ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

THE LEARNING CULTURE AND THE LEARNING LEADER 397trust of people) and Theory Y (idealistic trust of people) still has nottaken hold, more than forty years after it was first promulgated. Onehypothesis is that he was proposing the more idealistic Theory Yat a time when control-oriented bureaucracies were still workingfairly effectively. The real relevance of Theory Y may well be to thelearning organization of the future. It is inconceivable to me how alearning-oriented leader could have anything other than Theory Yassumptions about human nature and how an organization in whichknowledge and skill are widely distributed can work on any basisother than mutual trust. And this takes us all the way back to KurtLewin’s classic studies of classrooms under autocratic or democraticleaders (1947). The autocratic classes could match and even outdothe democratic ones in performance when the teacher was present,but if the teacher left, the autocratic ones fell apart, whereas thedemocratic ones reorganized and continued to perform.4. The Assumption That theEnvironment Can Be DominatedA learning culture must contain in its DNA a gene that reflects theshared assumption that the environment is to some degree manageable.An organization that assumes that it must symbioticallyaccept its niche will have more difficulty in learning as the environmentbecomes more turbulent. Adaptation to a slowly changingenvironment is also a viable learning process, but I am assumingthat the way in which the world is changing will make that less andless possible. The more turbulent the environment, the more importantit will be for leaders to argue for and show that some levelof control over the environment is desirable and possible.5. Commitment to TruthThrough Pragmatism and InquiryA learning culture must contain the shared assumption that solutionsto problems derive from a deep belief in inquiry and a pragmaticsearch for truth. The inquiry process itself must be flexible and