Margaret McIntyre asks me:
"I would love to hear more about the PROCESS you see for getting there.
Your latest writing spoke more about the ineffectiveness of clients doing
what they do today rather than on your ideas for improving it."
The PROCESS for building a learning organization must be discussed in
terms of the mission and goals of the organization, not whether it learns
well.
Most businesses, for example, have a mission of something like increasing
stockholder value. In order to do so, they have goals of growth, profit
and customer satisfaction through some sort of product or service base.
In order to best fulfill the mission and achieve their goals, they must
continually make better products or services (or at least make more
compelling sales pitches). Other kinds of organizations have different
missions and goals, and different fulfillment strategies.
The process of building or improving an orgainzation to meet the goals and
fulfill the mission IS the process of building a learning organization.
Most companies and organizations chose a traditional, heirarchical
approach to constructing an "layered-box" org. Cultures build-up around
these boxes that vary from Taylorism to Theory-Z, defining the three
levels of a learning org. The process of building these LOs is usually
"seat-of-the-pants", doing only the bare necessities to get the next
product out or complete the next phase of a project.
A better process for building a LO is to study the three levels
explicitly, detached from the daily grind. Study the org. to see how
learning takes place, where knowledge is built, and how that knowledge is
used for improvement in meeting the org. goals. Analyze the knowledge and
learning gaps, and launch "meta-projects" to close these gaps. These
meta-projects work best if real metrics can be found to monitor their
progress.
Take an electronics manufacturer for example. Its success is highly
dependent on "first-pass yields", or percentage of the parts that pass the
test the first time. Typically these yields hit some plateau beyond which
the manufacturer does not seem able to achieve. I have seen many cases in
which the company adopted LO approaches and were able to drastically
increase those yields - approaching 100%! Why? It turns out that the
full brainpower of the team (assembly operators, technicians, buyers,
supervisors, etc) are much more powerful than those of the engineers
alone. I'm sure you know of similar examples in other types of orgs.
Back to my original point: most companies do not have a goal or mission
of building a LO. It just happens to be the best tool for achieving their
real mission.
Regards,
Scott Elliott
scott_elliott@hotmail.com
--Scott Ellliott <scotte@sonic.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>