ARE YOU A L(EARNING) ORGANIZATION?
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Sounds like a fantasy? Well I have news for you; this
is the reality of how learning takes place at Google. But well, it’s Google after all,
so it may still seem far-fetched but nevertheless achievable if you decide to
become what is called a ‘Learning Organization’. The concept of Learning
Organization (LO) is neither new nor novel but is one of the most played-down
because, as we know, despite crores of investment in L&D people constantly
quit organizations in search of better learning opportunities. Popularly
practiced notions of L&D do not think beyond the vision-goal-training-incentive
formula, do they?
A LO, on the other hand, thinks beyond the traditional and focuses on
creating, acquiring, transferring knowledge, and modifying its behavior to
reflect the same. Simply put, it is a place where both individuals and teams
challenge the established mindsets, learn from experience, and consistently
develop greater personal and collective competence to achieve better
performance and ultimately revenue. The concept was first introduced in 1990s by Peter Senge in his work The Fifth Discipline. He went on to describe the 5 components that
comprise a learning organization.
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- Systems Thinking: An organization must recognize that they are a complex system with many interconnected parts and then understand the way in which these parts interact and result in the said system.
- Personal Mastery: Every employee in the organization must strive to develop their own competence and patience for personal learning as organizational learning cannot occur without individual learning.
- Mental Models: These are the ingrained assumptions people have about business situations which we must challenge and prevent by fostering openness. This means that you need to unlearn to learn; beginners mind-set is the new normal.
- Shared Vision: An organization or leader must have the ability to share and encourage a common picture of the desired future through formulation of objectives and planning for contingencies.
- Team Learning: Having achieved personal mastery and shared vision are not enough to foster learning. People must learn together to think and act together. Inspiring dialogue, group discussions and cohesive relationships can accelerate team learning.
Does it sound desirable or does it sound desirable? The idea of LO is fast gaining popularity especially in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) business conditions. In fact, a recent study conducted in the healthcare sector in Canada showed that being a LO affected nurses’ daily work in a positive way with respect to knowledge, nursing practices, and quality of health care - objectives that the learning organization had sought to meet since its inception. However, this theoretical explanation of LO provides no framework for action because the scholars describe it using mystical terminology.
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But today, practitioners have come up with several strategies that
organizations can easily incorporate to become quick l(earners). Some of the
actionable recommendations by modern practitioners and scholars are:
- Openness to New Ideas – Remember Pearl Harbor? Japan redesigned the fins of their torpedoes to make them effective under the depth of 40 feet which were then successfully used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. If not for the encouragement of unconventional ideas through appreciation of differences, it wouldn’t have happened!
- Experimentation – The organization 7-Eleven’s ‘click and pick’ technology wherein customers can order goods online before picking it up from the store, was tried in a small number of stores first as an experiment before being implemented on a larger scale. Thus, relevant intelligence gathering, disciplined analysis and practice of concrete processes with consistency and rigor, foster efficient learning.
- Time for Reflection – The most basic of all lessons is to learn from own and other mistakes. Reflective audits and reviews are the best way to do so. After action review is a practice carried out by US army personnel, which has been incorporated by companies such as 7-Eleven wherein they use video technology to help employees have biweekly reviews to learn from their work.
- Leadership and Reinforcement – Research shows that leaders tend to overestimate the extent to which they are a LO. Leaders must listen, entertain differences, incentivize employees without being forceful about learning and change. They must instill learning based culture, values, mission and strategy; just how CEO Satya Nadella did for Microsoft.
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- Systematic Problem Solving – Xerox in 1983 established a 6 step process for virtually all decisions to be taken by leaders, which is still practiced across the company. This kind of a scientific, data driven approach using tools greatly facilitates learning processes.
- Transfer of Knowledge –Going back to the example of Japan in Pearl Harbor, they totally ignored the knowledge they had about the technological superiority of the Americans before going into World War II, which eventually brought Japan a nuclear devastation. Thus, continuous improvement requires commitment to learning which can be done through the age old methods of training and education.
Having possibly learnt how to unlearn and learn, don’t forget a few key
things as you go about it. Always measure the extent to which you are an LO. Harvard
Business Review’s recommended Depth of Learning and Benchmark Scores are tools
that can be used for the same. Furthermore, be sensitive to local cultures of
learning among departments, understand that leadership alone is not enough and
that learning is multidimensional. Most importantly, know that without
learning, change is just cosmetic.
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Image by Scott Adams via Dilbert Comics
Nivya Raghunandan
thoughts@kaleidoscope.org.in
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