Enabling Business Agility through Continuous Learning

“The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.”

―?Jacob Bronowski,?The Ascent of Man

Srinivas leads Healthcare and Life sciences business unit at technology services firm. His unit has 5000+ employees and revenue of approx. US$ 300 M. Couple of months back, he spent a week-end at one of the leading conference related to ‘Digital Health’. He got quite excited about the opportunities at the cusp of advancement in the health-care research and digital technologies. After returning from conference when he debriefed his team about the opportunities, he got timid response. His team-members are swamped with operational challenges and mostly relying on what they have learned in distant past. During his skip level interactions with high potential team-members, he heard similar concern about ‘not having adequate time’ for learning.

Susan is Learning and Development Head of a mid-market enterprise. During pandemic, she has invested significantly on the on-line learning content platform. She got the courses curated around the learning needs and aspirations of learner’s persona. During the mid-year review she observed that after the initial euphoria about availability of courses from leading university and ‘on the move learning’ opportunities, only 58% employees have enrolled on the platform and course completion rate less than 40%.

Sri Lakshmi is an Engineering Manager in a start-up. She leads team of 50+ members responsible for developing and maintaining the SaaS platform for hospital management. Her Agile Coach has brought to her attention about ineffective ‘retrospectives’. Though the team-members participate in the inspect and adapt events, the issues are repetitive across iterations. Teams are slow in adopting newer ways of working. In the moment of crisis, they slip back to the practices that they were comfortable with.

Across the organizations, one sees a constant struggle about spending effort for learning and growth across majority of the roles. According to L&D professionals – ‘getting managers to make learning a priority for their teams’ and ‘increasing employee engagement in learning’ are the key challenges faced by the organization. Hence, creating ‘continuous learning culture’ becomes one of the major imperatives for the organizations. [2]

One may find answers to these challenges in Peter Senge’s classic first published in 1992 – ‘The Fifth Discipline – The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization’. Peter defined the learning organization as the organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results, they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. [1]

?Peter advocated four disciplines – ‘personal mastery’, ‘mental models’, ‘shared vision’ and ‘team learning’. He recommended that power of these individual discipline can be leveraged when they are integrated with fifth discipline called ‘systems thinking’. These disciplines are focused on creating the organization where people continue to bring their best driven by the purpose of life and inspiration drawn from the environment.

Personal mastery –

Business leaders need to enable / create an environment for fostering aspiration for learning. It’s about individual and group’s realization for learning, experimenting, adopting and mastering the skills needed for today’s as well as tomorrow’s needs and aspirations. Business leaders need to provide guiding philosophy, resources, infrastructure and time for team-members to learn and grow.

-???????Create aspiration among individuals to learn individually / as smally group, every week.

-???????Provide at least 1-1.5 hrs per fortnight for group learning.

-???????Check with team members about their development goals for quarter and monthly mile-stones

-???????Ask team members to share six monthly / yearly development plan and monitor the progress on monthly basis

Mental Model –

“Mental Models” are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take actions. Mental models shapes perception and thus interpretation of reality. Business leaders have created team structures primarily for stability and cost optimization. They need to challenge themselves and explore the structure for speed and innovation. Leaders should –

-???????Make own reasoning explicit with data

-???????Encourage others to share their feedback about her / his decisions

-???????Encourage others to provide different views based on the data and assumptions

Shared Vision –

Shares vision answers the question – ‘what do we want to create’? It’s built on the foundation of personal vision. A shared vision reflects people’s own personal vision; hence many people truly commit to the same. It’s vital to the learning organization because it provides focus and energy for learning.

Sometimes it’s necessary to paint ‘negative vision’ to drive the point home. It asks the question – “what do we want avoid?” e.g., “anti-war”, “anti-smoking”, “anti-drugs”, etc.

?

Team Learning –

Team learning is about thinking and working collectively to achieve set objectives and resolve impediments. Most of us have been part of a team at some point where group of people functioned together extraordinary way – where people trusted one another, who complemented each other’s strength and compensated for each other’s limitation, and who has common goals that were larger than individual goals. It gets created from periodic events to reflect collectively.?Leaders need to create capacity for reflective conversation. The discipline of team learning involved mastering the practice of dialogue and discussion. Team learning requires regular practice.

-???????Plan time for fortnightly ‘retrospective’ as team

-???????Performance ‘inspect and adapt’ routine at the end of mile-stone or program increment.

-???????Encourage team to ask the questions – what happened and what did you understand

Systems Thinking –

It’s about building intrinsic sense of connection to see the big picture. Taking holistic approach to learning, problem solving, and solution development. Systems thinking binds all other disciplines to create the learning organization. Personal mastery fosters continuous motivation to continually learn how our actions affect the world. Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings. Shared vision fosters commitment to long term. Team learning develops the skills of group of people to look for the larger picture that lies beyond individual perspectives.

In order to enable Systems Thinking, leaders should –

-???????Share picture of operational value stream cutting across organization boundaries

-???????Help identify the leverage / bottlenecks for break-through innovation

-???????Encourage team to identify the root causes of key challenges and avoid symptomatic fixes

Business leaders are constantly faced with paradoxes – revenue vs profitability, growth vs stability, quality vs innovation, cycle-time vs cost, speed vs productivity, etc. These conflicts are feasible to resolve with the learning organization. There is no ‘outside’ here.

“… People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in the school, gold stars and on up through the university. On the jobs, people, teams, divisions are ranked – reward for the one at the top and punishment at the bottom…”

– W. Edward Deming

Reference –

[1] – Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Penguin Random House LLC, 2006.

[2] - https://www.scaledagileframework.com/continuous-learning-culture/

Copyright acknowledged – ? ScaledAgile Inc. ? Penguine Random House LLC

Views expressed are personal