Organisational learning in an English Regional Theatre: Case Study.

Joe works for a small UK-based training and development consultancy which specialises in the not for profit sector and has built a particular niche for itself in working within the cultural industries: museums, fallaries, libraries, theatres etc. As she sat in a production meeting the previous week, she heard stories of productions. She heard a discussion about how to make new production a multi-sensory event (how the audience might see, hear and feel the production), and witnessed concerns regarding how they would manage it with people contemplating the impact it would have on their particular departments. The CEO had talked to Zoe about her interest in how best to develop her team as a whole and that she was keen on Zoe’s proposal to look at how people experienced learning across the organisation. Recognising they recently went through some big challenges, Emma wondered how they might do things better in future. She was eager to instil an approach that allowed people to work more actively across departments rather than staying in what she described as their comfort silos. This had given Zoe an initial research question: how do people in arts organisation experience learning and how might this be done better in future? She recognised this needed further refining, but at least was a good start.

Question 1

Justify the philosophy you would use to answer the question in the above case study. (25).