Managerial Barriers to Learning From Post-project Reviews Include
The Idea in Cursory
As nosotros all know, to stay ahead of competitors, companies must constantly enhance the way they do business. But more performance-improvement programs fail than succeed. That's because many managers don't realize that sustainable improvement requires a commitment to learning.
After all, how can organizations respond creatively to new challenges (shifts in customer preferences, marketplace downturns) without kickoff discovering something new—then altering the way they operate to reflect new insights? Without learning, companies echo old practices, make cosmetic changes, and produce short-lived improvements.
To transform your visitor into a learning organization, Garvin recommends mastering five activities:
- Solving problems systematically
- Experimenting with new approaches to work
- Learning from by experience
- Learning from other companies and from customers
- Transferring knowledge throughout your organization
Woven into the fabric of your company's daily operations, these activities aid your organisation brand indelible improvements that translate straight into measurable gains—including superior quality, better delivery, and increased market share.
The Idea in Practice
Garvin offers these suggestions for mastering five organizational learning practices:
Solving Bug Systematically
Don't try to solve problems by relying on gut instinct or assumptions. Instead, generate hypotheses, gather data to test your hypotheses, and utilise statistical tools (such as cause-and-outcome diagrams) to organize information and draw inferences.
Experimenting
Systematically search for and examination new knowledge. Use small experiments to produce incremental gains in cognition. For instance, specialty drinking glass manufacturer Corning experiments continually with diverse raw materials and new formulations to increment yields and provide better grades of drinking glass.
Utilize sit-in projects to produce knowledge you tin can use for systemwide changes. General Foods experimented with cocky-managing teams at its Topeka plant with the aim of adopting this approach beyond the company later.
Learning from Past Feel
Review your successes and failures, place lessons learned, and record those lessons in accessible forms. Instance:
Boeing compared the development processes of its 737 and 747 planes (models that had serious technical issues) to those of its 707 and 727 (ii profitable programs). Information technology then compiled a booklet of lessons learned. Several members of the learning team were subsequently transferred to two start-up programs—the 757 and 767. They produced the about successful, fault-gratis launches in Boeing's history.
Learning from Others
Look outside your immediate environment to gain new perspectives. Consider these sources:
- Other companies. Identify all-time-practice organizations (even in other industries), use site visits and interviews to study how they get piece of work done, and generate ideas for improving your own practices.
- Your customers. See regularly with customers to gather knowledge about products, competitors, consumers' preferences, and the quality of your service. Likewise observe customers using your products, to identify problems and generate ideas for improvement.
Transferring Knowledge
New knowledge carries maximum bear on when it's shared broadly. To transfer knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout your organization, motility experts to different parts of the company—beyond divisions, departments, and facilities—and then they can share the wealth. Example:
Time Life's CEO shifted the president of the visitor's music division (who had orchestrated years of rapid growth and high profits through innovative marketing) to the book segmentation, where profits were flat because of continued reliance on traditional marketing concepts.
Continuous improvement programs are sprouting upwards all over as organizations strive to meliorate themselves and proceeds an edge. The topic list is long and varied, and sometimes information technology seems as though a plan a month is needed only to keep up. Unfortunately, failed programs far outnumber successes, and improvement rates remain distressingly low. Why? Considering nigh companies have failed to grasp a basic truth. Continuous comeback requires a commitment to learning.
How, later on all, tin an organization improve without get-go learning something new? Solving a problem, introducing a product, and reengineering a procedure all require seeing the world in a new lite and acting accordingly. In the absence of learning, companies—and individuals—simply echo one-time practices. Alter remains corrective, and improvements are either fortuitous or curt-lived.
A few farsighted executives—Ray Stata of Analog Devices, Gordon Forward of Chaparral Steel, Paul Allaire of Xerox—accept recognized the link between learning and continuous improvement and take begun to refocus their companies around it. Scholars too accept jumped on the bandwagon, chirapsia the pulsate for "learning organizations" and "cognition-creating companies." In rapidly changing businesses like semiconductors and consumer electronics, these ideas are fast taking concord. However despite the encouraging signs, the topic in large part remains murky, confused, and difficult to penetrate.
Pregnant, Management, and Measurement
Scholars are partly to blame. Their discussions of learning organizations have oftentimes been reverential and utopian, filled with near mystical terminology. Paradise, they would accept you believe, is only around the corner. Peter Senge, who popularized learning organizations in his book The Fifth Field of study, described them as places "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together."1 To achieve these ends, Senge suggested the use of five "component technologies": systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning. In a similar spirit, Ikujiro Nonaka characterized knowledge-creating companies as places where "inventing new noesis is not a specialized activity…information technology is a way of behaving, indeed, a mode of beingness, in which anybody is a knowledge worker."2 Nonaka suggested that companies utilise metaphors and organizational redundancy to focus thinking, encourage dialogue, and make tacit, instinctively understood ideas explicit.
Sound idyllic? Absolutely. Desirable? Without question. Just does it provide a framework for activity? Hardly. The recommendations are far as well abstract, and too many questions remain unanswered. How, for example, volition managers know when their companies take become learning organizations? What concrete changes in behavior are required? What policies and programs must be in place? How do you lot get from here to there?
About discussions of learning organizations finesse these issues. Their focus is high philosophy and grand themes, sweeping metaphors rather than the gritty details of practice. Three critical bug are left unresolved; however each is essential for effective implementation. First is the question of meaning. Nosotros need a plausible, well-grounded definition of learning organizations; it must be actionable and piece of cake to use. Second is the question of management. We need clearer guidelines for practice, filled with operational advice rather than high aspirations. And third is the question of measurement. We need better tools for assessing an organisation'south charge per unit and level of learning to ensure that gains have in fact been fabricated.
Once these "three Ms" are addressed, managers will have a firmer foundation for launching learning organizations. Without this background, progress is unlikely, and for the simplest of reasons. For learning to get a meaningful corporate goal, it must first be understood.
What Is a Learning Organization?
Surprisingly, a articulate definition of learning has proved to exist elusive over the years. Organizational theorists accept studied learning for a long time; the accompanying quotations suggest that there is still considerable disagreement (see the insert "Definitions of Organizational Learning"). Most scholars view organizational learning as a process that unfolds over time and link it with cognition acquisition and improved performance. Merely they differ on other important matters.
Some, for case, believe that behavioral modify is required for learning; others insist that new means of thinking are enough. Some cite information processing as the machinery through which learning takes place; others suggest shared insights, organizational routines, even memory. And some call back that organizational learning is common, while others believe that flawed, self-serving interpretations are the norm.
How can we discern among this cacophony of voices however build on before insights? Every bit a first stride, consider the following definition:
A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring cognition, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.
This definition begins with a unproblematic truth: new ideas are essential if learning is to take place. Sometimes they are created de novo, through flashes of insight or creativity; at other times they make it from outside the organization or are communicated by knowledgeable insiders. Whatsoever their source, these ideas are the trigger for organizational comeback. But they cannot by themselves create a learning organization. Without accompanying changes in the style that piece of work gets done, only the potential for improvement exists.
This is a surprisingly stringent test for it rules out a number of obvious candidates for learning organizations. Many universities fail to qualify, every bit do many consulting firms. Even General Motors, despite its recent efforts to improve performance, is establish wanting. All of these organizations take been constructive at creating or acquiring new knowledge but notably less successful in applying that noesis to their own activities. Total quality management, for example, is now taught at many business organisation schools, yet the number using it to guide their ain decision making is very small-scale. Organizational consultants advise clients on social dynamics and small-scale-group behavior only are notorious for their own infighting and factionalism. And GM, with a few exceptions (like Saturn and NUMMI), has had little success in revamping its manufacturing practices, even though its managers are experts on lean manufacturing, JIT product, and the requirements for improved quality of work life.
Organizations that do pass the definitional test—Honda, Corning, and Full general Electric come rapidly to listen—have, past contrast, become expert at translating new knowledge into new ways of behaving. These companies actively manage the learning process to ensure that information technology occurs past design rather than past chance. Distinctive policies and practices are responsible for their success; they form the edifice blocks of learning organizations.
Building Blocks
Learning organizations are skilled at five master activities: systematic problem solving, experimentation with new approaches, learning from their ain experience and past history, learning from the experiences and all-time practices of others, and transferring cognition rapidly and efficiently throughout the organization. Each is accompanied by a distinctive mind-set, tool kit, and design of behavior. Many companies practise these activities to some degree. Simply few are consistently successful because they rely largely on happenstance and isolated examples. By creating systems and processes that support these activities and integrate them into the textile of daily operations, companies tin can manage their learning more finer.
1. Systematic problem solving
This offset action rests heavily on the philosophy and methods of the quality motion. Its underlying ideas, now widely accepted, include:
- Relying on the scientific method, rather than guesswork, for diagnosing problems (what Deming calls the "Plan, Do, Check, Act" cycle, and others refer to every bit "hypothesis-generating, hypothesis-testing" techniques).
- Insisting on data, rather than assumptions, equally background for decision making (what quality practitioners call "fact-based management").
- Using simple statistical tools (histograms, Pareto charts, correlations, crusade-and-upshot diagrams) to organize data and draw inferences.
Most training programs focus primarily on problem-solving techniques, using exercises and practical examples. These tools are relatively straightforward and easily communicated; the necessary mind-set up, however, is more difficult to institute. Accuracy and precision are essential for learning. Employees must therefore get more disciplined in their thinking and more attentive to details. They must continually ask, "How do we know that's true?", recognizing that shut enough is not good enough if real learning is to take place. They must push beyond obvious symptoms to assess underlying causes, often collecting evidence when conventional wisdom says it is unnecessary. Otherwise, the organization will remain a prisoner of "gut facts" and sloppy reasoning, and learning volition be stifled.
Xerox has mastered this approach on a company-broad scale. In 1983, senior managers launched the company's Leadership Through Quality initiative; since and then, all employees take been trained in minor-group activities and problem-solving techniques. Today a six-step procedure is used for virtually all decisions (see the insert "Xerox's Problem-Solving Process"). Employees are provided with tools in four areas: generating ideas and collecting information (brainstorming, interviewing, surveying); reaching consensus (listing reduction, rating forms, weighted voting); analyzing and displaying data (cause-and-outcome diagrams, strength-field analysis); and planning actions (flow charts, Gantt charts). They then practice these tools during training sessions that concluding several days. Training is presented in "family groups," members of the same section or business-unit of measurement team, and the tools are practical to real bug facing the group. The outcome of this process has been a common vocabulary and a consistent, companywide approach to problem solving. Once employees accept been trained, they are expected to use the techniques at all meetings, and no topic is off-limits. When a high-level grouping was formed to review Xerox's organizational structure and suggest alternatives, it employed the very same process and tools.3
Xerox'southward Trouble-Solving Process
2. Experimentation
This activeness involves the systematic searching for and testing of new knowledge. Using the scientific method is essential, and at that place are obvious parallels to systematic problem solving. But unlike problem solving, experimentation is ordinarily motivated by opportunity and expanding horizons, not by current difficulties. Information technology takes two main forms: ongoing programs and one-of-a-kind demonstration projects.
Ongoing programs normally involve a continuing series of minor experiments, designed to produce incremental gains in knowledge. They are the mainstay of well-nigh continuous comeback programs and are specially mutual on the store flooring. Corning, for example, experiments continually with diverse raw materials and new formulations to increase yields and provide meliorate grades of drinking glass. Allegheny Ludlum, a specialty steelmaker, regularly examines new rolling methods and improved technologies to raise productivity and reduce costs.
Opportunity motivates experimentation. Corning, for example, continually strives to increase yields and provide ameliorate grades of glass.
Successful ongoing programs share several characteristics. Showtime, they piece of work difficult to ensure a steady flow of new ideas, even if they must be imported from outside the organization. Chaparral Steel sends its first-line supervisors on sabbaticals effectually the globe, where they visit academic and industry leaders, develop an understanding of new work practices and technologies, then bring what they've learned back to the visitor and employ it to daily operations. In big function equally a effect of these initiatives, Chaparral is one of the five lowest price steel plants in the world. GE's Impact Program originally sent manufacturing managers to Japan to written report manufacturing plant innovations, such as quality circles and kanban cards, and then utilise them in their own organizations; today Europe is the destination, and productivity comeback practices the target. The plan is ane reason GE has recorded productivity gains averaging well-nigh v% over the last four years.
Successful ongoing programs likewise require an incentive system that favors risk taking. Employees must feel that the benefits of experimentation exceed the costs; otherwise, they will not participate. This creates a difficult challenge for managers, who are trapped between two perilous extremes. They must maintain accountability and control over experiments without stifling creativity by unduly penalizing employees for failures. Allegheny Ludlum has perfected this juggling deed: it keeps expensive, loftier-impact experiments off the scorecard used to evaluate managers but requires prior approvals from four senior vice presidents. The outcome has been a history of productivity improvements annually averaging seven% to 8%.
Successful programs require an incentive system that favors risk taking.
Finally, ongoing programs need managers and employees who are trained in the skills required to perform and evaluate experiments. These skills are seldom intuitive and must usually be learned. They comprehend a broad sweep: statistical methods, similar blueprint of experiments, that efficiently compare a big number of alternatives; graphical techniques, similar process assay, that are essential for redesigning work flows; and inventiveness techniques, similar storyboarding and role playing, that proceed novel ideas flowing. The most effective training programs are tightly focused and feature a pocket-size ready of techniques tailored to employees' needs. Training in design of experiments, for case, is useful for manufacturing engineers, while creativity techniques are well suited to development groups.
Sit-in projects are usually larger and more complex than ongoing experiments. They involve holistic, systemwide changes, introduced at a unmarried site, and are frequently undertaken with the goal of developing new organizational capabilities. Because these projects represent a sharp break from the past, they are usually designed from scratch, using a "clean slate" approach. General Foods's Topeka plant, one of the starting time high-delivery work systems in this country, was a pioneering demonstration project initiated to innovate the idea of self-managing teams and loftier levels of worker autonomy; a more recent case, designed to rethink small-motorcar development, manufacturing, and sales, is GM's Saturn Division.
Demonstration projects share a number of distinctive characteristics:
- They are usually the first projects to embody principles and approaches that the organisation hopes to adopt later on a larger scale. For this reason, they are more than transitional efforts than endpoints and involve considerable "learning by doing." Mid-course corrections are common.
- They implicitly establish policy guidelines and decision rules for later on projects. Managers must therefore exist sensitive to the precedents they are setting and must send strong signals if they expect to establish new norms.
- They often encounter severe tests of commitment from employees who wish to encounter whether the rules accept, in fact, changed.
- They are normally adult by potent multi-functional teams reporting directly to senior direction. (For projects targeting employee involvement or quality of work life, teams should exist multilevel besides.)
- They tend to have but limited impact on the rest of the arrangement if they are non accompanied by explicit strategies for transferring learning.
All of these characteristics appeared in a sit-in projection launched by Copeland Corporation, a highly successful compressor manufacturer, in the mid-1970s. Matt Diggs, then the new CEO, wanted to transform the visitor'due south approach to manufacturing. Previously, Copeland had machined and assembled all products in a single facility. Costs were high, and quality was marginal. The trouble, Diggs felt, was too much complexity.
At the showtime, Diggs assigned a small, multifunctional team the job of designing a "focused factory" dedicated to a narrow, newly developed product line. The team reported directly to Diggs and took three years to complete its work. Initially, the project upkeep was $10 one thousand thousand to $12 million; that figure was repeatedly revised as the team found, through feel and with Diggs'south prodding, that it could achieve dramatic improvements. The final investment, a total of $30 million, yielded unanticipated breakthroughs in reliability testing, automated tool aligning, and programmable control. All were accomplished through learning past doing.
The squad set additional precedents during the plant's start-upward and early on operations. To dramatize the importance of quality, for instance, the quality manager was appointed second-in-command, a significant motility upward. The same reporting relationship was used at all subsequent plants. In addition, Diggs urged the establish managing director to ramp up slowly to full production and resist all efforts to proliferate products. These instructions were unusual at Copeland, where the marketing section usually ruled. Both directives were speedily tested; direction held firm, and the implications were felt throughout the organization. Manufacturing'south stature improved, and the company as a whole recognized its competitive contribution. One observer commented, "Marketing had always run the company, then they couldn't believe it. The modify was visible at the highest levels, and it went down hard."
Once the first focused factory was running smoothly—it seized 25% of the market in 2 years and held its edge in reliability for over a decade—Copeland built 4 more factories in quick succession. Diggs assigned members of the initial projection to each mill'due south design squad to ensure that early on learnings were non lost; these people later rotated into operating assignments. Today focused factories remain the cornerstone of Copeland'due south manufacturing strategy and a continuing source of its cost and quality advantages.
Whether they are sit-in projects like Copeland's or ongoing programs similar Allegheny Ludlum'due south, all forms of experimentation seek the same end: moving from superficial knowledge to deep understanding. At its simplest, the distinction is between knowing how things are done and knowing why they occur. Knowing how is partial knowledge; it is rooted in norms of behavior, standards of practice, and settings of equipment. Knowing why is more fundamental: information technology captures underlying crusade-and-effect relationships and accommodates exceptions, adaptations, and unforeseen events. The power to command temperatures and pressures to align grains of silicon and grade silicon steel is an example of knowing how; agreement the chemical and physical process that produces the alignment is knowing why.
Further distinctions are possible, as the insert "Stages of Knowledge" suggests. Operating cognition tin can exist arrayed in a hierarchy, moving from limited understanding and the power to make few distinctions to more complete understanding in which all contingencies are anticipated and controlled. In this context, experimentation and trouble solving foster learning by pushing organizations up the hierarchy, from lower to higher stages of knowledge.
3. Learning from by feel
Companies must review their successes and failures, appraise them systematically, and record the lessons in a grade that employees discover open up and accessible. One good has chosen this process the "Santayana Review," citing the famous philosopher George Santayana, who coined the phrase "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Unfortunately, too many managers today are indifferent, even hostile, to the past, and by declining to reflect on information technology, they permit valuable knowledge escape.
A study of more than than 150 new products concluded that "the knowledge gained from failures [is] often instrumental in achieving subsequent successes… In the simplest terms, failure is the ultimate teacher."4 IBM's 360 calculator series, for example, 1 of the nearly popular and profitable always built, was based on the technology of the failed Stretch figurer that preceded information technology. In this case, as in many others, learning occurred past chance rather than by careful planning. A few companies, however, have established processes that require their managers to periodically think near the past and larn from their mistakes.
Boeing did so immediately after its difficulties with the 737 and 747 plane programs. Both planes were introduced with much fanfare and likewise with serious bug. To ensure that the problems were not repeated, senior managers commissioned a loftier-level employee group, called Project Homework, to compare the evolution processes of the 737 and 747 with those of the 707 and 727, two of the company's virtually assisting planes. The group was asked to develop a set of "lessons learned" that could be used on futurity projects. After working for 3 years, they produced hundreds of recommendations and an inch-thick booklet. Several members of the squad were then transferred to the 757 and 767 start-ups, and guided past experience, they produced the nearly successful, error-gratuitous launches in Boeing's history.
Boeing used lessons from before model development to help produce the 757 and 767—the most successful, fault-free launches in its history.
Other companies have used a similar retrospective approach. Similar Boeing, Xerox studied its product development process, examining iii troubled products in an effort to understand why the company's new business concern initiatives failed then often. Arthur D. Little, the consulting visitor, focused on its past successes. Senior management invited ADL consultants from effectually the world to a 2-solar day "jamboree," featuring booths and presentations documenting a broad range of the company'due south nearly successful practices, publications, and techniques. British Petroleum went fifty-fifty farther and established the post-projection appraisal unit to review major investment projects, write up instance studies, and derive lessons for planners that were and then incorporated into revisions of the visitor's planning guidelines. A five-person unit reported to the board of directors and reviewed half-dozen projects annually. The majority of the fourth dimension was spent in the field interviewing managers.five This type of review is now conducted regularly at the project level.
At the center of this approach, one expert has observed, "is a heed-ready that…enables companies to recognize the value of productive failure as assorted with unproductive success. A productive failure is ane that leads to insight, understanding, and thus an addition to the ordinarily held wisdom of the organization. An unproductive success occurs when something goes well, but nobody knows how or why."six IBM'southward legendary founder, Thomas Watson, Sr., apparently understood the distinction well. Company lore has it that a young manager, after losing $10 1000000 in a risky venture, was called into Watson'due south office. The fellow, thoroughly intimidated, began by saying, "I guess you want my resignation." Watson replied, "Yous can't be serious. We just spent $10 1000000 educating y'all."
Fortunately, the learning process demand non be so expensive. Case studies and post-project reviews like those of Xerox and British Petroleum tin can exist performed with little cost other than managers' time. Companies can too enlist the help of faculty and students at local colleges or universities; they bring fresh perspectives and view internships and case studies every bit opportunities to gain experience and increase their own learning. A few companies take established computerized data banks to speed upwardly the learning process. At Paul Revere Life Insurance, management requires all problem-solving teams to consummate brusque registration forms describing their proposed projects if they hope to authorize for the company'southward laurels program. The company so enters the forms into its estimator arrangement and can immediately think a list of other groups of people who have worked or are working on the topic, along with a contact person. Relevant experience is then just a call away.
4. Learning from others
Of course, not all learning comes from reflection and self-analysis. Sometimes the most powerful insights come from looking exterior one's firsthand environment to proceeds a new perspective. Enlightened managers know that fifty-fifty companies in completely dissimilar businesses can be fertile sources of ideas and catalysts for creative thinking. At these organizations, enthusiastic borrowing is replacing the "non invented here" syndrome. Milliken calls the process Sis, for "Steal Ideas Shamelessly"; the broader term for information technology is benchmarking.
Enthusiastic borrowing is replacing the "not invented here" syndrome.
According to 1 expert, "benchmarking is an ongoing investigation and learning experience that ensures that best industry practices are uncovered, analyzed, adopted, and implemented."vii The greatest benefits come from studying practices, the fashion that work gets washed, rather than results, and from involving line managers in the process. Most anything can exist benchmarked. Xerox, the concept's creator, has applied it to billing, warehousing, and automated manufacturing. Milliken has been fifty-fifty more creative: in an inspired moment, it benchmarked Xerox'south arroyo to benchmarking.
Unfortunately, there is still considerable confusion virtually the requirements for successful benchmarking. Benchmarking is not "industrial tourism," a series of ad hoc visits to companies that have received favorable publicity or won quality awards. Rather, it is a disciplined procedure that begins with a thorough search to identify all-time-practice organizations, continues with careful study of one's own practices and performance, progresses through systematic site visits and interviews, and concludes with an analysis of results, development of recommendations, and implementation. While time-consuming, the process need non be terribly expensive. AT&T's Benchmarking Group estimates that a moderate-sized project takes four to half-dozen months and incurs out-of-pocket costs of $xx,000 (when personnel costs are included, the figure is iii to four times higher).
Benchmarking is one way of gaining an outside perspective; some other, equally fertile source of ideas is customers. Conversations with customers invariably stimulate learning; they are, after all, experts in what they do. Customers tin provide upward-to-date product information, competitive comparisons, insights into irresolute preferences, and firsthand feedback almost service and patterns of use. And companies need these insights at all levels, from the executive suite to the shop floor. At Motorola, members of the Operating and Policy Committee, including the CEO, meet personally and on a regular basis with customers. At Worthington Steel, all machine operators make periodic, unescorted trips to customers' factories to discuss their needs.
Customers can provide competitive comparisons and immediate feedback about service. And companies demand these insights at all levels, from the executive suite to the shop flooring.
Sometimes customers tin can't clear their needs or think fifty-fifty the well-nigh recent problems they accept had with a product or service. If that's the case, managers must observe them in action. Xerox employs a number of anthropologists at its Palo Alto Inquiry Center to observe users of new document products in their offices. Digital Equipment has developed an interactive process called "contextual inquiry" that is used by software engineers to observe users of new technologies every bit they go nearly their work. Milliken has created "get-go-delivery teams" that accompany the commencement shipment of all products; squad members follow the product through the customer'south production procedure to see how it is used and then develop ideas for further comeback.
Learning organizations cultivate the art of open, circumspect listening. Managers must be open to criticism.
Whatever the source of outside ideas, learning volition merely occur in a receptive environment. Managers can't be defensive and must be open to criticism or bad news. This is a difficult challenge, but it is essential for success. Companies that approach customers assuming that "we must be right, they have to exist wrong" or visit other organizations certain that "they can't teach us anything" seldom acquire very much. Learning organizations, past contrast, cultivate the art of open up, attentive listening.
5. Transferring knowledge
For learning to exist more than a local affair, knowledge must spread apace and efficiently throughout the organization. Ideas comport maximum touch when they are shared broadly rather than held in a few hands. A diversity of mechanisms spur this process, including written, oral, and visual reports, site visits and tours, personnel rotation programs, education and training programs, and standardization programs. Each has distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
Reports and tours are by far the most popular mediums. Reports serve many purposes: they summarize findings, provide checklists of dos and don'ts, and describe of import processes and events. They cover a multitude of topics, from benchmarking studies to accounting conventions to newly discovered marketing techniques. Today written reports are often supplemented by videotapes, which offer greater immediacy and fidelity.
Tours are an equally popular means of transferring knowledge, especially for big, multidivisional organizations with multiple sites. The nigh effective tours are tailored to different audiences and needs. To introduce its managers to the distinctive manufacturing practices of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), its joint venture with Toyota, Full general Motors developed a series of specialized tours. Some were geared to upper and middle managers, while others were aimed at lower ranks. Each tour described the policies, practices, and systems that were most relevant to that level of management.
Despite their popularity, reports and tours are relatively cumbersome ways of transferring cognition. The gritty details that lie behind complex management concepts are difficult to communicate secondhand. Absorbing facts by reading them or seeing them demonstrated is one thing; experiencing them personally is quite another. As a leading cerebral scientist has observed, "Information technology is very difficult to get knowledgeable in a passive way. Actively experiencing something is considerably more than valuable than having it described."8 For this reason, personnel rotation programs are one of the well-nigh powerful methods of transferring knowledge.
In many organizations, expertise is held locally: in a peculiarly skilled computer technician, peradventure, a savvy global brand manager, or a sectionalisation head with a track tape of successful articulation ventures. Those in daily contact with these experts do good enormously from their skills, but their field of influence is relatively narrow. Transferring them to different parts of the organization helps share the wealth. Transfers may be from division to division, department to department, or facility to facility; they may involve senior, eye, or start-level managers. A supervisor experienced in just-in-time product, for example, might motility to some other manufacturing plant to apply the methods there, or a successful division manager might transfer to a lagging segmentation to invigorate it with already proven ideas. The CEO of Time Life used the latter arroyo when he shifted the president of the company's music segmentation, who had orchestrated several years of rapid growth and high profits through innovative marketing, to the presidency of the volume division, where profits were flat because of continued reliance on traditional marketing concepts.
Line to staff transfers are another option. These are almost effective when they allow experienced managers to dribble what they have learned and diffuse it across the company in the form of new standards, policies, or training programs. Consider how PPG used only such a transfer to advance its human resources practices around the concept of high-commitment work systems. In 1986, PPG synthetic a new float-glass plant in Chehalis, Washington; it employed a radically new technology equally well every bit innovations in human resource management that were developed by the constitute manager and his staff. All workers were organized into small, self-managing teams with responsibleness for work assignments, scheduling, problem solving and improvement, and peer review. After several years running the factory, the institute managing director was promoted to manager of human resources for the entire glass group. Drawing on his experiences at Chehalis, he developed a grooming program geared toward first-level supervisors that taught the behaviors needed to manage employees in a participative, cocky-managing surroundings.
As the PPG example suggests, education and training programs are powerful tools for transferring knowledge. Simply for maximum effectiveness, they must be linked explicitly to implementation. All as well often, trainers assume that new cognition will be applied without taking concrete steps to ensure that trainees actually follow through. Seldom do trainers provide opportunities for exercise, and few programs consciously promote the application of their teachings after employees have returned to their jobs.
Xerox and GTE are exceptions. As noted earlier, when Xerox introduced trouble-solving techniques to its employees in the 1980s, everyone, from the acme to the bottom of the organization, was taught in small departmental or bounded groups led by their immediate superior. Afterward an introduction to concepts and techniques, each grouping practical what they learned to a real-life work trouble. In a similar spirit, GTE's Quality: The Competitive Border program was offered to teams of business-unit of measurement presidents and the managers reporting to them. At the beginning of the 3-mean solar day course, each team received a asking from a company officeholder to prepare a complete quality program for their unit, based on the course concepts, inside sixty days. Discussion periods of two to iii hours were set aside during the plan so that teams could begin working on their plans. After the teams submitted their reports, the company officers studied them, and and then the teams implemented them. This GTE program produced dramatic improvements in quality, including a recent semifinalist spot in the Baldrige Awards.
GTE proved knowledge is more likely to be transferred effectively when the right incentives are in place.
The GTE instance suggests another important guideline: noesis is more likely to be transferred effectively when the correct incentives are in place. If employees know that their plans will be evaluated and implemented—in other words, that their learning will be practical—progress is far more than likely. At most companies, the status quo is well entrenched; only if managers and employees come across new ideas as being in their own best interest will they accept them gracefully. AT&T has developed a creative arroyo that combines strong incentives with information sharing. Called the Chairman'southward Quality Accolade (CQA), it is an internal quality competition modeled on the Baldrige prize simply with an important twist: awards are given non only for absolute operation (using the same i,000-point scoring system as Baldrige) but also for improvements in scoring from the previous year. Gold, silver, and bronze Improvement Awards are given to units that have improved their scores 200, 150, and 100 points, respectively. These awards provide the incentive for alter. An accompanying Pockets of Excellence plan simplifies knowledge transfer. Every year, it identifies every unit within the company that has scored at to the lowest degree threescore% of the possible points in each award category and then publicizes the names of these units using written reports and electronic mail.
Measuring Learning
Managers have long known that "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." This maxim is equally true of learning equally it is of any other corporate objective. Traditionally, the solution has been "learning curves" and "manufacturing progress functions." Both concepts date back to the discovery, during the 1920s and 1930s, that the costs of airframe manufacturing fell predictably with increases in cumulative volume. These increases were viewed every bit proxies for greater manufacturing knowledge, and well-nigh early studies examined their bear upon on the costs of direct labor. Later studies expanded the focus, looking at total manufacturing costs and the impact of experience in other industries, including shipbuilding, oil refining, and consumer electronics. Typically, learning rates were in the fourscore% to 85% range (meaning that with a doubling of cumulative production, costs savage to 80% to 85% of their previous level), although there was wide variation.
Firms like the Boston Consulting Group raised these ideas to a higher level in the 1970s. Cartoon on the logic of learning curves, they argued that industries equally a whole faced "experience curves," costs and prices that fell by predictable amounts as industries grew and their total product increased. With this observation, consultants suggested, came an fe constabulary of competition. To savour the benefits of experience, companies would take to chop-chop increment their production ahead of competitors to lower prices and gain market share.
Both learning and experience curves are withal widely used, peculiarly in the aerospace, defense, and electronics industries. Boeing, for instance, has established learning curves for every work station in its associates establish; they assist in monitoring productivity, determining work flows and staffing levels, and setting prices and profit margins on new airplanes. Experience curves are mutual in semiconductors and consumer electronics, where they are used to forecast industry costs and prices.
For companies hoping to become learning organizations, however, these measures are incomplete. They focus on only a unmarried measure out of output (cost or price) and ignore learning that affects other competitive variables, similar quality, delivery, or new product introductions. They suggest only one possible learning driver (total production volumes) and ignore both the possibility of learning in mature industries, where output is flat, and the possibility that learning might be driven by other sources, such as new technology or the challenge posed past competing products. Maybe about important, they tell us little nearly the sources of learning or the levers of change.
Another measure has emerged in response to these concerns. Chosen the "half-life" bend, it was originally adult past Analog Devices, a leading semiconductor manufacturer, every bit a manner of comparing internal comeback rates. A one-half-life curve measures the fourth dimension it takes to achieve a fifty% improvement in a specified performance measure. When represented graphically, the operation measure (defect rates, on-time delivery, time to market) is plotted on the vertical axis, using a logarithmic scale, and the time scale (days, months, years) is plotted horizontally. Steeper slopes and so represent faster learning (see the insert "The Half-Life Curve" for an illustration).
The Half-Life Bend Analog Devices has used one-half-life curves to compare the performance of its divisions. Here monthly data on client service are graphed for seven divisions. Division C is the clear winner: even though it started with a high proportion of late deliveries, its rapid learning rate led eventually to the best accented performance. Divisions D, Due east, and K take been far less successful, with little or no improvement in on-time service over the period. Source: Ray Stata, "Organizational Learning—The Key to Management Innovation," Sloan Management Review, Spring 1989, p. 72.
The logic is straightforward. Companies, divisions, or departments that take less time to meliorate must exist learning faster than their peers. In the long run, their short learning cycles will translate into superior operation. The l% target is a measure of convenience; it was derived empirically from studies of successful improvement processes at a wide range of companies. Half-life curves are besides flexible. Unlike learning and feel curves, they work on any output measure, and they are not confined to costs or prices. In addition, they are piece of cake to operationalize, they provide a uncomplicated measuring stick, and they permit for ready comparison among groups.
Still fifty-fifty half-life curves have an of import weakness: they focus solely on results. Some types of knowledge take years to digest, with few visible changes in functioning for long periods. Creating a total quality culture, for case, or developing new approaches to product evolution are difficult systemic changes. Because of their long gestation periods, half-life curves or any other measures focused solely on results are unlikely to capture any short-run learning that has occurred. A more than comprehensive framework is needed to track progress.
Organizational learning can usually exist traced through 3 overlapping stages. The showtime pace is cognitive. Members of the organization are exposed to new ideas, aggrandize their knowledge, and begin to retrieve differently. The second step is behavioral. Employees begin to internalize new insights and alter their behavior. And the third step is performance comeback, with changes in behavior leading to measurable improvements in results: superior quality, better delivery, increased market place share, or other tangible gains. Because cognitive and behavioral changes typically precede improvements in performance, a complete learning inspect must include all three.
Surveys, questionnaires, and interviews are useful for this purpose. At the cerebral level, they would focus on attitudes and depth of agreement. Have employees truly understood the meaning of self-direction and teamwork, or are the terms still unclear? At PPG, a team of homo resources experts periodically audits every manufacturing establish, including extensive interviews with shop-floor employees, to ensure that the concepts are well understood. Have new approaches to customer service been fully accustomed? At its 1989 Worldwide Marketing Managers' Coming together, Ford presented participants with a series of hypothetical situations in which customer complaints were in conflict with short-term dealer or company profit goals and asked how they would respond. Surveys similar these are the first stride toward identifying changed attitudes and new ways of thinking.
To assess behavioral changes, surveys and questionnaires must be supplemented past direct ascertainment. Here the proof is in the doing, and there is no substitute for seeing employees in action. Domino's Pizza uses "mystery shoppers" to assess managers' commitment to customer service at its individual stores; L.L. Bean places telephone orders with its own operators to assess service levels. Other companies invite exterior consultants to visit, attend meetings, observe employees in action, and then report what they have learned. In many ways, this arroyo mirrors that of examiners for the Baldrige Accolade, who make several-day site visits to semifinalists to see whether the companies' deeds match the words on their applications.
Finally, a comprehensive learning inspect also measures operation. Half-life curves or other performance measures are essential for ensuring that cognitive and behavioral changes have actually produced results. Without them, companies would lack a rationale for investing in learning and the balls that learning was serving the organization's ends.
First Steps
Learning organizations are not built overnight. Nearly successful examples are the products of carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments, and direction processes that accept accrued slowly and steadily over time. Still, some changes can be fabricated immediately. Any company that wishes to get a learning arrangement can begin by taking a few uncomplicated steps.
The first step is to foster an environment that is conducive to learning. At that place must be time for reflection and analysis, to recall about strategic plans, dissect customer needs, assess electric current work systems, and invent new products. Learning is hard when employees are harried or rushed; it tends to be driven out by the pressures of the moment. Only if top management explicitly frees upwards employees' time for the purpose does learning occur with any frequency. That fourth dimension volition be doubly productive if employees possess the skills to use information technology wisely. Preparation in brainstorming, problem solving, evaluating experiments, and other core learning skills is therefore essential.
Another powerful lever is to open up boundaries and stimulate the exchange of ideas. Boundaries inhibit the flow of information; they keep individuals and groups isolated and reinforce preconceptions. Opening up boundaries, with conferences, meetings, and projection teams, which either cross organizational levels or link the company and its customers and suppliers, ensures a fresh catamenia of ideas and the chance to consider competing perspectives. Full general Electrical CEO Jack Welch considers this to be such a powerful stimulant of alter that he has made "boundarylessness" a cornerstone of the visitor'south strategy for the 1990s.
Once managers accept established a more than supportive, open environment, they tin create learning forums. These are programs or events designed with explicit learning goals in mind, and they can take a variety of forms: strategic reviews, which examine the changing competitive surroundings and the company's production portfolio, applied science, and market positioning; systems audits, which review the health of big, cross-functional processes and delivery systems; internal benchmarking reports, which identify and compare best-in-class activities inside the organization; report missions, which are dispatched to leading organizations around the globe to better understand their performance and distinctive skills; and jamborees or symposiums, which bring together customers, suppliers, exterior experts, or internal groups to share ideas and learn from one some other. Each of these activities fosters learning by requiring employees to wrestle with new knowledge and consider its implications. Each can also be tailored to business needs. A consumer goods visitor, for example, might sponsor a study mission to Europe to learn more about distribution methods within the newly unified Common Market, while a high-engineering visitor might launch a systems inspect to review its new product evolution process.
Together these efforts assist to eliminate barriers that impede learning and begin to motility learning college on the organizational calendar. They also suggest a subtle shift in focus, away from continuous improvement and toward a delivery to learning. Coupled with a amend agreement of the "three Ms," the pregnant, direction, and measurement of learning, this shift provides a solid foundation for building learning organizations.
References
i. Peter Chiliad. Senge, The Fifth Bailiwick (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. ane.
ii. Ikujiro Nonaka, "The Noesis-Creating Company," Harvard Business Review, Nov–December 1991, p. 97.
3. Robert Howard, "The CEO as Organizational Architect: An Interview with Xerox's Paul Allaire," Harvard Business Review, September–Oct 1992, p. 106.
four. Modesto A. Maidique and Billie Jo Zirger, "The New Production Learning Cycle," Research Policy, Vol. 14, No. 6 (1985), pp. 299, 309.
five. Frank R. Gulliver, "Postal service-Project Appraisals Pay," Harvard Business concern Review, March–April 1987, p. 128.
6. David Nadler, "Fifty-fifty Failures Can Be Productive," New York Times, April 23, 1989, Sec. 3, p. 3.
7. Robert C. Army camp, Benchmarking: The Search for Manufacture Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance (Milwaukee: ASQC Quality Press, 1989), p. 12.
8. Roger Schank, with Peter Childers, The Artistic Attitude (New York: Macmillan, 1988), p. ix.
9. Ramchandran Jaikumar and Roger Bohn, "The Development of Intelligent Systems for Industrial Apply: A Conceptual Framework," Inquiry on Technological Innovation, Direction and Policy, Vol. 3 (1986), pp. 182–188.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 1993 result of Harvard Business Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization
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