Creating an influential learning organisation to navigate change

Challenge Your Thinking

Your organisation is a group of interacting, interdependent parts that form a complex whole. Much like Ern? Rubik's puzzle, our main task as business leaders is to manipulate the elements to create a coherent pattern that delivers value amid external and internal factors that keep scrambling the parts into chaos. 

In the coming months, we will endeavour to understand and influence each layer on a psychological level to build a learning organisation that is agile not only in its structures but also in its thinking. 

People learn; organisations, hierarchies, systems, policies or procedures do not! 

Mental Models

"Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. We are often not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behaviour” Peter Senge.

Human beings are meaning-making machines. We evolved this way over thousands of years to quickly view the world in terms of cause and effect. Having a massive spike of adrenaline and cortisol just by the site of a visiting serpent meant the difference between life and death.

The truth is that we don’t see reality but the meaning that we give to it. 

We constantly evaluate these models to the real world, and when there is disparity, our flight or fight circuits are activated. It makes perfect sense from a survival point of view. It is better to be safe than sorry when that rock you were sitting on suddenly starts to move in contradiction with your mental model. 

In today’s modern life, much of the conflict and mental anguish comes from the discrepancies between what’s real and what’s in our heads, especially when our fellow human beings are involved. Even worse, when others start confronting our mental model. 

How Are Mental Models Formed?

In a nutshell, through the human experience. As meaning-making machines, we build, reinforce, alter and break down our mental models through every single interaction with the world as well as with ourselves. 

Why Are Mental Models Important?

If we’re not aware of our mental models, we can end up making assumptions and reaching conclusions about ourselves, others and situations that are a million miles from the truth. For example, if we interpret an employee’s story through our mental models, we are likely to judge them or advise them. 

Laying our mental models aside is one of the most challenging aspects of building an influential learning culture. 

Putting our own beliefs aside means choosing to put a stop to our thoughts and opinions, start recognising our assumptions and prejudices and take responsibility for dismissing these when they arise.