Learning is part of knowledge management

There's a good article in Harvard Business Review 08/08 Vol.36 No. 8 P.60 by Amy Edmondson, entitled "The competitive imperative of learning".

This article is about the global trend to move away from a product based organisations to those that are more knowledge based - that is where the value is now. A process called EAL - execution-as-learning is introduced as a means to support the organisational learning and knowledge management process.

I like this framework because it is action orientated (good for healthcare) and shows how competitiveness can be managed, challenged and leveraged, though collaborative tools. This sounds a bit like an oxymoron. My view is that competitiveness might be the overarching strategy but it is delivered, at the action level, by collaborative working, including the use of systems and tools to enable this. There is also an emphasis on evaluation and feedback as essential parts of the learning process.