ORGANIZING FOR LEARNING

Building Context

Employees in healthy, effective organizations continuously engage in conversation designed to increase the organization's capacity to achieve the results it cares about most. At Paradise Valley Community College (PVCC), the results we care about most, our core value, is learning.

It is important to recall that references to learning at PVCC encompass three dimensions: student, employee and organizational learning. For most, the concept of student learning and employee learning (formerly known as faculty development and staff development) is quite familiar and easily understood. However, organizational learning is a fairly new concept.

Organizational learning is rooted in what we have come to know about effective organizations. That is, we know the capacity of our college to achieve the results it values is influenced not only by the ability of our students and the performance of our colleagues but also by the college's structures, policies, procedures, and values. Collectively, these four elements form the college's systems. Structure, one of the four elements, is particularly intriguing. Within PVCC's system, structure refers to the organizational structure of our college. Given our commitment to learning, the central "system" question concerning structure is: How should our college organize itself to support learning? One dimension of the college's organizational structure is its administrative leadership structure. It is important to note that there are other organizational structures at PVCC including our college's academic, academic support and administrative services structures.

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