I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Albert Einstein

What will the world be like in 15 years? What will our children need to know? What qualities of a person will the businesses of the future need? What particular knowledge will be more important to them than the awakened capacity for learning? They should have a capacity to learn whatever they need as they need it. Human beings are first and foremost learners. We learn to walk, talk, think, know, relate to ourselves and to others. That consciously and unconsciously, everything about us is either learned or regulated by learning. Although learning is central to the individuals life and social well-being, we still have lot of resistance towards learning. In slow changing environments, the ideal situation for a business used to be to hire people who already knew how to do the job. As change becomes less predictable and less manageable, as the required job competencies become less definable, it is obvious that businesses will need people who can learn with the job. In our ever more complex world, the form of organisations which can prosper amidst the fast rate of change are those that are on their way to becoming ‘learning communities’. They have come to realize that survival and prosperity come from making the right decisions today. Hence these companies are developing learning-oriented relationships with customers, stockholders, the management and employees.

The organisations know that if there is nothing to hide and fair value is being exchanged, then there is no better basis for relationships than mutual learning. As we have very limited conception of learning, organisations are struggling hard to overcome the obstacles to learning. As organisational learning is derived from our understanding of individual learning, it needs people who are intellectually curious about their work, who actively reflect on their experience, who develop experience-based theories of change and continuously test these in practice with colleagues, and who use their understanding and initiative to contribute to knowledge development.

The author Dr Sarika Tomar is the Programme Director at NIILM — Centre for Management Studies, New Delhi.

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