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.

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.