Learning to learn

Just come across an old article by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn on the TrainingZone website, challenging L&D practitioners to check whether their organisation is really learning, or just has a fixation on training. Taking an "out-of-frame" viewpoint, they encourage looking across the whole organisation to search for learning and growth rather than focusing on the training department as the starting point - trying to look at the whole organisational system from the outside.

Where does real learning happen in the organisation ... in the training room or in the workplace - you probably know the real answer to that. And how does the organisation facilitate this learning - where are the encouragements to network outside the department, where are the means to quickly find corporate knowledge, where are the systems to record and re-use learnings? There are web 2.0 solutions for this, that the article seems to recommend, but there are older means of encouraging learning without focusing on the technology.  The culture of the organisation is the key to inspiring (or disabling) learning ... does your organisation have a learning disability (as Senge described the problem) or does it truly empower individuals to experiment, challenge norms, fail, learn from the failures and grow from the successes?

The challenge to L&D now seems to go beyond training, into helping your workers learn how to learn. Teach them to fish instead of spoon-feeding them fish ... to generate the new learning organisation.

Henley KM conference day 2 (afternoon)

Afternoon workshop using the Henley faculty model for learning relationships - how to improve learning in particular relationship situations? This followed on from yesterday's introduction to the subject. Proposed behaviours that might be useful in each situation were:
- leader-follower 1-way learning - focusing on a coaching style, building confidence, creating the environment of openness, role modelling
- leader-follower - 2-way learning - focusing on building trust
- peer-peer - 1-way learning- creating comfort in the situation, bringing clarity of purpose and benefit (to both), expanding the network to include others who could benefit
- peer-peer - 2-way learning - making the time for important tasks (knowledge sharing and learning when constantly under pressure from the urgent), cross-selling their ideas, documenting the learnings, the process and sharing, recognising that competitiveness exists and dealing with this, encouraging learning once delivery/project has completed

Helen Gordon presented a case for collaboration, using the Royal Pharmaceutical Society as a case study. The context of the NHS (change programmes and complexity) set the constraints, and identifying the required (useful) behaviours scoped the opportunity. Taking a people-centred view of knowledge management, Helen focused on building a knowledge exchange through making connections, linking up specialist groups, encouraging knowledge sharing (where this was possible in a competitive environment) and focusing on what's possible.

Henley KM conference day 2 (morning)

Mike Young on leading learning in people, teams, nations ... and self by taking the theoretical (know-that) into the practical (know-how). Described the vicious organisational drama triangle (where the leader takes responsibility for problem solving) vs the virtuous triangle that can be developed (leader coaches the problem owner to develop capability in problem solving). This approach is developmental (bringing forth rather than push) linked to coaching competence, and presented the idea that McGreror's theory X is the soft version - the way we teach (tell) children rather than the hard task of leading adults through learning. Also showed how Soft Systems techniques help embed the learning and change - focusing on the person in the situation rather than on the consultant/change manager.

John Borgoyne poured into the spiritual side of leadership - the search for meaning and spiro-culture as the (current) ultimate step in the progression from agrarian to manufacturing to knowledge to ... some future economy. On the way he questioned the current focus on leadership, and asked if we are moving back to management science ... a focus on the numbers to re-balance the previous decade's loss of control with guiding missions and visions lacking direct control.

Lee Griffin described knowledge leadership during change - introducing a culture of knowledge management during a big challenging change process - a merger of conflicting cultures. The process included an honest self-assessment of capability and putting in place the basics for knowledge sharing - wikis, IM and collaboration tools supported by a drive to share existing knowledge and capture knowledge about what the business does well.

Day 1 (afternoon) at Henley KM conference

Chris Collison (@chris_collison) led a session on engaging leaders in KM - capturing knowledge through stories using anecdote circles. Four stories of KM development were delivered and key points highlighted by individuals, with these summarised by the group into the key learning points - a shareable knowledge product. See my mind map on Chris's twitter feed ...

Members of the Henley Business School Leadership faculty (Jane McKenzie, Bernd Vogel and Claire Collins) presented research findings on accelerating organisational learning. This work proposed a 2x2 grid to map relationships in informal learning situations, based on two axes - one-way knowledge sharing (push) vs two-way knowledge co-creation and peer-to-peer learning vs a relationship with a separation in formal authority. The research (perhaps unsurprisingly) highlighted that learning in these situations is generally focused down the organisation - where there is a difference in formal authority, learning tends to be focused solely on the subordinate (unless the subordinate is highly specialised or the pair have had a long term relationship). The research proposed methods to break this barrier and accelerate organisational learning (in both directions):
- the leader generating trust more quickly
- making the leader more available and
- encouraging (supporting) the subordinate to challenge upwards.
These behaviours can move the organisation from first order learning (problem solving) to second order (challenging the current thinking, questioning the rules, living with the discomfort of uncertainty).

David Archer finished the day talking about collaborative leadership - delivering results across boundaries. Humans seem to have evolved the skills to collaborate (inside the tribe/organisation) but compete (outside). The increasingly interconnected world now requires the skill to collaborate outside the organisation,, and negotiate the boundaries of "inside" and "outside", paying particular attention to the risk at boundaries. With examples from rail, oil and gas, he highlighted the need to manage the culture and behaviours within the relationships ... not just the policies and contracts. A model of collaborative leadership was based on the pillars of governance (least), operations and behaviours (most).

Day 1 (morning) at Henley KM conference

Very interesting set of talks on the first day of the Henley Knowledge Management conference - the first time I have attended this event.

Jacqueline Gallinetti (Plan International) described creating a knowledge sharing culture in a federated global NGO. Very much a practitioner's guide, she described attempts to start small and pilot, which created ripples of change but were not successful until there was support from the top. THe culture change started with a new business goal and commitment to KM linked to this goal. They introduced research initiatives into KM and local initiatives, and put in place a programme structure to grow these. This developed a strategy, pilots and helped elaborate the full requirements for their organisation.

Moving from strategy to reality (making it real) involved formal/structural parts (document sharing processes, an IM strategy, knowledge & information architecture, an academy, intranet upgrade) and importantly the infromal parts (recognising what already existed, rewarding & modelling behaviours, supporting local initiatives, learning circles). The support from the top was demonstrated by making KM a management issue, including performance management competences, reporting on KM metrics and putting resources into the knwoledge architecture. An inspiring story to start, with much work still to do.

Arthur Shelley (@Metaphorage) disucssed "knowledge flow" - moving beyond knowing what to do ... into action to do it. He emphasized starting with the value of KM (and describing the behaviours but without mentioning the terminology of KM) ... then the people, process and finally the tools (the opposite way to how it's normally considered, maybe). Starting from the value, working with the business goals ... the knowledge flow can generate the superior performance required by executives ... a virtuous circle. But making the change requires coaching leaders in new behaviours, developing a style of letting go ... KM and control don't play well together!

Karl-Erik Sveiby challenged the ubiquity of the innovation paradigm ... highlighting how radical innovation can lead to temporary incompetence across markets. Using the example of the banking crisis, and the financial failures from 1987-2007, his research showed a period of "temporary" incompetence that lasted several decades as the financial sector came to terms with the consequences of technology developed in the 70's. The dominant belief systems within the domain/system drive sets of behaviours that deny the existence of data that doesn't support the accepted model ... leading to eventual failure. There was subsequent discussion about the unintended consequences of the Internet revolution ... what long term impacts will we feel, and what temporary incompetence are we/markets experiencing during the current experiment.

Systemic AND Systematic change - working together

Looking at systems views of managing change today, I strayed into a discussion on systemic vs systematic change which links strongly to my previous observations on Leandro Herrero’s work. I had struggled with the contrasting of systemic and systematic as opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps as a non-overlapping dichotomy, particularly when authors (like Ison [1]) decry the systematic, project-based view of managing change. Although this has its limitations, particularly when driven by targets, it can deliver successful change in well-defined situations. We use projects to successfully design and build aeroplanes that do not fall from the sky (at least not often), despite the thousands of components that need to operate together.

Helen Wilding asked whether there could be a theory of systemic change (based on learning) versus systematic change (based on optimising). However, she highlighted one of Checkland’s papers [2] that gave a different view on this. Contrasting hard (systematic) and soft (systemic) systems approaches, he made the assertion that the hard systems approach is a subset of soft systems. When systems are (relatively) simple, the soft systems approach can be condensed to a simpler target-driven hard systems approach, which can be successfully achieved with a systematic project.

So am I suggesting that building a plane is simple! Not really, but I am suggesting that it is complicated rather than complex. The complexity occurs when a system has emergent behaviour, that could not have been predicted from its component parts. And emergence particularly arises from including people within the system.

Checkland and Herrero both seem to support the idea that systemic and systematic is not an either/or question for managing complex change situations – both are required as a combination of soft and hard systems approaches.


[1] Ison, R., 2010, Systems Practice: how to act in a climate-change world, Springer Publications, London, 224-229.

[2] Checkland, P., 1985, "From Optimizing to Learning: A Development of Systems Thinking for the 1990s.", The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 36(9), 757–767.

Organisations and the laws of thermodynamics

In  Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Pascale starts to describe organisations as complex adaptive systems, rather than using the more traditional functional forms.  It's interesting that complext adaptive systems have four properties:

• composed of many agents acting in parallel
• continuously shuffling the building blocks
• subject to the second law of thermodynamics, exhibiting entropy and winding down
• has the capacity for pattern recognition

It's the third property that fascinates me - as this seems the significant step up from traditional analysis of organisational forms and strategy.  Alfred Marshall defined the maths that describe economics as a science to be compared with physics.  This used fundamentally first law principles, and worked as a theory in periods of slow market change.  However, since the technologically revolutions of the last 20th century, the first law principles seem to fall down regularly.

Enter Pascale and the era of complex adaptive systems.  The organisation and the market cannot be controlled or predicted purely by considering energy - if we invest more in X, we can defeat competitive spending in Y.  The equation becomes more complex, with the evolution of unexpected outomes and the time-based nature of the second law - the impact of energy recedes over time as entropy increases.

I wonder if there is some future business analogy to the 3rd law?

Or perhaps we have already seen it - complex adaptive systems are at risk when in equilibrium - a precursor to death.  Perhaps the regular death of major companies is an exhibition of equilibrium at absolute zero - energy exhange with the environment has declined to zero as the processes ossify and the ability to change is reduced to zero.

Post industrial scarcity and Natural Capitalism

I've been reading a Harvard Business Review article on Natural Capitalism (Lovins et al 1999), and just discovered this is also a book. The article highlights numerous ideas for a greener business environment - re-glazing that pays back cost and energy output inside two years, penny-pinching on wiring that drives up lifetime costs and energy output and innovative services/leases that can change the economic question from initial investment appraisal to total cost of ownership savings.

But the really interesting comment that struck me towards the end was "most businesses are behaving as if people were scarce and nature abundant - the conditions that fueled the first Industrial Revolution". But today's conditions are reversed - people are abundant and natural resources are becoming scarce. That's quite a philosophical challenge to the accepted business strategy norms. How does off-shoring continue to make sense with this philosophy - given the abundance of people here and the increased energy requirements of moving manufacturing overseas (and transporting finished goods back).

The (current) normal business response to a financial challenge/crisis is to cut costs - normally headcount costs and particularly in the "support functions". But if this reduces the amount of maintenance (see BP's record or New York city's bridge maintenance deferral problem), the ultimate cost (in both natural resources and financial capital) can exceed the initial savings. Lovins et al called for a broader measure of business performance - measuring and effectively using human and natural capital as well as financial capital. At least one company has taken this forward seriously - Novo Nordisk in reporting on their triple bottom line.

However, even this triple bottom line reporting is missing the intangible nature of novel ideas. It is said that "creativity, knowledge, innovation and learning now add value far more than land, labour or capital" (OU, p15). Perhaps a quadruple bottom line is needed for the learning organisation.

Change Management: toolkits for change or Viral Change

The standard model for change management seems to be (1) decide on the change, engaging a few people if you have to, (2) create the project/programme plan, (3) set out the vision and communicate it, (4) tell people what you want them to do differently and (5) run the project ... reinforcing the message in the hope that people will change.  There are numerous change toolkits available on the web to support this methodology.  But, with continuing reports of 70% failure rate of change initiatives, isn't it time for a change in managing change?

Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful change

I've recently been reading Viral Change (by Leandro Herrero). This puts the case for easing change into an organisation by:

• Framing the change in an appropriate language
• Identifying (and rewarding) a non-negotiable set of new behaviours
• A Change Champion network, who are given the principles of the change and the new behaviours, and then set free to influence ... supported by management rather than reporting to management, and supporting each other through a simple communications channel
• When changes in behaviour are apparent in some areas, broadcast (and reward) this change

This approach focuses on changing people's regular behaviours rather than some nebulous "culture". Rather than a huge top-down programme of change, the initiative becomes one of modelling the change (through managers and change agents), focussing on the positive behavioural changes that start to happen and allowing the organisation to adapt the programme to local circumstances. This feels like a radical new platform for addressing the challenges of organisational change.

2012 update We recently persuaded Leandro Herrero to come and present to the Henley Management group Leadership of Organisational Change. Focussing more on his new book Homo Imitans, he highlighted the problems of traditional change programmes (formal leadership, communication channels and push ... leading to limited success) and compared with his proposed "world II"  change which focusses on behaviours, social copying, informal networks stories and leaders staying backstage.  A challenge to the normal organisational hierarchy, but with the continuing massive failure rate of change programmes, something different is needed ...

The "strategic pause" in creativity

I mentioned the "strategic pause" in my last blog, and seem to have taken one ... with no entries for a year. I recalled term again today in reading about processes for creativity. There are numerous descriptions of characteristics, personality profiles and tests of creativity, which identify skills such as originality, flexibility, problem identification and reframing.
However, a rather different perspective considers the skills needed for the process of creativity, rather than the content. These seem to be:

• an intrinsic motivation - interest in the challenge for its own sake
• objectivity - to quickly identify and reject ideas that are not going to work
• problem-finding skills
• a tolerance for ambiguity - to avoid premature closure, settling on a less effective solution too soon

It was this last comment that brought me back to the "strategic pause". As I commented last time, delaying acting, delaying coming to a decision, and taking to time to think and allow events to unfold ... are skills that are rarely rewarded in fast-paced business where action is rewarded over thinking.

A Strategic Pause

Yesterday I was asked to "escalate" an issue. Someone out in the business hadn't completed some forms that had been requested a few weeks ago, and this was going to delay implementing some project changes. I was supposed to contact this person's line manager, highlight the lack of activity and generally bang the table ("escalate") until the recalcitrant miscreant did what was requested.

I thought I'd do a little checking before I started the escalation, and checked the forms. I found a mess - people listed in the wrong buildings, incorrect data, mostly people not associated with our contact ... etc. Hardly surprising that the forms hadn't been completed. Instead of escalating, I searched around for someone I vaguely knew in the relevant department and gave him a call to ask for assistance. He'd already gone home, so I took a risk and delayed doing anything until today.

Today I found that the person who had escalated this to me had got his information wrong, and the form is not due for completion until next week - it's been a long project, and mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. But I felt greatly relieved that I hadn't taken the escalation action that had been requested. That would have been counter-productive, made me look stupid (or at least uninformed) and high-handed. It was lucky I had taken a "strategic pause".

This seemed very relevant today when I was reading about the strategic benefits of doing nothing in business. While this might seem to encourage the idle, it does highlight the pragmatic approach to management that accepts over-reaction to data or events is just as counter-productive as ignoring information. Studying systems thinking (as I currently am), this links to the management of feedback to control systems. Make the control too reactive and the system rapidly oscillates between different states, while an unresponsive control introduces long lags between event and response. The secret is finding the appropriate balance.

So I'm not moving into the do nothing domain, but taking a "strategic pause" seems an appropriate response to many requests for action. One suggested response is in the art of being brave: listen, wait, do something different and keep it simple, to which I would add: ask lots of questions.

Appreciative Inquiry

I have come acoss Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in readings connected with Systems Thinking recently. Although a relatively new field, there is a wealth of literature and case studies available, particularly at the Appreciative Commons site. Rather than looking to develop individuals (or organisations) by focussing on the weaknesses that must be tackled, AI looks to the strengths and successes, and seeks to build on these. Using the old analogy, this doesn't simpky assume that the glass is always full, but seeks to understandhow the glass has become half full - what strengths and competences have created this success.

There are numerous resources at the Appreciative Commons site, and this toolset is regarded as a great way to enact change through positive drivers. There is a short manual available, which describes some of the background processes that can be used, such as the 4D model:

• Discovery: talk to people to discover the times when their organization is at its best.
• Dream: As a large group conference, people
  are encouraged to envision the organization as though the peak moments were the norm rather than the exception.
• Design: create the design for the organization dreamed in the large group conference.
• Delivery: deliver the dream through the new design. This is a process of experimentation and improvisation, and may require many iterative AI processes to attain the desired results at all levels.

Russell Ackoff (RIP)

The great management thinker and philosopher Russell ackoff died in October, a great loss to alternatives in management thinking. As a systems thinker, he regarded the detail of current management planning as a crisis, and wrote extensively about the flaws in this. Highlighting the risk aversion that is trained into most managers, he regularly proposed a new direction of management measurement - checking up on what people failed tro do as well as what people failed in doing. As he put it: "Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong".

See more Ackoff at the Ackoff collaboratory (blog), on Mission statements, on systems thinking and an obituary.

Servant Leadership

The term "servant leadership" was coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 (see The Power of Servant Leadership), but is based on ancient philosophies of leadership. After the economic collapse following the greed for growth era, perhaps servant leadership is the new style required to re-build businesses and re-build confidence in leaders.

Fons Trompenaars supported this idea in a recent article in people People Management (May 2009). Greenleaf believed that great leaders are motivated by the desire to serve others and see the served grow as people. Trompenaars suggests that this is a strength that is even more in demand in the current challenging times - a commitment to deliver a vision with the knowledge that their actions are always guided by the desire to serve others. He has extended the concept to handling cross-cultural challenges in his book Servant Leadership Across Cultures, contrasting styles of servant leadership in the east and west.

Servant leadership proposes a philosophy of management which is in sharp contrast to the mainstream leadership model based on the exercise and retention of power. But Trompenaars points out that many of the companies in Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For” follow servant-leadership principles and have links to the Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership. Larry Spears, former president of the Center for Servant-Leadership, outlined the 10 characteristics of a servant leader as:

1 Listening - seeks to identify the will of a group in what is being said and what is not being said.
2 Empathy - seeks to understand others, accepting everyone's unique spirit and good intentions. Accepts the person while seeking to correct behaviour or performance.
3 Healing - applies the power to heal self and others, creating wholeness, transformation and integration.
4 Awareness - takes a holistic view of self and situations to increase awareness. Is comfortable with the disturbances that increased awareness brings.
5 Persuasion - seeks to form consensus and convince others rather than using a position of authority to coerce compliance.
6 Conceptualisation - demonstrates the ability to look beyond the operational realities to a concept of the organisation that defines a vision.
7 Foresight - uses a broad range of past experience and intuition to plot the likely outcome of a situation.
8 Stewardship - acts as if authority is only given to hold the current position on trust on behalf of someone else.
9 Commitment to the growth of people - take personal responsibility for the growth of each individual within the organisation.
10 Building community - seeks to build a community among those who work within the organisation.

While Greenleaf is credited with starting this work in the 20th century, the earliest word on the subject may belong to Lao Tzu in Tao Te Ching:

A leader is best
When people are hardly aware of his existence,
Not so good when people praise his government,
Less good when people stand in fear,
Worst, when people are contemptuous.
Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.
But of a good leader, who speaks little,
When his task is accomplished, his work is done!
The people say, “We did it ourselves”

A Systems Perspective of Targets

Came across an interesting perspective on targets in "The Systems Thinking Review" (web archive link). While most management thinking stresses the importance of setting goals and targets to motivate performance, in "a tool too far: a systems perspective of targets" (web archive link), the authors highlight some of the problems of target-driven cultures. There are numerous example:

• NHS targets 'may have led to 1,200 deaths' in Mid-Staffordshire
• Hospital chairman quits over dangerous targets

These life and death situations present some real callenges to mainstream thinking about performance management. The authors highlight that many of these problems are caused by centrally set targets, which have little connection with the business action at the front line. The further the centre from the operation, the worse the problem seems to be, particularly when data is aggregated and averaged to produce management reports that drive new targets. This statistical process smooths out all the variations in performance and operational difficulties that make targets difficult or impossible to achieve.

The authors highlight the challenge that then arises for managers under this measurement regime - the options are (a) cheat, (b) tell the truth or (c) chase the target but do the wrong thing. Option (a) may deliver what the customer wants, but only works for as long as the manager doesn't get caught. Money and reputation are linked to target attainment, so option (b) is eventually career-limiting. Which leaves (c), so organisations are driven to do the wrong thing in order to meet an irrelevent target set externally.

So, can this be changed? It can be quite difficult to move an organisation away from a target-driven culture, as targets give the illusion of control. If a specific target is set out as a performance improvement, and subsequently achieved, this appears to be strong management, leading the organisational improvement. However, the deleterious impact on other services is skipped over in focusing on this single target.

So the change may be difficult, but it is possible. Locally set targets appear to motivate performance improvements, particularly when there is a connection between a target, an individual's behaviour in attaining the taget and the connection with some organisational or personal value. This simply needs a re-establishment of trust between local managers and the organisational centre - the centre sets direction and local managers set targets to motivate local performance.

This suggests loss of control from the centre, but local empowerment may achieve the required performance where central targets often fail. This requires a brave decision for the executive at the centre, but ultimately leads to greater achievement.

Update (Dec-2014): The Systems Thinking Review website seems to have disappeared - links moved to point to a snapshot archived by the web archive project.

The Secret of Good Leadership

With book shelves overloaded with volumes on leadership, it's not often I come across an article that seems worth adding to the existing body of knowledge. This is the exception, a report from the FT on Ronald Heifetz' course on leadership (registration needed at FT site) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Heifetz separates leadership from authoritarian instruction, and leads a course that challenges students to tackle the chaos and confusion that may result from high-stress problem solving situations. He creates an environment in the classroom which mimics this, and pushes the students to deliver in an unstructured setting. The drop-out rate is high, but the successes rise to greater achievements.

Similar to action learning definitions (of puzzles and problems), he differentiates between two types of management problem - technical challenges (for which there is a known solution that must be recognised) and adaptive challenges (in which both the problem and the solution may not be clear). During adacptive challenges, organisations experience long periods of disequilibrium, and it is the leader's challenge to control the pace of this while ensuring that momentum continues in face of the psychological needs for stability.

Heifetz offers this teaching as a counter-balance to the notion of charismatic leadership, particularly when this connection with a single vision prevents people and organisations from tackling the real problem they face.

Is there a way to lead large IT projects to success?

Catching up on some of my favourite blogs, I noticed on The Philosophy and Life blog that Mark is (or was) a closet IT journalist with some interesting views about the nature of current IT projects. Echoing a view from the dark side of IT, there are questions about belief (more familiar territory for Mark) - do the sellers and clients really believe in the potential success of huge IT projects?

While these stories are not limited to one sector, there does seem to be an inevitable process that runs with IT projects: the vendors send in the sales people who over-promise on capabilities, the client counters with the procurement department who drive down the price and choose the cheapest solution, and then both parties appoint specialists to manage the project, none of whom will ever (or have ever) run the operation. Strangely, although these parties are fighting a cost battle to achieve their own aims, they all have a shared goal of initiating the project.

Once the project is started, with over-optimistic estimates of delivery and under-estimated costs, the problems spiral, requiring more time and money to complete the work. And once a huge investment has been made, it is a brave manager who pulls he plug and admits the project cannot deliver. So more money is thrown at the problem. Is there a better way?

Stephen Jenner has suggested some means to control projects in his book (Realising Benefits from Government ICT Investment: a Fools Errand?), and the time for control is at the start. Projects need to be set out with a realistic view of the benefits that will be delivered and a strong view of the means for controlling the project. This requires partnership between the business owners and project owners. Instead of a battle at checkpoint meetings where the project attempts to justify its costs, a negotiation between project team seeking costs and business taking responsibility for operational delivery of value. It's not easy, but it can be achieved.