‘Learning organisation’ is a cliché mouthed too often by those who have no experience with such a rare beast.
The key is not to try and help the organisation learn, it is to help the people in it learn by doing, spread the good outcomes, and nip the causes of bad practises before they become established as a norm.
‘Learning’ is a key part of an organisational culture that is able to evolve in response to the external pressures it faces, to best leverage the resources available.
To achieve ‘learning organisation’ as an outcome, you must change the natural order of most enterprises, by applying a huge dose of leadership.
That is what makes it so hard, so to succeed, follow these 10 tips!
Remove the fear of failure.
Fear of failure is perhaps the greatest impediment to learning, as nothing new is tried. Employees need to be given the confidence that following an idea that does not deliver will not result in retribution. Experimenting and learning in collaboration with suppliers and customers offers rich rewards.
Employment policy.
Employ those who are prepared to try new things, be a bit different, seek challenges and opportunities to test themselves. Too often we employ people who ‘look like us,’ and as a result we get more of the same. Be aggressive about the sort of employees you want. Being selective at the beginning pays off in spades, as there is little as challenging as undoing a poor employment choice, for the person let go, the person doing the firing, and for the survivors. That does not take into account the costs of recruiting, training, and the opportunity costs of a poorly performing employee.
Future focused metrics.
Use metrics that are based on leading indicators of performance, not extrapolations of past performance. These metrics are challenging to identify and track, but the effort will be worth it.
Cause and effect, not correlation.
Ensure the links between cause and effect are real. Too often I see outcomes attributed to something other than the real causes, mostly because it is convenient and easy, and there appears to be a causal relationship. True cause and effect can be challenging to identify and quantify, but is essential to understanding how the future will shape itself.
Use data but be careful of data seduction
Data can be used well or poorly, but data has in itself a character of precision and certainty that can be misleading. Clean and objective data that removes assumptions, the power of the status quo, and really digs into the reasons something worked, or did not work, is required. Data also has two faces. What has happened, and what will happen. The former, when interrogated effectively can tell you a lot about ‘what’ happened, but often the ‘why it happened’ is elusive, requiring testing. Data presented as a definitive picture of the future should be taken with a huge degree of scepticism, as the only thing for sure we know about the future, is that it will not be the same as the past.
Take action.
Nice words do not move anything. Nothing happens until you take action, then learn from the outcomes and improve next time, by ensuring that the action is taken against a framework that has in it a core assumption being tested. When you do this methodically, you get to understand if the assumption was right or wrong, and why.
Build in time to think.
Those who are always busy, pushed by external schedules, do not reflect on things, do not give themselves the opportunity and time to just think about what has happened and why, the opportunity for the flashes of insight, questions that need to be answered to emerge must be present.
Diversity.
Change the status quo from one where you have to fit in, to one where differences are valued, celebrated, and actively sought. This is not about gender, it is about thinking styles and differentiated skill bases.
Accountability.
When no one is accountable, few will be prepared to take the initiative. Being transparently accountable, creates a bias towards action, which leads to learning.
Process stability.
This is a prerequisite for improvement. Unless you know which variable moved, and caused the outcome being examined, you have no chance of improving. Process stability is an essential ingredient of any improvement exercise, and improvement is all about learning.
These 10 tips have significant areas of overlap, and have in themselves cause and effect relationships. When you need someone to help untangling the mess, give me a call.
Header cartoon credit: another by the great Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid.com
