#29 Learning
There’s no truer truism than the phrase that describes humans as “life-long learners”. Whether we wish to agree with, ignore or detest that phrase, it’s a fact: We’re all life-long learners.
We’re learning from our first breath to our last.
We’re learning how to breath, how to interpret what we see, how to talk, how to read, how to ride a bike, how to handle delicate situations, how to act, how not to act, how to tie shoe laces, how to tie dress tie knots, how to knit, how to pick ourselves up off the ground (literally but also figuratively), how to use a phone, how to fly a kite, how to flirt, how to break-up, how to be an adult, how to interact with colleagues, how to assess risk, how to make sense of life events and life as a whole and how to come to terms with impermanence.
Let’s face it, we’re basically sponges with legs.
I’ve been reflecting on various arenas of learning over recent years, and partition those reflections into three groupings:
Personal Learning
Everything starts with self. That’s you! That’s the bedrock (sand or lava) that everything else builds from. In our formative years, our personal learning, development and growth comes from many channels in addition to our all-important school education.
We learn the mechanics of life from our parents, family, friends and teachers. We also learn the nuances of life (for better or worse) from these role models too.
We learn vital life lessons while attending those (sometimes poisoned) ivy-league institutions that many of you will have attended, some, more regularly than you may wish. ?These are the School of Life or the School of Hard Knocks.
Reading, interacting, writing, listening, socialising and other valuable pass-times also teach us invaluable things about ourselves and the world around us.
These learning experiences all contribute to our personal development. Developing us as humans, lifting our level of personal consciousness, raising our personal maturity.
As with any learning opportunity, regardless of age, the secret sauce is in being open to learning from these experiences.
In my experience, it’s the toughest of times in which you stand to learn the most. That’s where your “growth edge” is, as someone once described it to me. But it’s also the hardest time to go looking for learnings, and it requires an optimism and a growth mindset at a time you’re most likely to be running on empty.
Australian Russ Harris talks about this in one of his final chapters of The Reality Slap: How to survive and thrive when life hits hard. He notes that while we have plenty of opportunities to learn and grow as humans throughout our lives, when big stuff hits the fan, the key is to (1) acknowledge the pain, (2) be kind to ourselves and (3) do what we can to improve the situation. Only once you’ve taken care of these aspects of your emotional well-being, he suggests you may be ready to go looking for those vital learnings by asking questions such as:
Even better than this advice on the extraction of learnings from life events, I love the advice and visionary future painted in The School of Life's (the actual institution, not the metaphorical one) advice in ‘Stay or Leave’ on relationship break-ups:
The true tragedy of relationships is not that they go wrong, but that we learn so little from them when they do. In a better future society, ending relationships should be rendered simple at the practical level; marriages should be concluded without any of the current costs and bureaucratic delays. But only on one condition: that both parties would be able to show an advanced understanding of why their relationship had failed; what it was about them individually and as a couple that made their union so hard. One would need to pass an exit exam - and for a very simple and humane reason: that only when two people, who will presumably soon be dating again, have grasped why they might be difficult for someone else emotionally will the rest of the public be adequately protected from the huge risks posed by ongoing self-ignorance. The exit exam would not be a punitive measure, just a basic instrument of public health.
I’ve found curiosity, reading, reflection, conversation, friendships and ultimately life experience to be the most valuable source of personal development opportunities.
So, how does this differ from professional development opportunities?
Professional Learning
Where personal development develops an individual by lifting their level of personal consciousness and maturity, professional development takes that life-long learning and growing human and builds atop their professional competences and maturity.
That is, how the individual operates, performs, interacts and responds in a professional context. With colleagues, bosses, juniors and customers.
So once again, in this learning context, there are mechanics (professional behaviour, communication, process, team contribution, following instructions, understanding vision and strategy, and aligning to organisational values as examples).
In my experience, it’s the toughest of professional times in which you stand to learn the most. Again, that’s where your “growth edge” is. You won’t believe it at the time as your grind your way through those challenges, but you’ll definitely reflect on that tough time in a year, 5 years or 20 years’ time, and recognise the growth spurt you had.
My fifth role was a significant step up and into an organisational culture and values that were poorly aligned with mine. I didn’t realise it at the time. I ground my way through the first 6 months and, for the first time ever, found myself disengaged (in a Staff Engagement sense). But with some wise counsel, I stuck around for another 8 months before leaving that experience behind. And now I can safely say that growth edge produced a fantastic lift in professional maturity for me.
The only greater teacher than time in the saddle is mistakes. And the Mistakes Teacher can be better than the best school teacher you ever had, so long as you’re open to learning from your mistakes. This requires you to be alive to feedback, willing to reflect on your own performance, and prepared to admit (to yourself and others) that you could have done something different or better.
Of course, as well as time and mistakes, there’s also the investment your employer makes in your technical and transferable skills. These professional learning opportunities are invaluable and should be seized and valued at every chance.
Some employers have a 2.5% (of budget) commitment to professional learning and development (L&D), others commit 5 or 10 days a year to training. My advice is to actively manage your professional L&D needs aligned to your career aspirations and development plan, and if you’re unsure what that looks like, work closely with your manager and a trusted external mentor to plot that path.
Be mindful of the value of the Tshaped professional in any professional development you pursue. And be alert to your biases and the stories you tell yourself about what you should or shouldn’t do, and what you do well and what you don’t do well. Talk to that mentor and your trusted colleagues to discover your personal and professional blind-spots.
In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Suroweicki observes that humans are social beings and “we want to learn from each other and learning is a social process”. This is certainly the case with the on-the-job training, guidance and coaching I’ve grown from over my years of work-place learning experiences. Many more of those learning experiences have been outside the classroom and in the meeting room or boardroom.
I’ve also found curiosity, reading, reflection, conversation, colleagues and ultimately life experience to be the most valuable source of professional development opportunities.
By now you’ve probably spotted a trend, but how do personal and professional learning differ from organisational learning opportunities?
Organisational Learning
Where personal and professional L&D relates to an individual’s level of personal consciousness and maturity, organisational learning and development is much more complex.
As can be seen in this article introductory image, the complexities of an individual get multiplied and amplified by the teams, the business units, the business groups, the divisions and their interactions.
We all know that the family dynamics of a two-parent, two-child family are much less complicated than a two-parent, four-child family, for example. The same complications come into play with the dynamics of an organisation.
Organisational learning is about an opportunity to grow the organisation’s competences and maturity. That is, how the organisation operates, performs, interacts, learns, grows, evolves and responds as an entity. Between individuals, between teams, between business areas and around the executive table. Everywhere!
The leadership, the employees, the culture, the vision all have an influence on this.
Here, time in the saddle (i.e. the age of the organisation) can be a risk to cementing and amplifying poor practices, under-performing culture and directionless mediocrity.
The real gold for an organisation is in their mistakes, but you guessed it, so long as the culture allows its people and processes to be open to learning from their mistakes.
Identifying mistakes, or being open to feedback from employees that there are mistakes is a good start. Facing up to them in full is vital, even when they are embarrassing or damaging mistakes. Seeking to address those mistakes in a transparent way with a growth mindset is a critical.
Smart organisations learn from mistakes not just through a review and report with recommendations on steps to fix the mistake or change processes to avoid a repeat.
Organisations that truly want to lift their level of collective consciousness, to enhance and evolve their organisation’s maturity, to become a more resilient, attractive and sustainable organisation (and surely that’s what most organisations want), will exercise double-loop learning.
It’s a concept I was aware of but only recently delved deeper into after a book recommendation titled Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning by Chris Argyris.?
While not (yet) an expert, I am now definitely a deep believer in the value of Double-loop Learning, having operated (successfully, I'd like to think), in large, a single-loop mindset in the past.
Double-loop learning is a concept in organisational development that aims to significantly improve an organisation's ability to current, learn, adapt, innovate, and grow. Unlike single-loop learning, which involves implementing changes that fix errors and improve processes based on immediate analysis and feedback, double-loop learning goes deeper when looking into an error, issue, problem or flaming platform.
Double-loop learning requires that the underlying assumptions, policies, and objectives that frame and implicitly shape and govern an organisation's practices are challenged.
Toyota’s response to its quality crisis in the early 2000s is the gold standard example of Double-loop learning in practice. Instead of merely addressing the immediate quality issues, Toyota examined and reformed its underlying production and quality assurance philosophies. This intervention led to profound changes in their approach to manufacturing and quality control, embedding a culture of continuous improvement and learning.
You’ve probably heard of the Five Whys technique to discover the cause-and-effect aspects of a problem. No surprises that this also emerged from Toyota, but perhaps surprising that was in the '30s. Yup, it’s coming up to its 100 year birthday!
There’s plenty more on Organisational Learning. It's surely one of the more popular non-fiction topics, right after Leadership and Change. How ironic, then, that it's change programmes that generate the best double-loop learning opportunities, and it's leaders who stand to benefit most from this technique.
The smart leaders will already be practicing it and ensuring their leadership team understand its value.
Discover the double-loop and learn so much more!
Technology, Data & People Leader
7 个月This...