Do you really want to learn?

Learning leads to new knowledge and ideas. It challenges, enriches or makes existing ideas obsolete. Every day the learner finds how they can improve on what they did yesterday — and in here lies the dilemma of any learning organization: does it really want to learn?

With learning comes demands.

First:

A digital learning organization has invested in the speed and volume of their learning. They are designing every interaction with the intention of learning. They always ask:

A. What do I want to learn?

B. How do I want to learn it?

C. How do I measure it?

D. Where do I do it?

And they design every asset and every interaction with the intention of not only producing value for the customer and the business, but also to produce the best data to learn from that interaction.

Second:

What does the learning organization do with the new learning? Do they archive it or action it? If the organization is designed to learn they action it. Archiving learnings in documents only makes them invisible and forgettable.

Because committing to what you’ve just learned and actioning it can be painful when the organization is not designed for it. Think about it this way:

If you learn something tomorrow that should impact a part of your strategy how would you go about updating it? Who needs to be involved in the decision, what are the ceremonies that need to be performed, how many stakeholders needs to align on the details, what is their availabilities and how do you disseminate the learning back out to the company to operationalize it?

This slow process doesn’t work for the learning organization. There needs to be faster networks of communication and more autonomous decision making. And that is not a flick-of-the-switch change. It’s a painful redesign of the organization.

Third:

Learning is admitting that you don’t know everything (or sometimes anything). And it means that any decisions made has better answers. This has an impact on how the organization thinks.

In a non-learning organization you are at the end of your learning journey. Your decisions are the best there are and you are not designed to keep challenging them. The focus of the organization is efficiency and standardization — not flexibility and responsiveness. The system is so rigid that every change comes with massive costs and you minimize the need for change, you minimize the need for learning. For them learning means increasing uncertainty, that the glass is always half-empty.

A learning organization knows there are better answers and these could reveal themselves in the next five years or five minutes. Therefore you design to always be searching for better answers, and you have the structural design to action them as they emerge.

A learning organization sees every day as the start of their learning journey, an opportunity to do even better. Their glass is always half-full.

Learning includes the acquisition and sense making of new knowledge, and the implementation into what we do and how we think. Therefore learning includes feedback loops and commitment. And these are hard. The most important question for a learning organizations therefore becomes:

Do you really want it?

Because you really need to…