Why this idea means business : We explore what it means to be a learning organisation. Learn why it’s easier said than done. Read this for quick and easy ideas on becoming a better learning organisation.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To build better learning processes into your business to improve your future marketing activities. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Psychology | Marketing
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +75
- Est. sales increase = +$7.5k (monthly) | +$90k (annual)
Management scientist Peter Senge was the first to popularise the idea of a learning organisation back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
However, after its initial boom, it’s since faded into the background as other trends like AI and digital transformation hog the business world spotlight.
(The related idea of knowledge management, which emerged around the same time, has suffered a similar fate).
At its core, though, the learning organisation remains an intriguing concept. You organise your people and processes to build more expertise. This becomes a competitive advantage that helps your organisation outthink, outplay and outlast your non-learning organisation competitors.
Seems an obvious choice, right? Surely, smart businesses win out over dumb ones? You could even say, the more you learn, the more you earn.
So, why are most businesses so bad at it?
Barriers to the learning organisation
Let’s begin by looking at when learning starts. In childhood.
We read a statistic recently that children’s peak age for asking questions (and so learning) is 3-4 years old. They’re trying to make the most sense of the world around them. As their language and motor skills grow during this time, they can easily ask 300+ questions a day. Their open-minded developing brains ask questions to learn how the world works.
But once they go to school, the number of questions they ask drops rapidly. This comes as they learn prescribed topics to set them up for adult life, whichever career and lifestyle choice they make.
But this forced approach to learning can be a negative experience for many people. Especially if it’s on a topic they’re not interested in or see little use for (e.g. algebra). This can lead to a more close-minded approach to learning when those people become adults.
This effect is amplified because learning takes effort. It’s hard work. Your brain cells burn calories as you read, process and try to remember information and ideas. This tires you out. Remember coming out of a long and difficult exam at school? What’s the first thing you wanted to do? Eat, right? Your body needed to replace all that burned energy.
It’s these negative past learning experiences that create barriers to the learning organisation :-
- Resistance to change.
- Fear of “not knowing”.
- The action bias.
Resistance to change
When something unexpected happens, a part of our brains called the amygdala takes control. (See more on this in our fear and creativity article). It handles our “fight or flight” response, as those are the 2 default options our brains have to handle the perceived “threat” of the unexpected.
Our brains spend much of their time in autopilot mode. Routines and habits drive most choices and actions. We get up at the same time every day. Follow the same route to work. Work with the same people. Do the same sorts of tasks.
Our brains like this predictability as it makes us feel in control. We know what to expect.
But having to learn something new changes all that. We have to actively think about our choices and actions. Go to new places. Meet new people. Do things we’ve never done before. We don’t know what to expect. In the long run, this makes us fitter, happier, more productive. However, in the short run, it’s hard work, and our brains often rebel against this.
Now imagine what that’s like when you want a whole organisation to learn something new. A bunch of people happy with the way things are now. They know what’s expected of them and how to do it. They feel in control and know where everything is and how it all works.
Then you come along with this change you want them to learn. All that comfort and control goes out the window. So they reject your new learning. They drag their heels about innovating. They put up barriers and do all they can to stick with what’s worked before.
The idea of a learning organisation scares them.
Fear of "not knowing"
Learning also means admitting that there are things you don’t know.
You expect this in childhood – that’s why 3 to 4-year-olds ask so many questions.
But by the time we’re adults, we’re expected to know a lot more. Saying “I don’t know” is hard. Many worry it’ll be perceived as a sign of weakness, so it leads to negative behaviours. Lying. Making answers up. Getting confrontational. Shifting blame elsewhere.
Think about it. How often do you hear people at work saying “I don’t know”? And when you do hear it, how often is the response some sort of veiled attack? “Well, why don’t you know?”. “Maybe you should go find out?”. “I thought everyone knew that”.
In innovation-led businesses with a more creative culture, admitting you don’t know is seen as an opportunity. It can prompt ideas for more research and experiments to find new answers. But you need a strong, creative leadership team to make “don’t know” OK.
In most cases, the opposite is true. People who say “I don’t know” are judged as poor performers. They’re passed over for promotions and seen as lacking in confidence. Knowledge becomes a political weapon in the business rather than an enabler.
These negative behaviours make running a learning organisation much harder, as learning always starts from what you don’t know.
The action bias
The final barrier to the learning organisation is what psychologists call the action bias. At work, this is about being “busy”. Most people like being “busy” as it makes them feel like they’re doing what they’re being paid for. They feel valued.
However, learning often involves quieter and less overtly active behaviours. Reflecting. Reviewing. Hypothesising. To many people, these don’t feel like “actions”, so they’re harder to persuade people to do. But you can’t learn without them.
This is another creative leadership challenge. A big part of the creative culture in a learning organisation is encouraging these behaviours. Give people time and space to reflect on what they’ve learned. Get them to document their learnings in reviews, so they can be shared. Ask them to imagine alternative ways they might do something if they had to do it again in the future.
Busy people might think these are distractions. But in a learning organisation, they help drive improvements which make the business more effective and efficient.
A learning organisation starts at the top
By now, it should be clear that the success or failure of a learning organisation starts at the top.
The leadership team should role model behaviours that show they both practice and value learning. They need to set up processes and an environment where it’s encouraged. There are many different ways leaders can do this. Here are 3 of the best (and easiest) ways to start :-
- Make writing things down a habit.
- Organise learnings to make them accessible.
- Use it (or lose it).
Make writing things down a habit
There are 2 main types of knowledge. Tacit and explicit. (See our knowledge management article for more on this).
Tacit knowledge exists in people’s heads as learned behaviour. If you know how to bake a cake without needing a recipe, that’s tacit knowledge. It’s sometimes also known as “know-how”. From a task performance viewpoint, it’s very efficient. You know how to do something without having to think about it.
But it only exists in your head.
Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, exists in more tangible formats. Written down in plans. Processes. Training guides. Workshop presentations. It’s documented knowledge that can be shared and spread across an organisation. Like the recipe, it means everyone can bake the cake.
It’s this explicit knowledge that fuels learning across the organisation. Learning organisations encourage people to write down their tacit knowledge. This creates documented lessons that other (newer) people can learn from. It helps spread the learning and raises everyone’s skill levels.
And it starts with getting people to write things down.
Organise learnings to make them accessible
However, writing things down isn’t enough. You need to organise the learnings so that people can find what they need when they need it.
This can take different forms, but it’s easiest to think about it like organising a library.
First, you group together learnings around common subjects. For example, your processes for creating and crafting ideas. Your order to delivery process. How you handle customer service.
Then you store these grouped lessons in some sort of online system. An intranet. A shared database. Storing everything online allows you to add categories and tags to documents to make it easier for people to search for what they need. For example, the Three-Brains Ideas Database holds over 5,000 ideas. So we created 10 categories and 120+ separate tags to make it easier to find the right idea at the right time.
You can see a simpler example of this with the categories and tags set up of this site’s 250+ blog articles.
Use it (or lose it)
Finally, learning only benefits your organisation if you use it. Never used ideas soon fade from the memory, so it’s important to develop “hands-on” sessions that apply learning.
For example, you could have a weekly session where you pick an idea that’s not been done before and work on it. Or you explore an adjacent category. On new projects, you could set a goal to always apply a lesson learned from a previous project. Using knowledge makes it stickier and increases its impact.
That’s what you want from a learning organisation, right? After all, the more you learn, the more you earn.
Conclusion - The learning organisation is easier said than done
It’s hard to find anyone who’d argue against the idea of a learning organisation. No one wants to work for a business that never learns.
But while the learning organisation makes logical sense to most people, there’s a whole load of instincts and emotions that get in the way.
Our natural reluctance to embrace change. Our fear of “not knowing”. And our action bias preference to “do” rather than “learn”.
It takes strong, creative leaders to dismantle these barriers and make it easier for their teams to learn. It helps if they encourage everyone to write things down. Plus, they set up a system where what’s written is organised so it can be searched, shared and used. And of course, they make a habit of applying what the business learns. When it comes to learning, you use it, or you lose it.
For more on this, check out our knowledge management article. Or get in touch if you need more thought-starters on how to make learning part of your organisation.
Photo Credits
Hurdles : Photo by Jeremy Chen on Unsplash
Hand / Stop : Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Woman covering face under blanket : Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash
Sprint : Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
Man in blue shirt writing : Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
Bookshelf : Photo by Jamie Taylor on Unsplash
Kid squeezing paint tube : Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash
