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Purpose and benefits

Chris Argyris has made a very important contribution to the concept of organisational learning. He argues that organisations depend fundamentally on people, but too often stand in the way of people fulfilling their potential. The main thrust of his work has been to explore the relations between personality and the organisation and to suggest how these relations can best be made mutually beneficial. He is particularly associated with the concepts of ‘single-loop’ and ‘double-loop’ learning. The former is a top-down process in which management imposes change on others; it merely enables an organisation to achieve its existing objectives. In the latter, managers debate issues and respond to change, learning from others, and are able to modify and expand the objectives of the organisation accordingly.