Culture. Community. Memes. Knowledge.

Why building an organisational learning culture is hard.

Giles Hearn FLPI, CMO, LPI

Another day, another article on ‘building an organisational learning culture’.

Why is everyone so obsessed about this? And why is it so hard?

Let’s begin our journey down this rabbit-hole by looking at the actual meaning of culture. Summarising several Google/ChatGPT responses, we arrive at this definition:

“A culture is set of knowledge structures (systems, values, norms, attitudes and behaviours) that are shared by members of a social group and that are learned from previous generations”

OK great - but why is this so important to companies? Because, according to Josh Bersin, the “single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organisation’s learning culture.”

Let’s rephrase this for maximum effect: learning values and behaviours are the main forces driving business performance.

Wow. It’s no wonder that everyone wants to build a learning culture!

But what to do when one’s company doesn’t already have a clearly recognisable culture of learning? Where to even start?

We start, as always, with people.

For a culture to have life, it needs people to uphold and believe in its values. The Incas had a rich and varied culture whilst they were alive. But now their civilization has collapsed, their culture is merely a historical footnote.

In a similar way, if the employees of an organisation are uninvested in learning, it would be hard to see how an organisational culture of learning could be imposed upon the employees, or spontaneously arise from them.

Therefore, for an organisational learning culture to become normalised, there must first be a shared simpatico for learning. In other words, there must be active communities that value the purpose of learning and acquire the knowledge and practices to manifest that purpose. Only then, can a culture of learning exist.

Think of it this way: cultures are a set of practices; communities are a set of relationships; organisations are a set of communities. Cultures can exist without people; communities cannot.

So, we need understand more about how communities form, and why. And for that, we need to get our ‘people’ hat on.

How communities form, and why.

Communities form because humans, as social creatures, tend to work better in groups. As the saying goes, “a problem shared is a problem halved”.

When we work with colleagues who share an interest, concern, or aptitude for the subject at hand, results can be obtained that far outshine those achieved by a single person.

However, it’s na?ve to think we can simply create a community by throwing some like-minded people together, giving them a brief, a set of tools, and maybe a name.

Building communities is hard and maintaining them is even harder.

OK, what if we work with leadership to align communities to the organisation structure? What if we assign topics, leaders, and membership based on business unit, function, geography, client, market offering, or initiative? Surely that will work?

It may do – it may not. The problem is that successful communities require that their members engage and interact with each other for a purpose beyond their own individual self-interest. But this is not guaranteed. Why? Because people are individuals with their own identities and motivations.

Allegiances will shift. Values will change. Communication will fail. Dedication will falter.

It's all down to identity.

Identity

Within a community, one’s behaviours are guided by a sense of identity - what might be called a virtue ethic.

The feeling of belonging we get from a community is far more than just the pleasure of collaborating with a group of people. It’s the very canvas on which we paint ourselves as human beings.

Our identity – our concept of self – is a reflection of the communities in which we hold membership. Simply working at a company does not constitute one’s identity. No matter how passionately one believes in the vision/mission statement, strives for quality, and gives effort, one’s workplace identity is never going to override other senses of community, of identity. It’s hardly likely that an IBM identity would somehow obliterate an LGBTQ+ sexuality, a Bengali ethnicity, or a fondness for one's children.

In modern societies, organisations cannot be total institutions that mould their employees from birth – and thus will struggle to be unitary communities in themselves.

This is unfortunate because, according to the OC Tanner Global Culture Report, 65% of employees actually want to feel more connected at work.

So, let's instead think of the organisation not as a single community but as an amalgamation (an average, if you will) of all the various communities and micro-cultures within it. There may be common traits that percolate up from various groups but we should probably accept that a company can never really be a unified, purpose-led Gemeinschaft, no matter what leadership tells us.

OK, I give up. What’s the answer?

The answer is to think small.

The tools for ‘building’ a learning culture are tiny. Like the miniature scalpels and needles of the brain surgeon, they can be used to dissect and re-stitch people’s values on a microscopic scale.

We need miniscule changes that will organically radiate out to the wider organisation. In essence, we’re looking at memes.

No, I’m not talking about memes in the Internet sense (even though they can influence a sense of belonging, sense of community, and attitude toward a community) but rather as biologist and author, Richard Dawkins, described them in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene:?

“...units of cultural transmission, or units of imitation.”

In other words, people learn appropriate responses and adjust their behaviour by observing the behaviour of others.

Let’s look at a fictional example:

Alice watches a YouTube video that shows her how to quickly create pivot charts in Excel using AI. She signs up to the tool and, within an hour, is ploughing through work six times faster than before.

Bob is struggling with a similar task and notices Alice’s increased output. He asks her:

“How did you do that?” “What are you using there?” “Where can I find that?”

These questions are the genesis of the meme; a cultural element of behaviour passed from one individual to another by?imitation. And the behaviour here is knowledge acquisition; learning.

Research has shown that when people observe someone’s behaviour, they spontaneously infer the traits and situations that caused the target person’s behaviour.

In our example, when Bob sees Alice solving this problem, he assumes she must be ‘clever’ and experiences a strong social desire to emulate her.

Soon, James, Catherine, and Navi are all getting involved with the Excel/AI project, adding new ideas, setting standards. Without even trying, a community is spontaneously evolving around the shared purpose, driving the group forward. As more people interact with the group, the meme of learning grows and gradually becomes more stable.

If you look around your organisation, you’ll find these communities already active; groups of people that already have a combined consciousness united in the joint purpose of learning. We want these communities, and their memes, to multiply together to form a larger organisational meme.

This D.Phil thesis from the University of Western Australia entitled, "Memes and organisational culture: What is the relationship?", summarises the situation eloquently:

Organisations are groups of communities. As such, all organisations have both a culture... and a meme – a stable and recognisable group consciousness or corporate being. The meme gathers stability and strength as more people align their consciousness with the systems, structures and behavioural norms of the group. As the meme gathers strength, so do the feelings of belonging, of stability, of security within, of being part of something bigger. With this growth, the culture is clearer, and norms are easily recognised.

Memes and organisational culture are inextricably linked. Understanding organisational learning culture without understanding the learning meme is like trying to understand the sheep without taking note of the shepherd.

For the future of organisational development and organisational change, understanding the inner workings of memes will bring a tremendous boost to the ability to work with organisational culture.

Just one more thing…

We’ve established that culture and community are closely linked. We’ve understood that people are the key elements in any community, and that they must be invested in and motivated by a common purpose. And we’ve realised that, although cultural change can be slow, it is not unmoveable. Like the gentle but persistent nudging of an ocean liner by a smaller tug boat, the culture can - and will - be changed by the smallest elements (memes).

Now, we need to briefly mention architecture. Not the building you work or live in but the “cognitive architecture” that exists within your organisation.

Communities are the knowledge engines that power the workplace. If knowledge output is not shared or utilised or progressed, then the engine will stall and the company will die.

It is widely agreed that the “cognitive architecture” of knowledge within the company (the way knowledge is produced, stored, exchanged, transmitted, retrieved) strongly influences the process of organisational learning, and in turn the innovative process.

As Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) emphasised, the process of knowledge creation of within organisations relies on two main elements:

a)????The assumption that human knowledge is created and expanded through social interaction

b)????The existence of knowledge-creating entities (individual, group, organisational and inter-organisational)

Put simply, communities are important. And the organisation that supports creative individuals and provides contexts for them to create knowledge, can expect to be rewarded by an amplification of this knowledge-creation “meme” throughout the company.

In Summary

Phew!

It would seem there's quite a lot to think about when it comes to organisational learning culture, and we've really only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s summarise with a paragraph:

An organisational learning culture is a collection of communities who are motivated to improve their performance through a combination of watching and emulating others, collaboratively solving problems, enjoying unfettered access to knowledge and tools, and being part of a collective consciousness.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What’s your experience of building a learning culture or a community? What have you found that works?

Let us know in the comments!

That's all for now.

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