Is the learning organisation dead?

Is the learning organisation dead?  Or, at least, hidden away in a cupboard somewhere? 

I remember this term being used a lot back in the 1990s when I started really getting into what I’d now refer to as operational excellence, yet it’s hardly heard nowadays.  I wonder why that is.

It certainly can’t be because the need for “learning” being a necessary part of any organisation that takes OpEx/lean/continuous improvement seriously isn’t accepted.  I suspect almost every practitioner in this space would recognise that a positive attitude to learning is an essential pre-requisite for continuous improvement and problem solving.

And I doubt that it’s because every organisation now accepts this as a “given”.  There seems to be a general consensus among researchers that few organisations have become what they would recognise as truly “learning” organisations.

So why has the idea of “learning organisation” apparently fallen out of favour?  I’ve identified a few “possible causes” that may be worth exploring:

• “Initiative fatigue”:  “learning organisation” is seen as “just another initiative” and so becomes more “stuff to do” rather than an idea that underpins our overall “system” for operational excellence.

• Organisations don’t see the value:  the benefits are not appreciated and/or there isn’t a clear business case for doing this

• Resistance to learning:  managers and/or workers are reluctant to engage with the idea of becoming learners

• Literature “too academic”:  what was published on learning organisation was difficult to translate into practical steps

In what follows, I’ll dig a little deeper into these possible causes.  However, before doing that, it’s probably helpful to clarify what is meant by “learning organisation” to ensure that these are seen in context.

What is a Learning Organisation?

The term “learning organisation” was popularised by Peter Senge, renowned management thought leader, faculty member at MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. 

He defined a learning organisation as: “a place where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire; new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured; collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together.”

This all sounds very noble and grand, yet seems difficult to translate into day-to-day reality.  As someone commented on my recent LinkedIn post on this topic, “I wonder if Senge just made it too complicated.....and we all bailed out?”

Perhaps more helpfully, a Harvard Business Review article defines a learning organisation as “an organisation skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights.”

Other helpful definitions are:

• “… one that seeks to create its own future.  It is one that assumes learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members and therefore develops, adapts, and transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations of people, both inside and outside itself.” (peoplehum.com)

• “… a company that encourages the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.”  (peoplegoal.com)

• “… a company that continuously learns and develops itself through the process of creating new knowledge. The goal is to create a culture where employees are encouraged to learn and grow, which leads to sustainable competitive advantage.”  (study.com)

All of these definitions suggest that a positive attitude to learning is a fundamental attribute of the organisation and applies to everyone in it.  This perhaps starts to suggest why becoming a learning organisation might be difficult.

While there are a number of different definitions, the core ideas at the heart are pretty much the same.  Some are more or less complex.  Which one will your people understand and relate to best?  If necessary, write your own and then ensure everyone inside your organisation knows it.

Obstacles to becoming a “learning organisation

Now we’re clear what we’re talking about, let’s get back to unpicking some of challenges involved.

“Initiative fatigue”

At the time Peter Senge was writing, many organisations were already wrestling with other ideas such a Total Quality Management, Just-In-Time, Lean, Six Sigma and so on.  With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that these were all elements of an overall approach to what might now be termed “operational excellence” yet, at the time, few organisations saw it that way.

For many, each one was seen and treated as a separate initiative, often superseding what came before.  “Initiative fatigue” set in at many levels, each new idea became the “flavour of the month”, and little attention was paid to long term sustainability.

From my perspective, it’s far better to see each of these ideas as another perspective on the same challenge, which I’d summarise as something like – “developing a vision, strategy and plan to improve the performance of our organisations in a systematic way that ensures long term sustainability.” 

So, we can look at each idea and ask ourselves, “what new insight does this give us that might help our efforts?”

Organisations don’t see the value

From the “organisation-wide” definitions above, establishing a learning organisation would seem to require a considerable investment of time and money.  For most organisations, such investment would require a clear business case, yet the benefits may, at first sight, seem somewhat intangible:

• Knowledge sharing

• People more engaged and enthusiastic, so they’ll work better

• Organisation more focussed

• Strengthened community

• More creativity and innovation

All of these can be hard to translate to the “bottom-line”.  However, if we connect the idea of learning to more tangible aspects such as problem solving and continuous improvement, we start to get somewhere.  With problem solving in particular, the “cost of failure” can be quantified, and tangible benefits can be realised in the short-term.

With other elements of improvement, the benefits are perhaps more long-term and need a slightly different approach.  From my experience and study, UK and US businesses are typically more short-term focussed than their Japanese and German counterparts which, in my view, goes some way towards explaining the success of the latter.

Longer-term benefits of continuous improvement may be a reduction in costs over time, increased sales due to the realisation of additional capacity created by improvements or the creation or more attractive products through innovation, which in turn lead to increased sales.

So perhaps a change of mindset is needed around the way to assess the business case.  Which in turn may need something of a “leap of faith” – supported by appropriate operational and accounting metrics to demonstrate the evolving benefit. 

An exploration of some of the ideas in “lean accounting” may be helpful if you’d like to dig deeper into this theme.

A related idea is the fear of losing the value of the organisation’s investment in the development of its people, typified by the question; “what if we invest in developing all these people and they leave?”  To which the response is simple; “what if we don’t invest in them and they stay?”

Resistance to learning

Individual resistance

Many people can seem resistant to learning new things, having what Carol Dweck referred to as a “fixed” mindset as opposed to a “growth” mindset.  This can apply equally at any level of an organisation; both leaders and “workers” can be reluctant to engage with the idea of becoming “learners”.  Why might that be?

I suspect that, for most of us, admitting that we don’t know something requires a certain level of vulnerability and/or has a level of fear associated with it, and so denying the need to learn provides a degree of protection.

This can apply particularly to leaders, who may feel they need to be seen as “the expert”, so admitting a lack of knowledge or skill may suggest they aren’t up to the job. 

I have to confess that, in my early days as a trainer, I suffered from this to some extent.  However, the further I got into my consulting career, the more I accepted that the more you know, the more you realise you still have to learn.

It is far better to accept that everyone brings a level of knowledge, experience and skill to the table and to embark on a learning journey together.

“There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

Related to this is perhaps the fear of “having a go” and not being successful.  Ideas of “getting it wrong” may go back to childhood, either from parents or teachers (check out Harry Chapin’s great song “Flowers are Red”), and can be very deep seated.

IBM’s legendary founder, Thomas Watson, Sr., apparently understood the distinction well.  Company lore has it that a young manager, after losing $10 million in a risky venture, was called into Watson’s office.  The young man, thoroughly intimidated, began by saying, “I guess you want my resignation.”  Watson replied, “You can’t be serious.  We just spent $10 million educating you.”

This is closely connected to how the organisation reacts to mistakes.  Are these embraced as opportunities to learn or are they seen as “failure”?  A positive attitude to mistakes and problems can go a long way to promoting a culture of learning within an organisation.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing”

HENRY FORD

Also from our earlier lives can come unhelpful ideas about learning.  Seeing it as somehow a deficiency in one’s knowledge or skill hardly paints it in a positive light.

A great way to help “unstick” this may be to give anyone who wants to the support (financial and time) to learn anything new.  This approach was used highly successfully across Rover Group in the mid-1990s when they were faced with just this challenge.

Remember, the goal here is to reignite the “spark” for learning that may have been extinguished earlier in life and also to reinforce the idea that the organisation is interested in, and committed to, the development of the individual.  Therefore making a condition that the topic to be studied is work related is not necessary and may, in fact, work against these two objectives.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

Henry Ford

Organisational resistance

Of course, resistance to learning isn’t restricted to individuals.  There can be an overall organisational resistance.

In some organisations there isn’t a recognition of the need to learn or, at least, to tackle this at an organisational level.  The organisation has hired people for the knowledge and skill that they have and expects everyone to use their knowledge and skill to tackle the challenges the organisation is facing.

Associated with this is a concern about the cost.  Learning is seen simply as training and an on-cost rather than an investment in the company’s future.  Associated with this can be a concern that, with the additional knowledge and skill acquired will make their people more attractive to other employers, so they will leave for jobs elsewhere.  However, many exit interviews cite the lack of development as a reason for leaving.   Do you really want to lose talented people because you don't want them to get any better?

 “If you think education is expensive,
try estimating the cost of ignorance.”

Howard Gardner

Literature “too academic”

One criticism of the early literature published on the idea of the “learning organisation” was that it came across as too academic and difficult to translate into practical actions.  For example, Peter Senge identified five “key ingredients” for a learning organisation:

• Collaborative Learning Culture (Systems Thinking) ...

• "Lifelong Learning" Mindset (Personal Mastery) ...

• Room For Innovation (Mental Models) ...

• Forward-Thinking Leadership (Shared Vision) ...

• Knowledge Sharing (Team Learning)

After many years working in this subject area, I think I have a reasonable idea of what he meant by these.  However, if I’d come across these when I was in the earlier days of my work in improvement, I can easily imagine I’d have given up before digging much further!

Fortunately others (for example, the Harvard Business Review in their 1993 article “Building a Learning Organization”) expressed these requirements in terms that are more easily understood.

• Systematic problem solving

• Experimentation

• Learning from past experience

• Learning from others

• Transferring knowledge (better than training)

• Measuring learning

Each of these topics could easily take up a whole article on its own, so for now I’ll leave the list there for you to ponder how well each one exists in your organisation.

What if you’re not?

If, after all this, you’re still wondering whether becoming more of a learning organisation is worth it, perhaps take a moment to consider what things will be like if you are not.

In short, there’s no improvement without learning, so every improvement requires us to approach it with a curious spirit and a desire to learn something new.  The same is true for problem solving, at least if you want the problem to be fixed permanently rather than treating the same symptoms every time.

If this mindset is not in place, we may see some, or all, of the following:

• Change is random and “hopeful” rather than being based on evidence and part of a structured process of continuous improvement

• People have a “fixed” attitude to processes and their own knowledge

• Mistakes are seen as negative, so problems get hidden

• Feedback can be seen as criticism, gets taken personally and generates resistance

• Individuals start to “check out” as they don’t see the organisation being interested in them.  Either they will stay, grumble and their performance drops, or they’ll leave and have to be replaced at considerable cost

• Nothing really gets better!

Of course, other organisations will be working with a positive attitude to learning and will move ahead, so there isn’t even a “standstill” option as you’ll get further behind your competitors over time.

Time for action?

If any of the above characteristics is evident in your organisation, it may be time to take action.

• Do you need to set an example, be vulnerable and admit “I don’t know”?

• Do you need to embrace mistakes/failure and respond more positively when someone “confesses”?

• Do you need to celebrate ideas from your co-workers?

• Do you need to commit time and/or money to encourage learning?

Hopefully the article and suggestions above help you to identify possible action steps.  Of course, a dialogue just with yourself risks missing a vital perspective, so finding a partner will be really valuable to explore your options for action, especially where that partner is able to take a more objective position.  This usually means finding someone external to the organisation.

We have extensive experience of supporting such conversations and would be really happy to have a conversation with you, which we hope will deepen your appreciation of the issues discussed in this article and help you prioritise action.  If we can help, please get in touch – email, call or complete the contact form on our website.