Knowledge-oriented Organization Change - An Approach for the Modification of Structure and Culture

Organizations can only remain competitive in this dynamic field, if they change. Therefore organizational learning, knowledge and the systematic interaction of both, known as knowledge management, have become important matters for organizations. During the conversion of these tasks, one realizes again and again that the existing structures and the prevailing organization culture have an essential influence on these efforts. After working out the relevant basics of knowledge, knowledge management, individual learning as well as of organization structure and organization culture it could be identified that there is an analogy between individual and organizational learning. For this learning two learning processes were differentiated: the procedural learning and the declarative learning of an organization. Based on a general model, a specific procedure for procedural and declarative learning of an organization was developed and described. Depending on the activated learning process, in the analysis step, the learning object is evaluated and the received data are prepared and visualized. The design step which follows defines an ideal and contains the execution of an ideal/real-comparison and the derivation and planning of corresponding interventions. The final development step concerns oneself with implementing the interventions, checking if goals were reached and securing the results by a periodical review and continuous improvement in the long run.