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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on April 30, 2001. Survival May Depend on Changing StyleBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to The Post and Courier Business Major Management Information specialists have spent a lot of time in recent years talking about organizational learning. Of course, organizations don't learn, the people in them do. And when they do it right, the result is a learning organization. A learning organization is one that is so sensitive to shifts in technology, public demands, customer preferences, competitors and all the other environmental forces that it continually adapts, updates and, by making changes before they become necessary, survives and grows. Surprisingly, this is not the norm. Many of the largest and most powerful public and private sector organizations of fifty years ago, or even thirty, have been upstaged or replaced by newcomers. Others have all but died off or are in the end phases of existence. The problem is that, in many cases, managers and leaders in organizations fail to pay attention to people who are pointing out things the company needs to thrive and survive. There are many reasons why. Some are people reasons. Among the most prominent are CEOs who assume the future will be the same as the past (think buggy whip manufacturer at the dawn of the automobile age), managers who insist things be done the same way "because that's the way we've always done it," and bosses who prefer (and pay and promote) people who tell them what they want to hear instead of what they need to know. There are also systemic reasons for organizational malperformance, chief among them the fact that what is best for the organizational member is not always best for the organization. Examples are the CEO who acts under pressure from stockholders to maximize profits in the short run over making a needed organizational investment or the regional vice president of sales ambitious for promotion who offers overly generous discounts to customers to pump up numbers for a personal level of goal accomplishment. According to Robert Fulmer and Bernie Keys, who have recently revisited the work of Chris Argyris, the father of organizational learning, and Peter Singe, whose contributions in the field are more recent, how people in organizations approach problems and learn from them is a key ingredient in determining success or failure. Culture, meaning the sum total of the organization's structure, recent history, training programs, and formal and informal communication's networks and all the other things that make it a place different from any other, also impacts organizational learning. In his major work, Argyris discovered something very interesting that differentiated the culture in organizations that learned from organizations that didn't. Countless studies with MBA students and practitioners around the world produced the same result. The type of business didn't matter, the field of business didn't matter, and the geographic region and local culture didn't matter. Argyris observed there were two types of organizational learning. In the first type, the learning came from the feedback from various sources about how to improve the product, deliver it better, and the like. This was learning focused on what the organization was already doing and improving the system in place. Argyris called this single loop learning. The second type of organizational learning involved more fundamental issues, questions that required rethinking basic assumptions. This was the type of organizational learning that reshaped organizations so they could adjust to new conditions. It was learning of the most critical kind, and Argyris termed it "double loop learning." Organizations that did not learn suffered. In them, Argyris found "skilled incompetence" was at work. There are many examples of skilled incompetence. Nearly everyone can come up with a personal example. We have all met individuals who respond defensively when anyone questions their pet project and are skilled enough in arguing the case that the project proceeds unchanged. Many of us have observed or even participated in meetings where the groupthink of the participants overruled the facts at hand. Who hasn't met that old standby, "When in trouble blame something or somebody else?" The more sophisticated examples of skilled incompetence include the bright people who are capable of recognizing an error or potential problem (our new product has important defects) but bypass the threat (we should go ahead and release the product on schedule) by acting as if they are not bypassing (we have so much invested in development and manufacture that we cannot delay market entry). Double loop learning takes place when the realization dawns that instead of applying the usual model to the problem at hand the organization should consider another. This sounds simple, and it is. But in real life the execution is anything but easy. Recognizing that there are other approaches to solving problems, including ones not yet tried, requires a frank discussion. In some environments, supervisors, managers, and leaders are wary because they are supposed to be on top of things, or at least want to appear to be. Confusing criticism of their decisions with disrespect for their authority, they find open discussions uncomfortable and avoid them. Other managers are uncomfortable admitting, "I simply do not have the answer to this problem right now." There are innumerable other obstacles to frank and open discussion, but without that there can be no double loop learning and no learning organization. One of the fascinating things Argyris found was that women were more open to discussion and thinking outside the box than men - they were better organizational learners. Women executives and managers were more likely to take the lead in saying things like "Why can't we learn from this other model?" Perhaps this is because female managers--newly arrived in the workforce in great numbers--have come up in a time of organizational streamlining and through systems where they relied on personal power, influence, teamwork and an interactive, transformational style of leadership to get work accomplished and thus not bound by more formal organizational climates and artifacts. The old style hierarchical organizations with their strict authoritarian management systems, by contrast, tended to produce transactional leaders focused on short-term goals. Organizational learning has considerable relevance to your career development. Finding out whether or not you are in a learning organization may be even more important. Consider just one aspect of the impact of technology on learning behavior--an electronic message that can be simultaneously received by any or all the organizational members. In the past, top decision-makers exercised organizational control in part because they were privy to and had near exclusive control of critical information. Nothing in this system allowed for (or particularly wished for) suggestions and criticisms from people perceived to be lower in the organization. It is still possible for an organization to operate in the old fashion, and many do. But operations today are likely to be accompanied by a blizzard of electronic messages pulsing freely through the formal and informal organizational networks. Good ideas may lie within. In the learning organization, they will get a hearing. How are things in your company? For Questions/Comments about this site, contact dot.moore@comcast.net. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |