Is Artstation Learning Worth Iy
The Idea in Brief
As nosotros all know, to stay ahead of competitors, companies must constantly raise the way they do business concern. But more performance-improvement programs fail than succeed. That'south because many managers don't realize that sustainable comeback requires a delivery to learning.
After all, how tin organizations respond creatively to new challenges (shifts in customer preferences, market downturns) without first discovering something new—then altering the way they operate to reflect new insights? Without learning, companies repeat old practices, make cosmetic changes, and produce short-lived improvements.
To transform your visitor into a learning system, Garvin recommends mastering five activities:
- Solving issues 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 assist your organisation brand indelible improvements that translate direct into measurable gains—including superior quality, better commitment, and increased market share.
The Idea in Do
Garvin offers these suggestions for mastering v organizational learning practices:
Solving Bug Systematically
Don't endeavor to solve problems by relying on gut instinct or assumptions. Instead, generate hypotheses, gather data to test your hypotheses, and use statistical tools (such as cause-and-effect diagrams) to organize data and describe inferences.
Experimenting
Systematically search for and test new knowledge. Use minor experiments to produce incremental gains in cognition. For instance, specialty drinking glass manufacturer Corning experiments continually with diverse raw materials and new formulations to increase yields and provide improve grades of drinking glass.
Use demonstration projects to produce knowledge you can utilize for systemwide changes. Full general Foods experimented with self-managing teams at its Topeka plant with the aim of adopting this arroyo across the company later.
Learning from Past Experience
Review your successes and failures, identify lessons learned, and record those lessons in attainable forms. Example:
Boeing compared the development processes of its 737 and 747 planes (models that had serious technical problems) to those of its 707 and 727 (2 profitable programs). It then compiled a booklet of lessons learned. Several members of the learning team were later transferred to two starting time-up programs—the 757 and 767. They produced the most successful, error-free launches in Boeing's history.
Learning from Others
Look outside your immediate environment to gain new perspectives. Consider these sources:
- Other companies. Place best-practise organizations (even in other industries), employ site visits and interviews to written report how they go work washed, and generate ideas for improving your own practices.
- Your customers. Encounter regularly with customers to assemble knowledge well-nigh products, competitors, consumers' preferences, and the quality of your service. Also observe customers using your products, to identify problems and generate ideas for improvement.
Transferring Knowledge
New cognition carries maximum affect when it'due south shared broadly. To transfer noesis quickly and efficiently throughout your system, move experts to different parts of the visitor—beyond divisions, departments, and facilities—then they can share the wealth. Example:
Time Life's CEO shifted the president of the company's music division (who had orchestrated years of rapid growth and high profits through innovative marketing) to the book division, where profits were flat because of continued reliance on traditional marketing concepts.
Continuous improvement programs are sprouting up all over as organizations strive to better themselves and gain an edge. The topic list is long and varied, and sometimes it seems as though a programme a month is needed just to go on up. Unfortunately, failed programs far outnumber successes, and comeback rates remain distressingly depression. Why? Considering most companies take failed to grasp a bones truth. Continuous improvement requires a delivery to learning.
How, after all, tin an arrangement improve without showtime learning something new? Solving a problem, introducing a production, and reengineering a process all require seeing the world in a new light and acting accordingly. In the absenteeism of learning, companies—and individuals—simply repeat old practices. Change remains corrective, and improvements are either fortuitous or short-lived.
A few farsighted executives—Ray Stata of Analog Devices, Gordon Frontwards of Chaparral Steel, Paul Allaire of Xerox—accept recognized the link between learning and continuous improvement and have begun to refocus their companies around it. Scholars as well have jumped on the bandwagon, beating the drum for "learning organizations" and "knowledge-creating companies." In rapidly changing businesses like semiconductors and consumer electronics, these ideas are fast taking hold. Yet despite the encouraging signs, the topic in large role remains murky, confused, and difficult to penetrate.
Significant, Management, and Measurement
Scholars are partly to arraign. Their discussions of learning organizations accept often been reverential and utopian, filled with near mystical terminology. Paradise, they would have you believe, is just effectually the corner. Peter Senge, who popularized learning organizations in his book The Fifth Discipline, described them as places "where people continually expand their chapters to create the results they truly want, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where commonage aspiration is prepare 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 cognition-creating companies equally places where "inventing new noesis is not a specialized activity…information technology is a way of behaving, indeed, a fashion of being, in which everyone is a noesis worker."ii Nonaka suggested that companies utilize metaphors and organizational redundancy to focus thinking, encourage dialogue, and make tacit, instinctively understood ideas explicit.
Sound idyllic? Absolutely. Desirable? Without question. Only does it provide a framework for action? Hardly. The recommendations are far also abstract, and too many questions remain unanswered. How, for example, will managers know when their companies take become learning organizations? What concrete changes in beliefs are required? What policies and programs must exist in place? How practice you become from here to at that place?
Most discussions of learning organizations finesse these issues. Their focus is high philosophy and grand themes, sweeping metaphors rather than the gritty details of exercise. Three disquisitional problems are left unresolved; nonetheless each is essential for effective implementation. Start is the question of meaning. We need a plausible, well-grounded definition of learning organizations; it must be actionable and easy to employ. Second is the question of direction. We demand clearer guidelines for practice, filled with operational advice rather than high aspirations. And third is the question of measurement. We need improve tools for assessing an system's rate and level of learning to ensure that gains have in fact been made.
Once these "three Ms" are addressed, managers will accept a firmer foundation for launching learning organizations. Without this background, progress is unlikely, and for the simplest of reasons. For learning to become a meaningful corporate goal, it must showtime be understood.
What Is a Learning Organization?
Surprisingly, a clear definition of learning has proved to exist elusive over the years. Organizational theorists accept studied learning for a long time; the accompanying quotations propose that in that location is still considerable disagreement (run into the insert "Definitions of Organizational Learning"). Almost scholars view organizational learning as a process that unfolds over time and link it with knowledge acquisition and improved operation. But they differ on other important matters.
Some, for example, believe that behavioral alter is required for learning; others insist that new ways of thinking are enough. Some cite data processing every bit the machinery through which learning takes place; others propose shared insights, organizational routines, even retentivity. And some recollect that organizational learning is common, while others believe that flawed, self-serving interpretations are the norm.
How tin we discern among this cacophony of voices yet build on earlier insights? As a commencement footstep, consider the post-obit definition:
A learning organization is an arrangement skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring noesis, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.
This definition begins with a simple truth: new ideas are essential if learning is to accept place. Sometimes they are created de novo, through flashes of insight or inventiveness; at other times they get in from outside the system or are communicated by knowledgeable insiders. Whatever their source, these ideas are the trigger for organizational comeback. But they cannot by themselves create a learning organisation. Without accompanying changes in the way that work gets done, simply 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 authorize, equally exercise many consulting firms. Even General Motors, despite its recent efforts to improve performance, is establish wanting. All of these organizations accept been effective at creating or acquiring new knowledge merely notably less successful in applying that cognition to their ain activities. Total quality direction, for example, is now taught at many business schools, yet the number using information technology to guide their ain decision making is very small-scale. Organizational consultants advise clients on social dynamics and small-group behavior but 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 production, and the requirements for improved quality of piece of work life.
Organizations that do pass the definitional test—Honda, Corning, and General Electric come quickly to listen—have, by contrast, become adept at translating new knowledge into new ways of behaving. These companies actively manage the learning process to ensure that information technology occurs by design rather than by chance. Distinctive policies and practices are responsible for their success; they class the building blocks of learning organizations.
Building Blocks
Learning organizations are skilled at five chief activities: systematic problem solving, experimentation with new approaches, learning from their own experience and past history, learning from the experiences and best practices of others, and transferring cognition speedily and efficiently throughout the arrangement. Each is accompanied by a distinctive mind-set, tool kit, and pattern of beliefs. Many companies practice these activities to some degree. Simply few are consistently successful because they rely largely on happenstance and isolated examples. Past creating systems and processes that support these activities and integrate them into the textile of daily operations, companies tin manage their learning more effectively.
1. Systematic problem solving
This starting time action rests heavily on the philosophy and methods of the quality motion. Its underlying ideas, at present 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 as "hypothesis-generating, hypothesis-testing" techniques).
- Insisting on data, rather than assumptions, as background for conclusion making (what quality practitioners call "fact-based management").
- Using simple statistical tools (histograms, Pareto charts, correlations, cause-and-result 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, all the same, is more difficult to constitute. Accuracy and precision are essential for learning. Employees must therefore become more than disciplined in their thinking and more circumspect to details. They must continually inquire, "How practise nosotros know that's truthful?", recognizing that close enough is non good enough if real learning is to take place. They must push beyond obvious symptoms to assess underlying causes, oft collecting show when conventional wisdom says it is unnecessary. Otherwise, the arrangement will remain a prisoner of "gut facts" and sloppy reasoning, and learning will be stifled.
Xerox has mastered this approach on a company-wide scale. In 1983, senior managers launched the company's Leadership Through Quality initiative; since then, all employees have been trained in small-grouping activities and problem-solving techniques. Today a half dozen-step process is used for virtually all decisions (see the insert "Xerox'south Problem-Solving Procedure"). Employees are provided with tools in iv areas: generating ideas and collecting information (brainstorming, interviewing, surveying); reaching consensus (list reduction, rating forms, weighted voting); analyzing and displaying data (cause-and-consequence diagrams, strength-field analysis); and planning actions (menstruum charts, Gantt charts). They so do these tools during preparation sessions that last several days. Training is presented in "family groups," members of the same department or business-unit team, and the tools are applied to real bug facing the group. The effect of this process has been a common vocabulary and a consistent, companywide approach to trouble solving. Once employees have been trained, they are expected to employ the techniques at all meetings, and no topic is off-limits. When a high-level group was formed to review Xerox'southward organizational structure and advise alternatives, it employed the very same process and tools.3
Xerox's Problem-Solving Process
2. Experimentation
This activity involves the systematic searching for and testing of new noesis. Using the scientific method is essential, and there are obvious parallels to systematic problem solving. But unlike problem solving, experimentation is usually motivated past opportunity and expanding horizons, not by electric current difficulties. It takes two chief forms: ongoing programs and one-of-a-kind demonstration projects.
Ongoing programs unremarkably involve a standing series of small experiments, designed to produce incremental gains in noesis. They are the mainstay of most continuous improvement programs and are especially common on the store floor. Corning, for example, experiments continually with diverse raw materials and new formulations to increase yields and provide better grades of glass. Allegheny Ludlum, a specialty steelmaker, regularly examines new rolling methods and improved technologies to enhance productivity and reduce costs.
Opportunity motivates experimentation. Corning, for example, continually strives to increase yields and provide better grades of glass.
Successful ongoing programs share several characteristics. Beginning, they work difficult to ensure a steady menstruation of new ideas, fifty-fifty if they must exist imported from outside the organization. Chaparral Steel sends its first-line supervisors on sabbaticals around the globe, where they visit bookish and industry leaders, develop an understanding of new work practices and technologies, then bring what they've learned back to the company and apply it to daily operations. In large part as a result of these initiatives, Chaparral is 1 of the 5 lowest price steel plants in the globe. GE's Touch Program originally sent manufacturing managers to Japan to study factory innovations, such as quality circles and kanban cards, and so use them in their own organizations; today Europe is the destination, and productivity improvement practices the target. The programme is one reason GE has recorded productivity gains averaging nearly 5% over the last four years.
Successful ongoing programs also 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 inventiveness past unduly penalizing employees for failures. Allegheny Ludlum has perfected this juggling act: it keeps expensive, loftier-impact experiments off the scorecard used to evaluate managers but requires prior approvals from four senior vice presidents. The result has been a history of productivity improvements annually averaging vii% to 8%.
Successful programs require an incentive system that favors chance 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 embrace a wide sweep: statistical methods, similar design of experiments, that efficiently compare a large number of alternatives; graphical techniques, like process analysis, that are essential for redesigning piece of work flows; and creativity techniques, like storyboarding and part playing, that keep novel ideas flowing. The most effective training programs are tightly focused and characteristic a small ready of techniques tailored to employees' needs. Grooming in design of experiments, for case, is useful for manufacturing engineers, while creativity techniques are well suited to development groups.
Demonstration projects are ordinarily larger and more than complex than ongoing experiments. They involve holistic, systemwide changes, introduced at a single site, and are often undertaken with the goal of developing new organizational capabilities. Considering these projects correspond a abrupt break from the by, they are normally designed from scratch, using a "make clean slate" approach. General Foods'south Topeka found, one of the commencement high-delivery piece of work systems in this land, was a pioneering demonstration project initiated to introduce the idea of cocky-managing teams and high levels of worker autonomy; a more contempo case, designed to rethink small-car evolution, manufacturing, and sales, is GM'due south Saturn Sectionalization.
Demonstration projects share a number of distinctive characteristics:
- They are normally the first projects to embody principles and approaches that the organization hopes to adopt later on a larger scale. For this reason, they are more transitional efforts than endpoints and involve considerable "learning by doing." Mid-grade corrections are common.
- They implicitly found policy guidelines and conclusion rules for later projects. Managers must therefore be sensitive to the precedents they are setting and must send strong signals if they expect to establish new norms.
- They often run across astringent tests of commitment from employees who wish to come across whether the rules have, in fact, changed.
- They are normally developed by stiff multi-functional teams reporting straight to senior management. (For projects targeting employee involvement or quality of piece of work life, teams should be multilevel as well.)
- They tend to have merely limited impact on the rest of the organization if they are not accompanied past explicit strategies for transferring learning.
All of these characteristics appeared in a sit-in project launched by Copeland Corporation, a highly successful compressor manufacturer, in the mid-1970s. Matt Diggs, then the new CEO, wanted to transform the company'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 problem, Diggs felt, was as well much complexity.
At the outset, Diggs assigned a pocket-size, multifunctional team the task of designing a "focused factory" defended to a narrow, newly developed production line. The team reported directly to Diggs and took 3 years to complete its piece of work. Initially, the project budget was $10 1000000 to $12 million; that figure was repeatedly revised as the squad found, through experience and with Diggs's prodding, that it could achieve dramatic improvements. The final investment, a full of $30 million, yielded unanticipated breakthroughs in reliability testing, automatic tool adjustment, and programmable control. All were accomplished through learning by doing.
The team set boosted precedents during the plant'due south start-up and early on operations. To dramatize the importance of quality, for example, the quality manager was appointed 2d-in-command, a significant move up. The aforementioned reporting relationship was used at all subsequent plants. In addition, Diggs urged the plant 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 department normally ruled. Both directives were quickly tested; management held firm, and the implications were felt throughout the organization. Manufacturing'south stature improved, and the company as a whole recognized its competitive contribution. 1 observer commented, "Marketing had always run the company, so they couldn't believe information technology. The change was visible at the highest levels, and it went down difficult."
Once the first focused factory was running smoothly—it seized 25% of the market in two years and held its border in reliability for over a decade—Copeland congenital four more factories in quick succession. Diggs assigned members of the initial projection to each mill's blueprint team to ensure that early learnings were not lost; these people afterwards rotated into operating assignments. Today focused factories remain the cornerstone of Copeland'southward manufacturing strategy and a continuing source of its cost and quality advantages.
Whether they are demonstration projects like Copeland's or ongoing programs like Allegheny Ludlum'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 washed and knowing why they occur. Knowing how is partial cognition; it is rooted in norms of beliefs, standards of exercise, and settings of equipment. Knowing why is more primal: it captures underlying cause-and-effect relationships and accommodates exceptions, adaptations, and unforeseen events. The ability to control temperatures and pressures to align grains of silicon and grade silicon steel is an instance of knowing how; understanding the chemical and concrete process that produces the alignment is knowing why.
Farther distinctions are possible, as the insert "Stages of Knowledge" suggests. Operating knowledge tin exist arrayed in a hierarchy, moving from limited understanding and the ability to make few distinctions to more consummate understanding in which all contingencies are anticipated and controlled. In this context, experimentation and problem solving foster learning by pushing organizations up the hierarchy, from lower to higher stages of knowledge.
three. Learning from past experience
Companies must review their successes and failures, appraise them systematically, and record the lessons in a form that employees discover open and attainable. One proficient has called 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, fifty-fifty hostile, to the past, and by failing to reflect on it, they allow valuable noesis escape.
A study of more than 150 new products ended 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 about pop and profitable ever congenital, was based on the technology of the failed Stretch figurer that preceded it. In this case, as in many others, learning occurred past gamble rather than past careful planning. A few companies, even so, have established processes that require their managers to periodically recall most the past and acquire from their mistakes.
Boeing did so immediately afterwards its difficulties with the 737 and 747 plane programs. Both planes were introduced with much fanfare and besides with serious problems. To ensure that the problems were not repeated, senior managers commissioned a high-level employee group, chosen Project Homework, to compare the development processes of the 737 and 747 with those of the 707 and 727, ii of the visitor's most assisting planes. The group was asked to develop a set up of "lessons learned" that could be used on future projects. After working for three years, they produced hundreds of recommendations and an inch-thick booklet. Several members of the squad were and so transferred to the 757 and 767 showtime-ups, and guided past experience, they produced the most successful, error-free launches in Boeing's history.
Boeing used lessons from earlier model evolution to assistance produce the 757 and 767—the most successful, error-gratis launches in its history.
Other companies have used a similar retrospective approach. Like Boeing, Xerox studied its product development procedure, examining three troubled products in an effort to understand why the visitor'southward new business initiatives failed so oft. Arthur D. Little, the consulting company, focused on its past successes. Senior management invited ADL consultants from around the globe to a 2-day "jamboree," featuring booths and presentations documenting a wide range of the company's most successful practices, publications, and techniques. British Petroleum went even farther and established the postal service-project appraisal unit of measurement to review major investment projects, write upwards case studies, and derive lessons for planners that were then incorporated into revisions of the company's planning guidelines. A five-person unit of measurement reported to the board of directors and reviewed six projects annually. The bulk of the time was spent in the field interviewing managers.5 This type of review is now conducted regularly at the project level.
At the center of this approach, one practiced has observed, "is a heed-set 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 commonly held wisdom of the arrangement. An unproductive success occurs when something goes well, simply nobody knows how or why."six IBM's legendary founder, Thomas Watson, Sr., apparently understood the distinction well. Visitor lore has it that a immature director, after losing $10 meg in a risky venture, was called into Watson'south role. The immature man, thoroughly intimidated, began by saying, "I gauge you desire my resignation." Watson replied, "You can't be serious. We just spent $10 meg educating yous."
Fortunately, the learning procedure need non be then expensive. Example studies and mail service-projection reviews like those of Xerox and British Petroleum can exist performed with niggling cost other than managers' time. Companies can also enlist the help of kinesthesia and students at local colleges or universities; they bring fresh perspectives and view internships and instance studies as opportunities to gain experience and increase their ain learning. A few companies have established computerized data banks to speed up 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's accolade program. The company then enters the forms into its estimator arrangement and tin can immediately retrieve a listing of other groups of people who take worked or are working on the topic, forth with a contact person. Relevant experience is and then just a telephone phone call abroad.
4. Learning from others
Of course, not all learning comes from reflection and cocky-analysis. Sometimes the about powerful insights come from looking outside one's immediate environment to gain a new perspective. Enlightened managers know that even companies in completely different businesses can be fertile sources of ideas and catalysts for creative thinking. At these organizations, enthusiastic borrowing is replacing the "not invented here" syndrome. Milliken calls the process Sis, for "Steal Ideas Shamelessly"; the broader term for it is benchmarking.
Enthusiastic borrowing is replacing the "not invented here" syndrome.
According to one skilful, "benchmarking is an ongoing investigation and learning experience that ensures that all-time industry practices are uncovered, analyzed, adopted, and implemented."7 The greatest benefits come from studying practices, the way that work gets washed, rather than results, and from involving line managers in the process. Almost anything can be benchmarked. Xerox, the concept'southward creator, has practical it to billing, warehousing, and automatic manufacturing. Milliken has been even more than artistic: in an inspired moment, it benchmarked Xerox's approach to benchmarking.
Unfortunately, at that place is withal considerable confusion about the requirements for successful benchmarking. Benchmarking is not "industrial tourism," a series of advertisement hoc visits to companies that have received favorable publicity or won quality awards. Rather, information technology is a disciplined process that begins with a thorough search to place best-practise organizations, continues with careful written report of i'south own practices and performance, progresses through systematic site visits and interviews, and concludes with an analysis of results, evolution of recommendations, and implementation. While time-consuming, the process need not be terribly expensive. AT&T'due south Benchmarking Group estimates that a moderate-sized project takes four to vi months and incurs out-of-pocket costs of $20,000 (when personnel costs are included, the figure is iii to four times college).
Benchmarking is 1 way of gaining an outside perspective; another, equally fertile source of ideas is customers. Conversations with customers invariably stimulate learning; they are, after all, experts in what they do. Customers can provide up-to-engagement product data, competitive comparisons, insights into changing preferences, and immediate feedback about service and patterns of use. And companies need these insights at all levels, from the executive suite to the store 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 car operators make periodic, unescorted trips to customers' factories to talk over their needs.
Customers can provide competitive comparisons and immediate feedback well-nigh service. And companies need these insights at all levels, from the executive suite to the shop floor.
Sometimes customers tin can't articulate their needs or remember fifty-fifty the nearly recent problems they have had with a production or service. If that'south the case, managers must observe them in activity. Xerox employs a number of anthropologists at its Palo Alto Research Center to observe users of new certificate products in their offices. Digital Equipment has adult an interactive procedure chosen "contextual inquiry" that is used by software engineers to find users of new technologies as they go about their work. Milliken has created "first-delivery teams" that back-trail the outset shipment of all products; team members follow the product through the client's product process to see how it is used and then develop ideas for farther comeback.
Learning organizations cultivate the art of open, attentive listening. Managers must be open to criticism.
Whatever the source of outside ideas, learning will merely occur in a receptive environs. Managers can't be defensive and must be open to criticism or bad news. This is a difficult challenge, only it is essential for success. Companies that approach customers assuming that "nosotros must be correct, they have to exist incorrect" or visit other organizations certain that "they can't teach u.s. anything" seldom learn very much. Learning organizations, by dissimilarity, cultivate the art of open, attentive listening.
5. Transferring knowledge
For learning to be more than a local matter, cognition must spread apace and efficiently throughout the arrangement. Ideas bear maximum impact when they are shared broadly rather than held in a few hands. A variety 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 important processes and events. They encompass a multitude of topics, from benchmarking studies to accounting conventions to newly discovered marketing techniques. Today written reports are oftentimes supplemented by videotapes, which offer greater immediacy and fidelity.
Tours are an equally pop means of transferring cognition, especially for large, multidivisional organizations with multiple sites. The most effective tours are tailored to unlike audiences and needs. To introduce its managers to the distinctive manufacturing practices of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), its joint venture with Toyota, General Motors adult a serial of specialized tours. Some were geared to upper and middle managers, while others were aimed at lower ranks. Each bout described the policies, practices, and systems that were nearly relevant to that level of management.
Despite their popularity, reports and tours are relatively cumbersome ways of transferring knowledge. The gritty details that lie behind complex management concepts are difficult to communicate secondhand. Arresting facts past reading them or seeing them demonstrated is one thing; experiencing them personally is quite another. As a leading cognitive scientist has observed, "It is very difficult to get knowledgeable in a passive way. Actively experiencing something is considerably more valuable than having it described."eight For this reason, personnel rotation programs are one of the most powerful methods of transferring knowledge.
In many organizations, expertise is held locally: in a particularly skilled calculator technician, perhaps, a savvy global brand manager, or a division head with a track record of successful joint ventures. Those in daily contact with these experts benefit enormously from their skills, simply their field of influence is relatively narrow. Transferring them to different parts of the organisation helps share the wealth. Transfers may be from division to division, section to section, or facility to facility; they may involve senior, eye, or first-level managers. A supervisor experienced in simply-in-fourth dimension production, for example, might move to another manufactory to utilise the methods there, or a successful division manager might transfer to a lagging division to invigorate it with already proven ideas. The CEO of Time Life used the latter approach when he shifted the president of the visitor's music sectionalisation, who had orchestrated several years of rapid growth and high profits through innovative marketing, to the presidency of the book sectionalization, where profits were flat because of continued reliance on traditional marketing concepts.
Line to staff transfers are some other option. These are most effective when they let experienced managers to dribble what they accept learned and diffuse it across the company in the form of new standards, policies, or training programs. Consider how PPG used just such a transfer to advance its man resource practices effectually the concept of high-delivery work systems. In 1986, PPG constructed a new float-glass plant in Chehalis, Washington; it employed a radically new technology as well as 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 responsibility for work assignments, scheduling, problem solving and improvement, and peer review. After several years running the factory, the institute manager was promoted to director of man resources for the unabridged drinking glass grouping. Drawing on his experiences at Chehalis, he developed a training program geared toward first-level supervisors that taught the behaviors needed to manage employees in a participative, cocky-managing surround.
As the PPG example suggests, pedagogy and training programs are powerful tools for transferring knowledge. Only for maximum effectiveness, they must exist linked explicitly to implementation. All too often, trainers presume that new knowledge will be applied without taking physical steps to ensure that trainees actually follow through. Seldom do trainers provide opportunities for practice, and few programs consciously promote the awarding of their teachings later on employees accept returned to their jobs.
Xerox and GTE are exceptions. As noted before, when Xerox introduced problem-solving techniques to its employees in the 1980s, everyone, from the top to the bottom of the organization, was taught in modest departmental or divisional groups led by their immediate superior. After an introduction to concepts and techniques, each group applied what they learned to a real-life work problem. In a similar spirit, GTE's Quality: The Competitive Edge program was offered to teams of concern-unit presidents and the managers reporting to them. At the kickoff of the 3-day form, each team received a request from a company officer to fix a complete quality plan for their unit, based on the course concepts, inside 60 days. Discussion periods of ii to three hours were set aside during the program so that teams could begin working on their plans. After the teams submitted their reports, the company officers studied them, and so the teams implemented them. This GTE programme produced dramatic improvements in quality, including a recent semifinalist spot in the Baldrige Awards.
GTE proved knowledge is more likely to exist transferred effectively when the correct incentives are in identify.
The GTE example suggests another important guideline: knowledge is more likely to exist transferred effectively when the right incentives are in place. If employees know that their plans volition be evaluated and implemented—in other words, that their learning volition be practical—progress is far more likely. At near companies, the status quo is well entrenched; only if managers and employees encounter new ideas every bit being in their own best interest volition they accept them gracefully. AT&T has developed a creative arroyo that combines potent incentives with information sharing. Called the Chairman's Quality Accolade (CQA), information technology is an internal quality contest modeled on the Baldrige prize but with an important twist: awards are given not only for accented performance (using the same 1,000-point scoring organisation as Baldrige) simply likewise for improvements in scoring from the previous year. Gold, silvery, and bronze Comeback Awards are given to units that have improved their scores 200, 150, and 100 points, respectively. These awards provide the incentive for change. An accompanying Pockets of Excellence program simplifies knowledge transfer. Every year, it identifies every unit within the company that has scored at least sixty% 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 mensurate information technology, you can't manage information technology." This saying is as true of learning as 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 as proxies for greater manufacturing knowledge, and nigh early studies examined their impact on the costs of direct labor. Afterwards studies expanded the focus, looking at total manufacturing costs and the touch on of feel in other industries, including shipbuilding, oil refining, and consumer electronics. Typically, learning rates were in the eighty% to 85% range (meaning that with a doubling of cumulative product, costs vicious to eighty% 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. Drawing on the logic of learning curves, they argued that industries as a whole faced "feel curves," costs and prices that fell by predictable amounts as industries grew and their total product increased. With this ascertainment, consultants suggested, came an iron constabulary of competition. To enjoy the benefits of experience, companies would take to speedily increase their production alee of competitors to lower prices and gain market share.
Both learning and experience curves are still widely used, especially in the aerospace, defense, and electronics industries. Boeing, for instance, has established learning curves for every work station in its associates plant; they assist in monitoring productivity, determining piece of work flows and staffing levels, and setting prices and profit margins on new airplanes. Experience curves are common 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 single measure of output (cost or toll) and ignore learning that affects other competitive variables, like quality, delivery, or new production introductions. They propose only one possible learning driver (total product volumes) and ignore both the possibility of learning in mature industries, where output is apartment, and the possibility that learning might be driven past other sources, such as new technology or the claiming posed by competing products. Perchance most important, they tell the states little well-nigh the sources of learning or the levers of change.
Another measure has emerged in response to these concerns. Chosen the "half-life" curve, it was originally developed past Analog Devices, a leading semiconductor manufacturer, as a manner of comparing internal improvement rates. A half-life curve measures the time it takes to achieve a 50% comeback in a specified performance measure. When represented graphically, the operation measure (defect rates, on-time commitment, fourth dimension to market place) is plotted on the vertical centrality, using a logarithmic scale, and the fourth dimension scale (days, months, years) is plotted horizontally. Steeper slopes then stand for faster learning (come across the insert "The One-half-Life Bend" for an illustration).
The One-half-Life Curve Analog Devices has used half-life curves to compare the performance of its divisions. Here monthly data on customer service are graphed for seven divisions. Division C is the clear winner: even though it started with a loftier proportion of late deliveries, its rapid learning rate led eventually to the best absolute operation. Divisions D, E, and G have been far less successful, with piffling or no improvement in on-fourth dimension 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 improve must be learning faster than their peers. In the long run, their brusk learning cycles will translate into superior operation. The 50% target is a measure out of convenience; information technology was derived empirically from studies of successful improvement processes at a wide range of companies. Half-life curves are also flexible. Unlike learning and experience curves, they work on any output mensurate, and they are non confined to costs or prices. In addition, they are easy to operationalize, they provide a simple measuring stick, and they allow for ready comparison among groups.
Still even one-half-life curves accept an of import weakness: they focus solely on results. Some types of cognition take years to digest, with few visible changes in performance for long periods. Creating a full quality culture, for instance, or developing new approaches to production development are hard systemic changes. Because of their long gestation periods, one-half-life curves or any other measures focused solely on results are unlikely to capture any short-run learning that has occurred. A more comprehensive framework is needed to track progress.
Organizational learning can commonly exist traced through iii overlapping stages. The first step is cerebral. Members of the organization are exposed to new ideas, aggrandize their cognition, and begin to call back differently. The second step is behavioral. Employees begin to internalize new insights and change their beliefs. And the third footstep 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 cerebral and behavioral changes typically precede improvements in performance, a consummate learning audit must include all three.
Surveys, questionnaires, and interviews are useful for this purpose. At the cognitive level, they would focus on attitudes and depth of understanding. Have employees truly understood the significant of self-management and teamwork, or are the terms however unclear? At PPG, a team of human resources experts periodically audits every manufacturing plant, including extensive interviews with shop-flooring employees, to ensure that the concepts are well understood. Have new approaches to customer service been fully accepted? At its 1989 Worldwide Marketing Managers' Meeting, Ford presented participants with a series of hypothetical situations in which customer complaints were in conflict with curt-term dealer or company profit goals and asked how they would respond. Surveys like these are the first pace toward identifying changed attitudes and new means of thinking.
To assess behavioral changes, surveys and questionnaires must be supplemented by direct observation. Here the proof is in the doing, and there is no substitute for seeing employees in action. Domino's Pizza uses "mystery shoppers" to appraise managers' commitment to customer service at its individual stores; L.50. Bean places telephone orders with its own operators to assess service levels. Other companies invite outside consultants to visit, nourish meetings, discover employees in activeness, and and then report what they take learned. In many ways, this arroyo mirrors that of examiners for the Baldrige Honour, who brand several-mean solar day site visits to semifinalists to run across whether the companies' deeds match the words on their applications.
Finally, a comprehensive learning audit also measures operation. Half-life curves or other operation measures are essential for ensuring that cognitive and behavioral changes take actually produced results. Without them, companies would lack a rationale for investing in learning and the assurance that learning was serving the organization's ends.
First Steps
Learning organizations are not congenital overnight. Most successful examples are the products of carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments, and management processes that accept accrued slowly and steadily over time. Still, some changes tin exist made immediately. Whatever company that wishes to get a learning organization tin begin past taking a few simple steps.
The first stride is to foster an environment that is conducive to learning. In that location must exist time for reflection and analysis, to think about strategic plans, dissect customer needs, assess electric current piece of work systems, and invent new products. Learning is difficult when employees are harried or rushed; information technology tends to exist driven out by the pressures of the moment. But if top management explicitly frees up employees' fourth dimension for the purpose does learning occur with any frequency. That time volition be doubly productive if employees possess the skills to use it wisely. Training in brainstorming, problem solving, evaluating experiments, and other core learning skills is therefore essential.
Some other powerful lever is to open up up boundaries and stimulate the substitution of ideas. Boundaries inhibit the flow of information; they keep individuals and groups isolated and reinforce preconceptions. Opening upwardly boundaries, with conferences, meetings, and project teams, which either cross organizational levels or link the company and its customers and suppliers, ensures a fresh menstruum of ideas and the take chances to consider competing perspectives. Full general Electrical CEO Jack Welch considers this to be such a powerful stimulant of change that he has fabricated "boundarylessness" a cornerstone of the company's strategy for the 1990s.
One time managers have established a more than supportive, open environment, they can create learning forums. These are programs or events designed with explicit learning goals in mind, and they tin can take a variety of forms: strategic reviews, which examine the changing competitive environs and the company'due south product portfolio, engineering science, and market positioning; systems audits, which review the health of large, cross-functional processes and commitment systems; internal benchmarking reports, which identify and compare best-in-class activities within the arrangement; study missions, which are dispatched to leading organizations around the world to improve understand their performance and distinctive skills; and jamborees or symposiums, which bring together customers, suppliers, outside experts, or internal groups to share ideas and acquire from ane another. Each of these activities fosters learning past requiring employees to wrestle with new knowledge and consider its implications. Each tin also exist tailored to concern needs. A consumer appurtenances company, for example, might sponsor a study mission to Europe to acquire more near distribution methods inside the newly unified Common Market, while a high-applied science company might launch a systems audit to review its new production development process.
Together these efforts assist to eliminate barriers that impede learning and brainstorm to move learning higher on the organizational agenda. They likewise propose a subtle shift in focus, away from continuous improvement and toward a commitment to learning. Coupled with a better understanding of the "three Ms," the meaning, management, and measurement of learning, this shift provides a solid foundation for building learning organizations.
References
1. Peter G. Senge, The Fifth Subject field (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 1.
2. Ikujiro Nonaka, "The Knowledge-Creating Company," Harvard Concern Review, November–Dec 1991, p. 97.
3. Robert Howard, "The CEO as Organizational Architect: An Interview with Xerox's Paul Allaire," Harvard Business Review, September–October 1992, p. 106.
iv. Modesto A. Maidique and Billie Jo Zirger, "The New Product Learning Bicycle," Inquiry Policy, Vol. 14, No. 6 (1985), pp. 299, 309.
5. Frank R. Gulliver, "Post-Project Appraisals Pay," Harvard Business Review, March–Apr 1987, p. 128.
6. David Nadler, "Fifty-fifty Failures Tin can Be Productive," New York Times, April 23, 1989, Sec. 3, p. 3.
7. Robert C. Camp, Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance (Milwaukee: ASQC Quality Press, 1989), p. 12.
8. Roger Schank, with Peter Childers, The Creative Attitude (New York: Macmillan, 1988), p. 9.
9. Ramchandran Jaikumar and Roger Bohn, "The Evolution of Intelligent Systems for Industrial Use: A Conceptual Framework," Research on Technological Innovation, Management and Policy, Vol. 3 (1986), pp. 182–188.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 1993 consequence of Harvard Business Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization
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