Organizational Learning:  Reimagined and Redefined for our time

Nothing gets in the way of organizational learning like hierarchies. And most organizations are rigidly hierarchical, designed around the assumption that those at the top are all-knowing and all-seeing. They are the ones who make the decisions, because they know best, and everyone else in the organization is expected to follow and enact those decisions.

This is a huge problem. It means organizations can’t learn from, respond to and adapt to change. Information, knowledge and expertise can’t filter around or into organizations because hierarchies, structures and processes won’t allow it. This results in a misalignment between what organizations need to do in order to be agile, to evolve and prosper, and the model of learning they follow. It also results in a disengaged, disempowered workforce – people know their role is to follow orders and to obey the laws of hierarchy. It’s not to ask questions or make suggestions or think about how they could do their jobs better and help the organization do its job better. And it means organizational learning is never going to happen.

To achieve organizational learning, we have to do away with established hierarchies. Why? Because organizational learning encompasses everyone within an organization, from the most senior to the most junior. It’s a way of being and working, as well as learning. It’s the way that individuals interact with each other to ensure that expertise, knowledge, challenges, problems and learning are widely and freely shared around the organization, without stigma. And that knowledge from outside the organization is rapidly imported, debated and acted upon (if necessary), in order to keep the organization focused on what it needs to do and to realign itself constantly with the changing external environment. Organizational learning is about alignment and agility, essentially.

When organizational learning exists, people feel able to communicate freely with each other. They are able to open up and ask questions, admit mistakes and say that they don’t know something, without fearing that those around them will see it as a sign of weakness, a sign of incompetence. They work and learn together, sharing challenges, ideas and thinking. This is a healthy workplace, one where people are empowered because they are trusted to do their best work, collectively.

Culture is obviously huge here. There needs to be a culture of learning, of curiosity, of trust and openness. The kind of culture that many organizations talk about but don’t have. The reality is that many organizations have a toxic culture, one where people are punished for asking for help, where they don’t admit that they don’t know something and they would certainly never admit that they have made a mistake.

I have worked in so many organizations where trust is low to non-existent, where there are hierarchies of permission and I don’t mean just one or two levels. I used to run creativity workshops and one of the questions I liked to ask was: “If you want to spend $100 to try something out, how many levels of approval do you have to get?” And people would say “five or six levels”. If you’ve got five or six levels of approval, you can kiss goodbye to innovation, to people doing things that might just enable them to do their job better, to their organisation performing better. These are small amounts of money – $100! – just to try things out.

There’s plenty of research that backs up what my experiences tell me. There’s a McKinsey study of corporate decision making, for example. It found that decision making chews up so much time in organisations and is often ineffective due to various factors – a lack of real debate, convoluted processes, death by committee, unclear organisational roles, information overload and disempowering company cultures. Of the 1,200 global managers, fewer than half said decisions were made in a timely fashion (no agility in those companies then). McKinsey calculated that 530,000 days of managers’ time would be lost in a typical Fortune 500 company each year.  

The report also shows that it’s not just junior employers who are disempowered and disengaged – there are lots of managers who are also disillusioned, bored and fed up. These are people who have been promoted, potentially several times, and they’re still not trusted to make good decisions. Once these kinds of attitudes and barriers are in place, a culture of just doing what’s required sets in. People aren’t going to come up with ideas or solutions to problems. They aren’t going to seek out or share learning. They will do the job in front of them, but nothing more.

These barriers and hierarchical structures and attitudes need to be dismantled. Organisations need to foster a culture where people put their hands up to ask for help and to offer ideas and share insights. It can be done but it requires a whole new way of looking at organisations and organisational learning.

I will talk about this and more in my forthcoming webinar, Organizational Learning:  Reimagined and Redefined for our time, the first in a series of four webinars looking at key elements of organisational learning.

In the webinar we will explore:

• A model of learning that creates a healthy workplace based on core values and acceptable behaviours
• The role of field work in understanding underlying problems
• How to/why to enable staff to work together on their own learning and challenges, working together in loose groups to achieve this
• How to encourage knowledge to be shared, not hoarded, and how to create intense networking in order to make this a reality
• How to/ Create an organizational culture in which blame is substituted by learning opportunity.

Sign up to the webinar here.