Organizing Viable Development Work in Operations

The aim of this chapter is to give an account of and discuss how viable development work can be organized and engage employees on all levels of an organization, which, depending on the specific needs, enables the emergence of both exploitation and exploration. A further aim is to describe the relationship between how development work is carried out and the opportunities afforded by such work for continuous learning of development work competence. The empirical material contains several examples of how employees are committed to improving their own operations, which in itself is an important prerequisite for a continuous work-integrated learning. However, the empirical findings presented in this chapter indicate that this is not a sufficient condition for the long-term development of skills relevant to pursuing structured development work. One conclusion to draw is that development work needs to be treated as a domain-specific competence in itself, which in turn needs to be distributed throughout the organization.