From driving to learning: the organizational learning process

Organizational learning (OL) has been considered to be an effective developmental initiative in organizations that have a mission to develop, to sustain and to advance. There is a wide range of beliefs of thinking about what organizational learning is, how it occurs, and how it is applied and how it influences organizational development. Different perspectives are used to study OL by researchers from different disciplines. There is no clear and widely accepted depiction of the linkage between OL and its enabling factors. Such a comprehensive concept covering so many aspects is difficult to achieve. The authors introduce a variant of a classic approach to analyze the OL process the DELO (Driving-Enabling-Learning-Outcome) model, by describing OL as a continuous process. The model not only describes OL as a continuous goal-driven process, but also allows the picturing of the relationships with various influencing factors and facilitating effect of the of an OL framework. © 2006 IEEE.