The Digital Academy: Advancing the potential of the BC Public Service as a learning organization

Dr. Amy Zidulka received a SSHRC Institutional Grant to study the efforts of the BC Government’s Digital Academy to foster characteristics of a learning organization within the BC public service.

The concept of the learning organization has influenced scholarship and practice for over thirty years (Senge, 1990; Watkins & Kim, 2017). Yet, organizational learning practices remain difficult to change and often have not shifted (Lizier & Reich, 2020). Change can be particularly challenging in large public-sector organizations which are often “dominated by control procedures, scheduling and routines” and characterized by “a more complex hierarchy and a higher degree of centralization” (Palos & Stancovici, 2015). This action research project focuses on the efforts of the BC Government’s Digital Academy to foster characteristics of a learning organization within the BC public service.