The only reason most companies exist is to win. Or at least to win as much as they can, given their resources. So you’d think that when things go wrong, companies would be better at learning.
But they aren’t. Sometimes, it seems they’re fighting tooth and nail against learning, often with disastrous results. The reasons, however, make sense. And once you understand the reasons, you might be able to make a difference. Or if not, at least you can feel self-righteous the next time everything starts going sideways.
Learning Needs Deliberation
We don’t think much about learning once we’ve graduated from school. Maybe we take some professional training, but otherwise, deliberate, structured learning isn’t part of our lives.
But learning doesn’t just happen; it takes reflection and thought. Reflection time used to be built into the world. It took three weeks for a head-office communication to arrive via Pony Express. While waiting for the Pony, you’d have lots of time to ponder, rethink decisions, and question whether ponies were the optimal communication medium (the jury’s still out).
Now we have social media, instant messages, overnight letters, junk mail, e-mail, voice mail, fax, cell phones, 30-second-delayed stock quotes, all turbo-charged with the expectation that responding immediately is far more important than responding thoughtfully. (AI is just going to make it even worse.)
As people, we don’t have much time for deliberate learning. But organizations only have the time if they make it part of a system. But even when they build in time to do thoughtful learning, that’s what gets eaten into when emergencies hit.
When we built the original Quicken VISA card, we scheduled a learning debrief and documentation time. But long before the project’s end, other demands squeezed all the slack out of the schedule. The learning review was the first to go. If you don’t do it deliberately, learning won’t happen.
Behavior Requires Practice
Implementing insights from a learning review is tough. Learning means behavior change. Behavior change is daunting for individuals.
Let’s unpack “organizational change” for a moment: it’s changing structure and processes. At the very least, a lot of people must change how they work. Responsibilities, roles, and reporting relationships change. And that’s just in the easy case; learning that your phone system is your customer service bottleneck may involve reworking physical plant and equipment in several locations.
Just getting the affected people together to coordinate can take weeks. People are busy. Then new systems must be designed, built, and documented, and everyone must be trained on the changes to their job. Then there the learning curve for the new procedures, no matter how easy they are. Finally, people get up to speed at the new ways of doing things. Then and only then the business has finally “learned.” And, oh yes, this all happens in spare time, because the normal workload isn’t going to pause and wait until the change is done.
The people are especially hard to change. A reorg can be done on paper in an afternoon. But changing one person is hard, even when they understand the need for change. My doctor said to lower my saturated fat intake, but those cookies yesterday ... I just had to eat … six … of them). Organizational learning will never happen unless people can learn.
Learning Takes Communication
A lot of learning breaks down because no one tells anybody, at least not the details. Telling someone “Now you report to Chris and your department is no longer sales, it’s account relationships.” tells them nothing about how their day-to-day job has changed. They can’t necessarily ask Chris, because Chris is still figuring things out too. Unless they were part of the learning discussions (they weren’t), they can’t change their behavior without understanding the context enough to figure out the change.
Context tells people Why something is happening. We’re simple creatures. We like things to stay the same. Knowing why something is changing gives us a reason to put in the effort. Without knowing the “Why?” change just makes life difficult with no obvious payoff … so we resist.
Even if people understand the changes, they may not have the skills for the new job. Several years ago, Microsoft learned that customers wanted security. Bill Gates proclaimed that all programmers would spend two months just fixing security problems. A great goal, to be sure, but he had 10,000 programmers who had spent their careers building systems without regard to security. How were they supposed to suddenly develop the expertise to find—much less fix—any but the simplest security flaws?
All Change Starts Handicapped
Any change effort starts with an organization that’s full of people who don’t think the right way for the change. Microsoft was starting with workers who uniformly lack security skills. Over time, organizational priorities shape the work force. Security-conscious engineers never had a chance to develop their skills at Microsoft, so if they really cared they left years ago for companies more aligned with their style. Those who stayed are the ones who thrive in the “get it out the door and capture the market” mentality. The change is needed precisely because no one in the existing culture has those skills.
Money can come to the rescue by training people. Simple skills can be learn quickly and easily. Large skills must be developed, delivered, and practiced over time. No matter how much we “thrive on chaos” and jump “into the vortex,” or do whatever else the latest management books are teling us to do, new habits take time to develop. Humans only change at a certain rate and we’ve never figured out how to speed that up. The world may change faster than ever, but people just don’t.
The ones who most need to change, however, are the managers. As the organization reshapes itself, resources will shift. That means money and people. Budgets will get slashed. Empires will topple. Even if everyone else is willing, one recalcitrant manager with the right budget authority can halt a learning effort in its tracks. Managers must let go and support the learning for it to happen. Being human, they can have as much difficulty changing their behavior as everyone else.
But You Can Do It, Just Be Deliberate
By now, I’ve probably convinced you that organizational learning is hopeless. But take heart: now that you know why learning is hard, you can deliberately counteract each of these forces and make it happen.
You can’t make organizational learning easy, but you can make it successful. Despite the many reasons why learning is hard for individuals and even harder for organizations, it’s just a behavior that can become a habit. Develop the learning habit. Practice moving learning into individual action. Help people change and grow. Over time, the very forces that make change hard will come to your aid: those who don’t like learning will gradually leave, and you’ll attract a culture of people committed to learning. Even when an organization fights it, strong, dedicated action can at least produce pockets of smart business savvy.