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The purpose of this paper is to identify and delineate a practical tool that assists teams in organizations and the individuals in those teams in reflecting and learning from their own conversations

For more than three years, the author acted as a Reflective Analyst for a team focusing on new product development.

By reflecting back to the themes of their conversations and by asking questions that caused them to reflect on the dynamics of the group, what was said and not said, and how people responded the team is able to understand themselves in a new way.

The Reflective Note process will be of value to learning facilitators, leaders of work teams, and individuals interested in finding new learning processes.

“Employee empowerment” as a term is frequently used in management circles. In practice, however, it is a daunting effort to find an exact definition of it. There are hundreds of articles on the topic. Some attempt their own definition; others expect that the reader already knows what the concept means. What is employee empowerment? What are its roots? What do the various theoretical voices have to say about the concept? An exploration of these questions is the content of this article.

The authors describe learning strategies that are being used successfully to benefit both individuals and organizations. They also speak about the shadow side: a culture of fear, the negative impact of constant change, and inappropriate exploitation of employee knowledge. They elaborate on what can happen when an idea as powerful as the learning organization ends up being used for purposes that were not originally intended.

This article offers a conception of the learning organization. From this model, we discuss ways in which organizational development can now be used to create learning organizations and ways in which organizational development theory and practice might change to create learning organizations. We consider three ways OD may contribute to the learning organization: supportive systems of interaction, guiding values, and a sense of structural alternatives. We look at contributions learning organizations make to OD, in terms of changing conceptions of dialogue, system diagnosis focused on learning, intervention focused on long term empowerment, and measurement at the macro system level.

The phrase “learning organization” has existed in the literature for several decades. Senge popularized the term in the 1990s; however, other writers have made significant contributions to this topic. The leadership literature, although vast, lacks specificity. At the intersection of these two concepts, the literature lacks a needed link that describes the specific actions that a leader can take to achieve the transformation to a learning organization. This paper examines the actions that a leader can take in order to transform an organization into a learning organization and studies four leaders of widely diverse organizations. The research indicated that leaders who were successful in implementing the learning organization concept used it as the solution to a business problem, while devoting time and attention to the transformation. The findings have widespread implications for practitioners, adult educators and for future research.