Development and the Learning Organisation: An introduction

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity. (George Eliot, Middlemarch) Why Development and the Learning Organisation? Why a special issue on Development and the Learning Organisation? We are aware that an increasing number of NGOs, particularly some of the large international ones, as well as some bilateral and multilateral actors, are embracing the idea of ‘becoming a learning organisation’. Over the past decade, as NGOs have either rushed into the mainstream in their claims of innovative and effective practice, or they have tried to transform themselves to fit new realities, organisational learning has emerged as one way to live up to expectations and needs. Certainly, it is difficult to find organisations that are not touting the importance of knowledge generation and organisational learning in one form or another. We are curious to know how practitioners are approaching the issue of learning in organisations and whether their approaches are yielding positive results. We are especially interested because much of the