Reforms of the Public Managers’ Training Policies for the Institutional Strengthening in Crisis Contexts: Made Learnings

The institutional crisis of the Argentine State in its political, technological, and administrative aspects has been so deep that it has brought some questioning about regular way to carry out reforms and training policies. It is within this context that the activities performed during 2002 and 2003 pursuant to the Public Managers’ Training Program from the “National Institute of the Public Administration” (INAP: Instituto Nacional de la Administración Pública) were carried out to foster institutional interrelation; to promote organizational learning; to reinforce institutional networks aimed at achieving a continuous improvement; to promote communities of practice and to acknowledge, keep up, and build knowledge as a policy and practice leading to the State modernization.

We tried to display the implementation potential of training as a mean to carry out agreed-on and possible modifications, acknowledging and strengthening the model set up by institutional networks in relation to the different communities of practice aiming at boosting the daily management and as a strategy to develop the interinstitutional coordination. We searched for a way to take advantage of the learning environment offered by organizations to spot the knowledge and relevant practices held by all the people and groups which belong to the different communities of practice, knowledge and learning.

The outline of the activities undertaken was made from a “knowledge management” standpoint. It  stands for the organizational activity of creating a social environment as well as the technical infrastructure in order that the knowledge could be accesible, shared and created. The actions arising from this approach have had two lines, both of which were interrelated: on the one hand, to make the implied knowledge be explicit, and on the other hand, to make it systematic and widespread.

The training areas were created within the framework of such idea, directed towards development in general, the careful utilization of the State intellectual capital, interinstitutional cooperation,  collaborative learning, and the build-up of institutional memory, as it is evidenced by this work, in a permanent aid to facilitate these processes creating the training spaces as well as the intra and inter-organizational management areas.

The designed training techniques to foster the “knowledge management” have been the following: 1) forums of people held responsible for the processes, 2) creation of networks of facilitators of organizational learning and case analysis, 3) learning of public managers in organizations, and 4) training of public managers to achieve the “knowledge management”. The working plan develops each of these lines in an attempt to account for: a) the context in which they arise, b) the degree of made progress, and c) the achieved results, at the same time that it links each experience with its corresponding conceptual framework.