The case for continuous learning

LinkedIn asked me to participate in a collaborative article co-created by a network of experts. The specific question to me was on how to create a culture of digital learning and transformation, as not a one-time event, but an ongoing process that requires continuous action?

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Let us start with 'everything that is not analog is digital'.

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It is important to reiterate this to understand how pervasive digital is and can be in an organization. It affects everything from optimizing the smallest supply chain warehouse to speeding up the destiny-altering innovation pipeline. In such pervasiveness, how can digital strategies promote learning and transformation?

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There are three simple rules for success -

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1.?Continual experimentation - ensuring that enough new things are being tried continuously within each department with clear success factors. Digital rigidity is the sure sign of imminent decay and death.

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2.?Continual codification - ensuring that the learning from each experiment, whether it be a failure, a success or anything partial in between, is codified for the future. Repeating a digital failure without any learned improvements is sacrilegious.

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3.?Continual sharing - ensuring that the experiments and their outcomes are shared at both an intra and an inter functional / team level. The best ideas of the future will be at the intersection of red and blue ocean, when functions and disciplines intermingle and learn of reach other. Digital ideation gets magnified when outputs of one experiment inspires the creation of another.

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In sum, any digital strategy must include this positive virtuous cycle of experimentation, codification and sharing to ensure that it creates a culture of learning and transformation.

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To use an analogy, the digital strategy of the organization needs to embrace the intuitive beauty of a wild tropical jungle as opposed to the stultified elegance of an English manicured garden. Every weed, every shrub, and every tree, indeed every living organism in the jungle plays a role in the overall growth of the jungle. To the outsider, it may look unkempt. But those who reside in the jungle know the value of every organism within it.

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On this day of Ganesha, may a thousand new experiments bloom every day.