Your organization’s long-term success depends on six core capabilities:
- Perception: How accurately it sees itself and the world around it
- Innovation: How effectively it creates ideas for new products and services
- Execution: How efficiently it executes and delivers value to the customer
- Persuasion: Telling its story to shareholders, employees, and customers in a compelling manner
- Talent: Attracting, retaining, and developing world class talent
- Relationship Management: Initiating and nurturing key relationships
Staying ahead of the pack not only requires that you continue to improve these capabilities, but that your pace of improvement exceeds that of your competitors.
Leaders sometimes address deficiencies in core business capabilities by simply replacing key people. While justified in cases of obvious incompetence, this approach has drawbacks, including ramp-up time for new hires and fear and uncertainty among peers and subordinates. The more an organization depends on the maintenance and creation of knowledge, the less interchangeable people become.
The real challenge for leaders is how to get better with (mostly) the people you have on board at any given time.
Achieving long-term competitiveness requires that an organization commits itself to becoming a Learning Organization – one that learns purposefully, systematically and relentlessly. I say purposeful because with clear vision of where the organization is heading, you can better understand what problems must be solved to get there. If you want improvements to be sustainable, you need a system in place to ensure that learning is part of every aspect of work to facilitate implementation and sharing the results of that learning. Above all, a Learning Organization is relentless in its quest for learning more. The journey is endless and there is always more to discover.
This all sounds wonderful, but becoming a Learning Organization is easier said than done. Our experience with a range of organizations as diverse as medical device companies, defense contractors, enterprise software companies, and game developers reveals that almost all organizations struggle with significant learning impairments. Let’s look at some of them.
Compartmentalization. “Silo thinking” makes it very difficult to get the bigger picture of what’s really going on. Lessons learned and improvements enacted tend to be localized to teams or groups where problems are spotted. Unfortunately, the improvements may not have much impact on the performance of the organization as a whole.
No time for reflection. If you are in an organization where managers are frantically running around putting out fires, are often double or triple-booked for meetings, and work long hours to catch up on email, setting aside time and space for reflection will be a significant uphill battle. Without significant time and space for reflection, learning will be difficult. Senior executives set the tone here; some quickly lose interest in meetings if someone isn’t getting to an actionable point within two minutes. This results in an atmosphere where expansive out-of-the-box thinking is frowned upon.
Lack of a clear and compelling vision. I recently spoke with the management team of a software company changing its business model from providing custom development to product sales. The CEO said they would be able to measure progress as a smaller portion of their revenues came from custom development. The team seemed to have a good idea of the challenges they would face: understanding customer needs, defining their new offering as a product family, and communicating the value added to new and existing customers. They seemed excited about the journey they were on. Organizations lacking such a shared strategic view of what challenges tomorrow will bring will not be able to learn as proactively, because they won’t be able to see beyond tactical obstacles.
Denial. I have spoken with countless executives and managers who tell me that the main obstacle to addressing problems is that their boss or their colleagues simply won’t listen to them. Perhaps they already feel overwhelmed with their own problems? In any case, without acknowledgement of problems or opportunities, little can be done to effectively address them. Our experience is that very often the organization we work with actually know much more about their problems (and possible remedies) than they think they know, they just don’t do a good job of listening to eachother.
Apathy. Most people want to do a good job, they want to improve. But when facing repeated denial and pushback concerning problems, people eventually just give up. Apathy sets in. “No one will listen to us anyway, so why should we keep raising this issue?” In uncertain times, people are also often worried about their jobs, so no one wants to rock the boat. Once apathy sets in, the motivation to learn and innovate goes out the window and is not easily recovered.
Overconfidence. Organizations that have been successful in the recent past have a different problem: their leaders may get so cocky that it becomes difficult to improve further. The scrap heap of business history is full of companies whose leaders thought they had it all figured out. The attitude and behavior of leaders set the tone for their subordinates. Cocky leaders, cocky middle managers. Leaders who don’t value learning. Successful leaders tend to be ambitious, aspire to lead, emotionally resilient when faced with challenges, and biased toward action. Sometimes that action bias can go too far – the focus is all on “getting the job done”, and there is little interest in stopping to reflect on lessons learned. Instead, this type of leader get things done by setting goals for subordinates and does not particularly embrace reflection and learning as part of their leadership style.
No systematic framework for learning. Even without the cultural and behavioral obstacles described above, organizations that do not have well-organized processes for reflection and continuous improvement will not learn very effectively. Instead we see sporadic learning in pockets of the organization. New knowledge is not easily shared across groups and departments.
Lean addresses organizational learning impairments chiefly in four ways:
- It positions people as valuable learners instead of disposable drones
- It helps managers transition from a command-and-control style to leading by teaching
- It helps organize work in a way that makes problems and opportunities visible for all
- It establishes an organization-wide system for relentless reflection and improvement
While a Lean Transformation can yield impressive operational results, it does require leaders who are willing to confront their organization’s learning impairments, starting with themselves.
If you are a senior executive, consider including learning goals with the “doing goals” you set for yourself and your people. Spend time with your people working to solve for hard problems where you yourself don’t have the answer. Stop delegating the problem solving to others, but also don’t hesitate recruit people from all over the organization to join in and help you and your team. Show that it’s okay not to know the answer beforehand, that being vulnerable in that fashion doesn’t mean you are a weak leader. Keep a list of the hard problems you all have to solve to get to where you want to take the organization, and work to organize and participate in problem-solving projects. Your managers will get the message, and you will be a credible role model.
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