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This paper aims to consider middle managers’ influence on organizational learning by exploring how they cope with demands and tensions in their role and whether their practice affects available team energy.

In total, 43 managers from three large organizations involved in major change assessed their group’s energy using a tested and validated instrument, the OEQ12©. This generated six distinct categories of team energy, from highly productive to corrosive. Thirty-four of these managers, spread across the six categories, completed a Twenty Statements Test and a follow-up interview to explore their cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to coping with resource constraints and tensions in their role.

The research provides preliminary insights into what distinguishes a middle manager persona co-ordinating teams with highly productive energy from those managing groups with less available energy to engage with knowledge and learning. It considers why these distinctions may affect collective sensitivities in the organizational learning process.

Informants were not equally distributed across the six team energy categories; therefore, some middle manager personas are more indicative than others.

This research suggests areas where middle manager development could potentially improve organizational learning.

This study offers early empirical evidence that middle managers’ orientation to their role is entangled with the process of energizing their teams in organizational learning during change.

To increase the spread and reuse of lessons learned (LLs), the purpose of this paper is to develop a standardised information structure to facilitate concise capture of the critical elements needed to engage secondary learners and help them apply lessons to their contexts.

Three workshops with industry practitioners, an analysis of over 60 actual lessons from private and public sector organisations and seven practitioner interviews provided evidence of actual practice. Design science was used to develop a repeatable/consistent information model of LL content/structure. Workshop analysis and theory provided the coding template. Situation theory and normative analysis were used to define the knowledge and rule logic to standardise fields.

Comparing evidence from practice against theoretical prescriptions in the literature highlighted important enhancements to the standard LL model. These were a consistent/concise rule and context structure, appropriate emotional language, reuse and control criteria to ensure lessons were transferrable and reusable in new situations.

Findings are based on a limited sample. Long-term benefits of standardisation and use need further research. A larger sample/longitudinal usage study is planned.

The implementation of the LL structure was well-received in one government user site and other industry user sites are pending. Practitioners validated the design logic for improving capture and reuse of lessons to render them easily translatable to a new learner’s context.

The new LL structure is uniquely grounded in user needs, developed from existing best practice and is an original application of normative and situation theory to provide consistent rule logic for context/content structure.

Cambodia’s workforce has shifted over time, with internal migration increasing as more people are forced to the cities to find employment. This paper aims to change in workforce participation has led to a number of challenges for people moving into urban areas, particularly women as their role in the household and workforce is changing.

This research used qualitative research to explore the experiences of 20 Cambodian women working in garment factories. Interviews were conducted in Khmer by a bilingual research assistant. Interviews were recorded and then translated into English. Data were thematically analysed following a constant comparative method.

Findings indicate that women experience social isolation, job stress and are vulnerable to a variety of health and well-being problems. When moving into the city for work, many rural women leave their children in the care of other family members, including grandparents and other extended families, without a network, they experience isolation and loneliness.

This is the first qualitative work of its kind to investigate the experiences of Cambodian women factory workers and their experiences of moving to urban areas for work.

Decisions are integral to daily business practice. Sound and agile decision making is argued to be a core strategic capability. Knowledge helps avoid the consequences of ill‐informed decisions. Facts and expertise provide content; know‐how about the pitfalls and requirements of thinking through problems in different contexts contributes to sound process. This paper seeks to offer a staged framework to guide organisational discussions about how knowledge management (KM) can contribute to better decision‐making capability.

Consistent with a maturity model approach, the study used an interactive multi‐method design to explore knowledge and decision making with experienced practitioners. Guided by the literature the authors collected input via three focus groups and eight interviews with KM practitioners plus 19 interviews with senior decision makers chosen for their good track record. From the combination of input five stages of capability building in five key areas of intellectual capital development were identified.

The output is a maturity model that can be used to assess organisational status in knowledge‐enabled decision making and plan for relevant KM interventions to improve organisational capability across a range of contexts.

A discussion around current status raises awareness of the pitfalls that can lead to poor or unsound decisions. This can help individuals reflect on how to improve their practice, and organisations to learn systematically from past experience, improve governance of the decision‐making process and progressively improve capability by planning deliberate developmental action.

The paper provides a rigorously developed tool for systematic evaluation and planning about a critical business capability.

This paper seeks to identify how leadership can positively influence knowledge work and to explore which leadership practices need to be developed to support organisational learning and agility in the face of continuous change.

The thinking combines a long history of leadership and change management advice and 12 years of knowledge management research with the insights from a collaborative research project involving 14 large organisations that are members of the Henley KM Forum.

The result is a framework of 12 leadership agility practices specifically focused on creating conducive conditions for knowledge sharing, learning, engagement and collaboration.

Those responsible for leadership development in the knowledgeable organisation could use this as a well‐grounded starting point for designing learning programs. Leaders in key roles can use it as a gauge for self‐assessment to identify development needs or reflect on how to change their approach when things are not working.

The 12 practices are complementary and mutually supportive. They focus on remedying potential causes of “dis‐ease” in learning and change, caused by the most frequently occurring conflicts and tensions in organisational life.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge an over‐reliance on past experience as the cognitive underpinning for strategic decisions. It seeks to argue that, in complex and unknowable conditions, effective leaders use three distinct and complementary thinking capacities, which go beyond those normally learned during their rise to the top.

A conceptual model of thinking capacities is justified through a review of the psychology literature; the face validity of the proposed model is supported through six in‐depth interviews with successful CEOs.

A model of non‐conventional thinking capacities describes how strategic decision‐makers make choices that are better adapted to the conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction, which prevail in complex situations. These capacities are complementary to the more conventional approaches generally used in thinking about decisions.

The paper aims to stimulate awareness of the limitations of habitual mental responses in the face of difficult strategic decisions. It challenges leaders consciously to extend their abilities beyond conventional expectations to a higher order of thinking that is better suited to multi‐stakeholder situations in complex environments.

The paper responds to the challenge of McKenna and Martin‐Smith to develop new theoretical approaches to complex environments. It extends conventional approaches to decision making by synthesising from the literature some essential thinking capacities, which are well suited to the demands of situations dominated by uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction.

Today, universities are using technological advances that have enabled them to change their traditional delivery methods. Computer supported collaborative learning permits students to undertake courses via the Internet. This allows students from all over the world to take part in a course where they can gather information not only from the instructor but also from their fellow students. Consequently, the traditional forms of teaching must be adapted to better serve the needs of virtual learning students. The virtual instructor must do more than just communicate information to the students. He or she must learn to support the collaborative process between the learners and to encourage them to work as a team. This article describes a model for facilitating virtual learning groups and presents a case study to illustrate the concepts of running such a group. In addition, a number of implications for planning and supporting virtual groups are presented.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his/her own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The term “middle manager” never feels a particularly satisfactory one. It is the sort of term that people who are in middle management would probably not use to describe their role. They may use head, lead or executive, but they would not rush to place themselves in the middle management bracket. It is, of course, a useful descriptive term, but again you would probably not use it to someone’s face. “Oh, you’re a middle manager, aren’t you?” sounds like you are damning someone with faint praise rather than lauding their achievements in their career so far.

This paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.