Trusts not learning -how are they supposed to learn?

This caught my eye because it attributes 'learning' to a corporisation and it does so matter-of-factly.

NHS trusts are failing to learn properly from patient complaints, with most needing to make significant improvements on how they learn from mistakes, according to researcher. NHS trusts not learning from their mistakes, report says | Society | theguardian.com 

Admittedly this is echoing the way that many of us talk routinely about corporisations. We speak of them knowing, learning, willing and even deciding. My question is whether this is a mere figure of speech or whether there is a significant level of truth to it. Now, it should be noted the same article also quotes a more 'nuanced' telling of the tale and it may give a way into answering my question:

"too many boards are not considering the kind of analysis they need in order to understand patient experience and use information from patient complaints to improve safety and care. From ward to board level, learning from complaints needs to improve."

In this we catch a glimpse of what learning by a corporisation involves at least in the minds of one set of researchers and their interlocutors. It involves people processing information in groups which have places in structures. Those structures convene the groups and (implicitly, given that the learning is related to improving care) take the product of the group deliberations into changed systems. This seems to parallel definitions of learning which talk about processing information into changed behaviour or structure.

learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. Learning produces changes in the organism and the changes produced are relatively permanent    
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning> 

Since a corporisation is, by definition, made up of individual humans (plus some other 'ingredients') part of what we need to pay attention to is how the move is made from individual learning to the corporate level.

There are many methods for capturing knowledge and experience, such as publications, activity reports, lessons learned, interviews, and presentations. Capturing includes organizing knowledge in ways that people can find it; multiple structures facilitate searches regardless of the user’s perspective (e.g., who, what, when, where, why,and how). Capturing also includes storage in repositories, databases, or libraries to ensure that the knowledge will be available when and as needed. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisational_learning>

And learning takes the knowledge captured and turns it into not just stored information but policies, proceedures, training, slogans, iconography, architecture and accountability structures.