiveness with which companies engage and transform hitherto unused intellectual capacity and tacit knowledge. This can be deployed to outperform rivals and build enduring strategic advantage.

This has profound implications for organisational design, because doing it well will also create organisations to which talented employees are attracted, and in which workers are engaged and motivated. These are the organisations of the future, fit for human beings.

I believe the unsustainable organisations of the past and present are little more than the result of failures in organisational learning, and that sustainability is a way of life, not of damage control.

I am the creator of the Accelerated Sustainability management and reporting methodology, which Stuart Wilson, former chief executive of the Australian Shareholders’ Association, described as sustainability reporting’s “future model”, as he considered its social, web-driven form capable of delivering real process and management change where its previous forms can’t. (His concern is that most corporations’ reports don’t.)

You can download a copy of The Competition of Sustainability here, that I wrote about an early implementation of Accelerated Sustainability. This was published in the journal of Chartered Secretaries Australia.

I am a big fan of the work of Gary Hamel, Peter Senge and Andrew McAfee.

I’ve spent my professional life in editorial production, web publishing and marketing and communication management.

I live in inner Sydney, Australia. Please email me at grahamlauren [at] gmail.com.



  • ARIE DE GEUS, former Corporate Planning Director, Royal Dutch Shell:
    "The rate at which organisations learn may become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage."





    AGILE ORGANISATIONS LEARN FASTER
    than competitors and quicker than the environment around them is changing.

    An optimal message for stakeholders is of
    how a workforce of committed human beings is being guided and motivated to pool wisdom, using the best tools available to learn from each other, about how to build a sustainable business that generates new value for all stakeholders.

    Strategic learning focuses all knowledge-building efforts across a business on understanding what drives strategy, and on what improves its execution. Its purpose is that the learning should become integral and indistinguishable from strategy itself. It is an eternally iterative challenge, and it will become a core future competency of all successful organisations, to the detriment of those that are not.



    As a professional editor, I can help your managers and even your non-writers look good in everything you publish



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    CHARLES DARWIN:
    “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”



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