What's the Buzz about Organizational Learning? 5

Taking charge of your 'learning' looks a pretty important aspect of avoiding 'gullibility'. This, in turn, means that learning becomes something a bit more different than sitting at a desk and being told what to know. Now this is scary!. An episode of 'gullibility' is a signal that you've encountered something that you have not been taught about. This might be the 'thing' itself, or something more profound about 'you' and the way you make sense of the world. So if you ask a question such as (i)'how do I stop my friends taking advantage of me?' or (ii)'how do I stop my competitors producing better products than me?' then why not stop and think what you are really asking.

If you are in place where you expect to be 'given the answer' then the answer to your question is very different from that expected by a person who is more 'self-directed' in their learning. e.g. q(i) if you are in a 'dualistic state' see Perry et al Then chances are you will be expecting to be 'told' by someone you regard as a higher authority what to do, such as "manage your time better and get better at saying NO", or "stop reacting to the guilt trips of others". If you take a more self directed approach, see the work of Jack Mezirow,B.S.Bloom,R.Gagne then answers to q(i) will be things like 'develop a more critical outlook', 'study the sense-making processes of indiviudals', 'get familiar with the communicative processes of generalization, distortion, and deletion'. No of course path two requires more effort of the individual.

Significantly however its requries us to become more explicitly aware and understanding of previously hidden/partially processes like 'learning' such that we achieve a meta-awareness. Gregory Bateson originally described this as the process of learning how to learn - or deutero learning.

so - how do I stop being gullible?, how does my organization learn? how do I stop my friends taking advantage of me? - a good place to begin is to learn how to learn.

What's the Buzz about Organizational Learning? 1

So imagine, you're hunkered down in your professional specialism, lawyer, policeman, SEO, marketing strategist, marketing executive, garage owner and any one else from a drop down box on an application form. You've had a bit more experience of co-workers, customers, suppliers, bosses and the like and you start pondering on why people sometimes don't buy your ideas, why the organization doesn't listen, when you tell them 'the baddies are coming' or some dork decides to erect a glass ceiling just above your head.

Guess what's happening... your becoming a social psychologist and a philosopher....aaarggghhh, OK maybe its not quite as bad as that, you're just becoming as Donald Schoncalls it a 'reflective practioner' (This is not some wierdo from a fetish website that wears tin foil btw)

You've started thinking about what makes people and organizations tick and...you've started coming up with some 'theories for success' you know like 'what you should do is', 'the best way to sort that out is' and so on. Now those of you listening in who have concerns about personal gullibility should stay tuned because the ideas and principles of organizational gullibility are pretty much the same.

If you have 'grown up' in a particular work specialism you're often shut away from ideas that could be useful to you, then like me, as someone who worked in sales and marketing, I'd never heard of organizational learning. That was, until I was introduced to it on a post grad business degree (the crowd roars), and now its an intergral (Wilber) aspect of my working life as an organization and management academic (people stand up and start to leave)

No... come back... I don't wear thick corduroy trousers and a tank top.

The plot sort of goes (here's the Hollywood pitch) - Marketing discovers HR and finds she is so nice compared to those sassy 'commercial' types, but after the first romantic meal Marketing finds out that HR has hidden sides to her character, and she's been having HRD treatment, and once had an OD, and then the dark secret - OL - yeah you discover, like her you've been an organizational learner all along (just didn't find the website)....major personal crisis that ends up in personal triumph and owning the world.

And so...we start to begin to think about where success comes from in an organisation. Tools & Techniques? Knowledge Management, Periphery Scanning, Efficient use of resources (including humans!) and the view emerges that is that its 'the people stupid!' and that what is really needed are Resourceful Humans.
Arie de Gues, Jeanne Meister, Pedler Burgoyne and Bodell all concur that people, their ability to learn are the fundamental source of organizational effectiveness.

The GIGO rule rules! Garbage in and Garbage out, and no more so than as one my business lit' heroes Bob Garat says from the top, as he puts it - 'The Fish Rots from the Head'






Organisational Learning Buzz 2
Organisational Learning Buzz 3
Organisational Learning 4

For a neat summary of key themes and issues see:
Organizational Learning and Competitive Advantage

Check out the following Resourceful Humans sites for more interesting & useful info

Reflections Coaching

Mcarthurs Rant

Is Ignorance Bliss? 9 - On Organisational Learning

Within discussions on organisational learning, reference is often made of the metaphor of the organisation as an organism or brain to convey the concept that it is alive, an open system, adaptive, and capable of learning – and presumably in the same, capable of being ill and dieing.

Taking this metaphor a little further it seems that there is the possibility for threats to the health of the organisation to exist without the organisation necessarily ‘feeling ill’ or exhibiting any obvious outward signs of trouble. In this way an analogy can be made with ‘raised blood pressure’ or hypertension’ which can only be detected by deliberate measuring and which in medical circles is known as the ‘silent killer’ for that very reason. I am suggesting therefore that organisational ignorance is analogous to ‘hypertension’, and whereas ‘unintentional ignorance’ might be more open to ‘treatment’ by organisational learning, ‘deliberate ignorance’ is far more resistant to such treatment.

Experience strongly suggests to me that ‘deliberate ignorance’ by individuals is a very real organisational phenomenon, difficult to confront, hard to pin down, counter-intuitive seemingly irrational, and capable of creating catastrophic consequences for organisations and individuals where it is present.

These ‘feelings’ and ‘experiences’ suggest this is an important (possibly un-discussable) area in which practising managers could increase their sensitivity in order to better understand how individual learning becomes or doesn’t become organisational learning.

Organisational Ignorance – the manifestation of individual character?

Why do we assume that 100% organisational health is everybody’s concern when they go to work? Certainly it is politically expedient and good personal income insurance to say so. Nevertheless I am confident that a ‘straw poll’ of conversations with friends and colleagues will reveal numerous examples where:

Informed advice is ignored
Solutions to problems aren’t sought because dealing with a problem creates ongoing work
Superiors spring un-helpful surprises on sub-ordinates
Self-esteem is undermined
Public humiliation is not uncommon
Credit for work done by others is stolen
There is unnecessary pedantic and irrelevant task setting
Information is withheld
Intentions are veiled

It seems difficult to argue that these behaviours are in any way conducive to organisational learning.

What might be going on here?


I also recommend that you visit workplace survival for some intersting views and opinions on the themes discussed in Is Ignorance Bliss?

Workplace Survival

Is Ignorance Bliss 8 - On Organisational Learning

Organisational Learning – improving unintentional ignorance?

Organisational learning and how organisations become learning organisations is a major theme in contemporary management literature (Senge, Argyris, Garrat, Revans et al). Learning organisations are characterised by the way in which they successfully change over the long-term in response to signals for change in the operating environment essentially through having free flowing information processes, good sense making skills, and an ability to learn how to solve problems so that they stay solved. Frequently the disappointing observation is made that there is little evidence to show that learning organisations actually exist despite the arguments that to become one is a ‘good thing’. You may agree that this applies to individuals too.

The prescriptive style of management literature (You must, Good organisations should, 25 ways to…) urge organisations onward with ‘this is how to do it’ schemes in the drive for 100% organisational fitness. Much of the writing and its tone suggests a ‘Utopian’ outlook. Despite the extensive publication of ‘how to do it’ management models, task and intervention lists and explanations of the underlying philosophy, becoming a learning organisation remains elusive and crucially individual learning doesn’t necessarily translate into organisational learning.

I also recommend that you visit Workplace Survival for some intersting views and opinions on the themes discussed in Is Ignorance Bliss?

Workplace Survival

Is Ignorance Bliss? 6 - On Organisational Learning

Driven partly by the belief that there is a single good answer to the question of ‘what does the market want?’ just waiting to be found by the person who is the most ‘in the know’, the whole subject of making sense of the business environment often becomes personalised and politicised. Discussions on the meaning of data and information become ‘turf wars’ where the political stakes for domination of ‘your’ point of view is extremely high. In this environment the skill of ignoring others becomes very polished and seems to occur as:

Being ignorant of ‘ignorance’ as an organisational phenomenon.

My experience in organisations shows that a significant number of people don’t have the business lexicon (jargon if you prefer), deep and intergrated education in business thinking and approaches, or the reflective skills to enable a productive assessment of management behaviour. Consequently people frequently rely on 'armchair theories', man on his bar stool explanations, and Springer-esque understandings of the process of becoming a succesful organisation.

Having the power to ignore.

A sense of indispensability, and a strong ego reinforced by recent successes encourages people to believe ‘they’ve learned enough’ and that the usefulness of their ‘model of explaining their world is enduring’. These echoes the observations of Bob Garrat in his book ‘Creating a Learning Organisation’ where recently promoted new directors feel that learning and training applies to everyone in the organisation but themselves.

In the gaming business this is especially noticeable in the area of games design where the explicit technical skill of computer programming is welded to the tacit behavioural skill of game creation. Attempts to learn about games design assumptions and their relationship to market information are frequently perceived as a serious threat to interfere with the ‘special knowledge’ of the designers rather than an attempt to build new perspectives and grow the organisations knowledge of the subject. These perceived threats are frequently and skilfully repulsed.

Organisational ignorance therefore seems to possess the dual properties of

deliberateness where a conscious choice is made by the individual to ignore input and suppress feedback, echoing Karl Deutsch’s remark that ‘power is the ability not to have to learn anything’ and the observation of Elias Cannetti in Crowds and Power that ‘freedom is not having to give an answer’.

and

unawareness which is explored in detail by Chris Argyris in ‘On Organisational Learning’ where he refers to those behaviours we unconsciously perform such as:

i) Defensive reasoning e.g. 'I could have done a better job if I'd had more resource'

ii) Predisposition to blame external rather than internal factors for failure e.g.'The suppliers let us down'

iii) A pre-occupation with symptomatic rather than root cause problem solving (single rather than double loop learning) e.g. sorry but the database software we have has a limited query facility. The solution to the problem lies outside the system in which the problem exists. (see post...There is effort...)

iv) Placing management subjects and themes ‘off limits’ so that they are not to be discussed, and making this tacit ‘decision’ in-discussable too!

These behaviours are largely unrecognised because they are so deeply hidden in the character of the individual they are, without considerable reflective effort, taken for granted.

Is Ignorance Bliss? 4-On Organisational Learning

So how has my world-view come into being? I believe it has been strongly influenced by:
A set of environmental characteristics
3 generic management experiences

The Environmental Characteristics
You might be surprised to find that the arcane business of creating, and selling pay to play ‘games’ can provide helpful insights that apply to many apparently unrelated management situations. Here (in bold) are 5 management generalisations that emerge that characterise the games and gaming industry.

Fast Moving. Uncertain, full of surprises, in which the faddish nature of the product means that pinning down and predicting consumer appeal is tricky. Consequently holding tightly onto past recipes for success is dangerous. Marketers push 'inductive' reasoning and act on the quest for more and more empiral data,(which leads to best seller syndrome, & competitive fixation) In contrast to designers who deploy more 'deductive' thinking, which 'scientific management' just doen't 'get' - Come on guys - what is THE formula for a good game! (sic)

Creative. Products can be understood as the physical manifestation of ‘mental models’ held by designers and more enlightened marketers concerning what they ‘imagine’ to be attractive to the market. They are not exclusively a reactive response to what the market says it wants. Relying exclusively upon the capture and understanding of the stated needs of customers doesn’t guarantee success.

Ambiguous. Gamers generally and Gamblers in particular are notoriously difficult to research. They are reluctant to be candid about their behaviour and needs. They may not even be able to explain their behaviour when asked. They are not rational (although they ‘rationalise’ their behaviour) and invent ‘plans’ / ‘schemes’ to make sense of unpredictable outcomes in an attempt to exert control over them. There is a difference between what people say they do and what they do.

Complex. There is an enormous and dynamic range of decisions, options and choices that takes place between the player and the electronic game or gambling. There is a constant ‘dance’ between the human and technical. Add this to the diversity of the player types, the diversity of places and social context where games can be played this means that management deals with ‘complex systems’. Yet the Bean Counters pursue a futile quest to 'predict', forecast, antipate and control, beause in their eyes quantity of facts is directly proportional to quality of understanding. This, of course, is dubious.

Typical. The dominant management thinking mode is ‘modernist’ or ‘rational’ where linear causal relationships are sought to explain why things happen or don’t happen the way they should. There is little awareness or consideration given to a world made up of as W.R. Ashby in An Introduction to Cybernetics describes:

“…complex systems that just do not allow the varying of only one factor at a time – they are so dynamic and interconnected that the alteration of one factor immediately acts as a course to evoke alternations in others, perhaps a great many others”

Management / design interventions that involve or require human interaction hardly ever occur in reality as neatly as the intervener expected.