Capturing Solutions for Organizational Learning and Scaling Up

The World Bank has published a much needed guidebook for organizations on how to document operational experiences for organizational learning and knowledge sharing. It also discusses the significance of organizational capabilities at two levels: Enabling Environment for Knowledge Sharing and Technical Skills. The publication asks a simple, yet important, question: Is your organization missing important lessons from its operational experiences?

This step-by-step guide shows you how to systematically capture such knowledge and use it to inform decision making, support professional learning, and scale up successes. The captured lessons--knowledge assets, the central element needed for learning--are consistently formatted documents that use operational experience to answer a specific question or challenge.

The guide describes how to create and use knowledge assets in five steps: (1) identify important lessons learned by participants, (2) capture those lessons with text or multimedia documents, (3) confirm their validity, (4) prepare them for dissemination, and (5) use them for sharing, replication, and scaling up. Included tools, templates, and checklists help you accomplish each step

For knowledge sharing to thrive, organizations need to develop capabilities at two levels: (1) the enabling environment for knowledge sharing and (2) technical skills. Hence, becoming a knowledge- sharing organization involves a complex change management process. A complete organizational transformation involves initiatives in eight areas, or pillars.

If you are keen on developing your organization thorugh its learning experiences, make sure you download the guidebook.

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