Learndontlearn

Promising practice

Promising practices… that grow learning.

There is still the big question: ‘what is learning’? Well it’s hardly what commonly passes for it -the taxidermy-driven ‘in receipt of stuff’, nor ‘wisdom’ passed on from the lips of a lecturer (someone who talks while you’re trying to sleep).

ldl believes that work is inseparable from learning - if the organisational climate is right. Here, as promised (see ‘Words Alan Sugar is scared of’ 29 June) are some examples of learning, or promising practice, from unusual sources.

Managers (fruitful interaction with their environment)

• When negative rumours abound and staff become scared, before meeting them, a senior manager stops and composes himself, in order to ‘get the worry off his face’…   Then everyone can think better.
• After a well-facilitated visualisation session based on managing with the head, heart and soul, a manager, hitherto with an egotistical, low trust style, says: I can’t lie anymore…

Organisational learning (collective learning)

Two examples of staff using ideas for improvement from The One Account company offering mortgage and financial services (2005):

• Raising the Bar: 17,000 customer waiting days for mortgage processing were removed
• Workouts: staff make presentations on possible improvements to senior managers. If approved, they have 90 days to implement them. Savings: £600,000  (Source: firms winning Service Excellence Awards -supplement from Management Today, October each year)      

What is this thing called… a Learning Organisation?

Some firms might think collective learning is fanciful and marginal to their concerns. However, to be functional, they still have to fulfil their purpose. According to John Seddon’s Vanguard Consultancy, to be a ‘learning organisation’ all staff must be engaged in creating value for its customers (being effective) and must also provide services without waste (being efficient).

This could hardly be more relevant to the bottom line. Any other definitions or characteristics of a ‘learning organisation’ out there?

Maybe the higher performing firms have a more action-based, lived–in idea of learning eg: ‘practice is not the measure of learning it is its medium’. ldl will explore this later.

Learning methods and their purpose

Methods chosen to enable learning should be derived from purpose.  ldl suggests the overriding one should be to develop independent, critical, creative learners.

Philip Beadle, a teacher involved with the late Ted Wragg in the Channel 4 programme ‘Teaching the unteachables’ (disengaged youth) clearly agrees. In a recent discussion about DfES advice that secondary teachers should stop asking pupils to put their hands up in class when answering teacher questions, he asked what the point was of an exercise where only a few pupils take part. Instead of most sitting passively, he suggested a range of interactive methods: paired discussion, trios, talking in groups, jigsaws, pairs to fours, expert groups, argument tunnels, verbal tennis, all of which gives pupils an opportunity to express themselves, promote independent learning and take the teacher away from being the sole source of knowledge, at the front of the class. His term for teachers who still practice ‘hands up half hour’: ‘lazy’ Exactly.

There can’t be active learners anywhere, without active facilitators.

Coming next

Learning prompts: techniques, tools, transformations including ways to develop independent learners, whether in ‘training’ or anywhere else.

How do consultants learn?    

Can they learn? Have faith. Possibly.

Trouble is consultancy is a barely legitimate cross over between self interest and being eager to please, which can make
learning difficult. But if consultants, above all, don’t, how effective can they be? There is evidence that many
consultant-supported change programmes fail because at the initial stage, consultants do not ‘challenge the frame’.

This is increasingly necessary if the initiative is organised in a way which is top down, loud hailing, more managing than
leading by those commissioning them.

In a recent exchange with an experienced consultant, she said: ‘I knew what the client asked me to do would not result
in the improved performance they sought. It would make no difference.’ Respectfully, she had said the same to the
client.

Now there are many points in such client-relationships where value can be created and you would think consultants
should spot these. However, the consultant sought to do this at the end-point, at evaluation. Here, she attempted to re-
explain the limited (imposed) strategy, only vaguely hinting at the more comprehensive one needed to effectively tackle
the problem -which would need to challenge the perception of the client. By the way, she was more than capable of this.

During the exchange, I asked how she could use this to handle similar future clients, who would otherwise be wasting
money. Key to this was what she felt she had learned.

Here is what I learned.

The reason we’re here (at any particular sticky point) is we haven’t done enough thinking.

If an ‘excellent’ organisation is one which is able to do more complex things better, year–on-year, shouldn’t this also
apply to consultants?

The less we take opportunities in our current work to use the big muscle between our ears, (however painful)
the more our future options narrow.

Given that you would not simply take the money, what would you learn?

Medieval consultancy

If ‘management’ was invented by consultants (see previous post, Campbell Soup) then who invented consultants?

Here is another wrong-footing tale:   

Called in, the consultant knocks on the door, meets the CEO for the first time, and they knock about introductory moves.

CEO: My management principles are 3M.

Consultant: Really -the innovative firm that made the post-it, where, each year, 25% of sales must be from new products…?

CEO: No, Medieval Monastery Management: notice everything, change something, cherish the brethren.

So consultancy was invented by monks –Evangelical consultancy -and a first example of e-learning! Though it seems to
have an otherwordly source (notice ‘everything’!) it’s generous enough to make a Pope shudder. Just add in something
like ‘be prepared for occasional mystery worshippers…’ and it’s up to date. Or up to the gate.

Now where has learning got to?

Campbell Soup... in a basket

Seen Alastair Campbell's Diaries?

Campbell seems less a politician and more a hairdresser (primp here, slim-cut there...) And
success? The media swallow whatever look he presents, regardless...

So, spooned in the best Campbell Soup, here's a likely story:

'Management' was invented by consultants! And the proof? Here is a common opening
exchange between a consultant and staff in an organisation where the consultant has been
asked to help 'change the culture'.

Consultant: What's it like working here?

Staff: Alienating, unvalued, unheard...

Consultant: Why?

Staff: They -management- don't listen, don't care... it's terrible, we could go on...

Consultant: So what do you need? Assertiveness, more self managing, more control...?

Staff: No! We need a consultant, to tell it like we feel it!

Consultant: Where did you learn to be so helpless?

Now we have asked before on learndontlearn what is learning. However tricky to
identify, we sort of know it has got to be much more than busloads of facts, or how
celebrities like their chips. And now, a complication: is it learning even if we learn the
wrong things, particularly in organisations?

Just as staff have to do harder things to learn, so does AC. Maybe he should start with
learning that for teams to work effectively, egos are overheads. And while he
thinks he can get away with using Lads-mag language to describe women (degrees of 'ballsy' etc)
it's juvenile to think in it. In the end, listening to Campbell is like hearing a bagpipe solo: even
if it's just a minute, it seems to go on forever.

Looks like we need to get back to learning, whatever that is...