The ability to 'learn in action' is a game changer

Going from "individual smart" to "collective smart" is probably one of the smartest things you can try to achieve as a leadership team. And to do that, you have to be willing to learn together.??

This month's BIASED BRAIN ask: How important is it for the senior leadership?team to learn from how they work together?

Reflecting on your meetings, revisiting previous decisions and strategic priorities, questioning your biases, your "truths" and your knowledge is quite simply vital for the soundness of your decisions and your ability to innovate.

1. Learning is a conscious act

Have you ever tried to learn something difficult? Like playing the violin, doing pullups or calculating probabilities?

Most of us have. And we have dedicated hours and hours to learn and then we mastered (mostly...) what we set out to learn. This process make sense for us when we try to learn something completely unrelated to our work. But asked to learn?from our work, setting aside time to derive the knowledge from our daily work, we tend to be a bit more reluctant.

Why? It might have to do with the fact that we "just do our job.", "It's just a meeting.",? Having to spend time discussing a meeting that has already taken place or a project that is already done & dusted is often not something we enjoy. And it's a shame. Because learning from how we work together, makes us better. It provides us with a break in which to focus, stop, breathe and think. It is quick, efficient and powerful and we don't do it enough.

This kind of?retrospective exercise should take place systematically for any leadership team willing to develop their full potential.

The excuses "We don't have time." Yes you do. You just don't see the value in prioritising it yet. "It's a waste of time." No, not if you do it right. "We don't need yet another thing to stuff into our already too full leadership meetings."?Yes, you do, because this will qualify your next meeting and save you countless hours of unproductive talk.

Ok, so how to do this in your regular leadership team meetings?

10-15 minutes on the agenda - last item. 10-15 minutes is enough. And when you get good at it, you can often do it even faster.

3 simple questions:

• One thing I take with me from today's meeting is...
• What did we do particularly well today??
• What could we do differently next time?

This approach requires that you have had a longer session in which you have decided on how you want to collaborate as a team, so that you can discuss and adjust in accordance with that.

“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice."?

Brian Herbert, House Harkonnen

2. What does it mean to 'learn in action'?

To 'learn in action' is quite simply the process of learning while doing something. That means that when in a workshop or meeting or during a production cycle you pause, reflect on what you're doing, and perhaps adjust your behaviour. It might not be smart to pause and reflect?during, but then we do it immediately after the meeting/workshop/production cycle etc. so that the actions are fresh in our minds.

At regular intervals, a leadership team should reflect on how to become more effective together, and then tune and adjust it's behaviour accordingly. You should do this no matter what kind of work you do, no matter what kind of team you are, but as a senior leadership team, you have an even stronger obligation to reflect and adjust your behaviour.

Want to learn??Be prepared to be wrong

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, Senior lecturer at MIT and Founder of the Society for Organizational Learning talks in this video how you have to be prepared to change your?mental model - be prepared to be wrong. And be?prepared to stop thinking about "individual smart" and start thinking "collective smart" instead.??

3. This month's article

From Harvard Buisness Review: The Surprising Power of Questions

"Asking questions is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards. But few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.

That’s a missed opportunity. The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners—a virtuous cycle."

“What we learn to do, we learn by doing.”?

Aristotle