Marie Michael Library

We're too much in 'to do' mode: action research into supporting international NGOs to learn

Smit, Maaike

This paper states that self-knowledge - understanding how you learn - is a first step in improving your own learning processes. Action research, in which the researcher and respondents in an organisation jointly make sense of their organisational learning, can then be seen as a way of promoting the learning capacity of the organisation. This paper explores the organisational learning processes of development NGOs in the Netherlands. The paper examines how these organisations think and talk about learning; how they learn in practice; and how action research can help support organisational learning.