Cultural Aspects in Learning Organizations Design

Abstract

Century's end is being signaled by a new way of thinking and acting. In order to survive, organizations need to be contemporaneous, adapting themselves to needed changes. In modern organizational environment is more and more evident the need of being competitive and innovative. Every company, in order to attain their goals, must be prepared to implement new proceedings for following the daily occurring transformations. Downsizing, re-structuring, re-engineering, and other efforts did not answer the question on how to keep organizations apt for following this continuous changing flow. Learning Organizations are a new proposal for answering these questions. The need for flexibility demands a continuous knowledge acquisition of changes occurring in the environment and the cognitive ability for processing this information. This paper intends, in a first moment, to present an organization model based in Maturana and Varela autopoiesis theory, and then, explore the possibilities of organization learning.