Why Organizations Are Approaching Learning All Wrong!

"The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition." ~ Peter Senge. 

Learning is one of the most important attributes to gain competitive advantage, yet the most ignored in some organizations. These organizations really do approach learning all wrong. They confuse Training with Learning.  The fundamental difference between the two is that Training refers to a planned event, an external activity; while Learning is a basic human need, is on-going, internal and happens everyday. Both are not synonymous.

Difference Between Training & Learning

Many organizations equate conducting a few classroom sessions or making employees take a few online modules to organizational learning. This is a very limited view of training itself, let alone learning. Learning encompasses a much broader and complex concept. In this interesting interview of David Garvin and Amy Edmonson, Harvard Business School professors and coauthors of the HBR article Is Yours a Learning Organization? David defines organizational learning as "creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge and using the new knowledge as a basis for responding to a changing environment."¹ David makes two points, the first is what learning is, and the second is about what learning does.

Going by David’s first point, learning is a very broad and complex concept that encompasses various activities enabling employees to sustain and enhance their performance, train peers, improve processes, and learn new skills; it also enables organizations to perform well in the market and achieve their strategic goals. This definition of learning connects learning to performance. So you see how training can certainly fit into the scheme of things, and is really a cog in the wheel of organizational learning. David’s second point about what learning does in terms of enabling organizations to respond to the changing environment using new knowledge is what creates the competitive advantage.

If the organizational strategy is to gain competitive advantage, putting learning first should follow naturally as a business decision. However, when it comes to learning, most discussions focus on training events and questions such as "how much will this cost?" and "for how long with employees be away from their work?"  Organizations that focus solely on these questions lack strategy/vision for Learning. Smart organizations that use the Balanced Scorecard know that Learning and Growth is one of the leading indicators not only for intangibles such as internal processes and operations but also on tangible customer and financial metrics. They realize that like other business initiatives, learning needs to align with the vision, mission and culture of the organization.

When asked about core organization learning capabilities, Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, discusses three capabilities in this short_video. The first one is fostering a vision for learning. Each organization needs to crystallize its vision for what it wants to intentionally achieve through learning.

Once this vision is put into action, he stresses that it is important for the organization to have the capability to reflect collectively on what has worked and what hasn't and to have reflective conversations as groups/organization. This really goes to the heart of having a Learning Culture and giving employees the permission to make mistakes and learn from their mistakes. 

The third capability Senge stresses is systems thinking, where people from different parts of the organization, having different points of view come together to collectively see the complexity and interconnectedness between various moving parts in an organization.

The lack of systems thinking sometimes makes organizations fall into the trap of leading with technology instead of strategy. In a hurry to jump onto the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon or striving to keep up with the latest technology, organizations hurriedly implement Web 2.0 tools only to realize that they did not really think through the planning, support, development and implementation. Employees suddenly find themselves bombarded with SharePoint, Yammer, Wikis, Blogs, Intranet and don't know what tool would best serve their immediate need.

The organization that just spent that hefty budget on implementing these tools is now stuck with either too many tools or tools that employees can't use or don't know how to use. So while Enterprise 2.0 can be a very productive concept, it needs to be dealt at the strategy level first than the technology level.

To summarize, the right way to approach organizational learning is to align learning with the organization's strategy, have a clear vision of what the organization will accomplish through learning, and integrate learning with performance. Finally, when implementing tools for learning and collaboration approach it systematically, not just technologically and remember to think through planning, support, development and implementation. By the way, here is a list of organizations that are doing it right!

¹ https://hbr.org/2008/02/harvard-business-ideacast-83-l/.
Disclaimer: All images have been sourced from Google images and have been used for educational purposes.