Learning cycles in knowledge intensive organisations

From the perspective of Organisational Learning, organisations have the capacity to learn. Processes of organisational learning and knowledge development have been described mostly in idiosyncratic studies. In this paper, the question raised is how these learning processes can be mapped in a more general way? Can phenomena such as learning abilities of organisations or characteristic learning cycles as several authors broadly describe them, be detected? Unlike other theoretical currents of organisation research, the absence of shared research instruments makes it difficult to compare organisations and be able to pronounce upon their learning capabilities in a more general way.In this paper, the learning abilities of organisations are distinguished and described according to the model of the social learning cycle. A questionnaire was designed and validated to characterise the dimensions of a knowledge space and the stages of a learning cycle. The results, given by the four departments of three knowledge-intensive organisations, are analysed. © 2006 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.