Learndontlearn

Monsters and mirth: more challenging transformative techniques

These two resources are change-primers and are starting points only for change. We usually follow them with i2i: ideas into impact where new ideas are built on and the new thinking they create is exploited. 

For more of these resources see ‘Categories’ on the left and click on ‘Resources: Building Learning’

1 Don’t need it – got my MBA

In the Summer 2007 issue of Strategy and Business (a Harvard Business Review rival) what is the term most frequently used? Is it leadership, ethics, business, knowledge, strategy, innovation, manufacture, partnerships, forecasts, economics, takeovers?

None of these. It is learning.

The editor’s comment (around 500 words) ‘Breakthrough learning’ which opens the issue uses the term ‘learning’ 14 times. Though he wants to celebrate it he notes the defensive mindset surrounding it: ‘Executives typically groan at the word learning.’ and  ‘…every major article in this issue could be seen as a story of organisational learning…’  Even so, the articles are based on the outcomes of learning including ‘the most proficient practitioner of organizational learning in the world’ and ‘the unexpected ways that innovation fosters learning’. 

Does this make us more confident about organizational learning?

Learndontlearn claims that improved performance cannot occur without an increase in the rate of organizational learning.

Learning prompt 1: Monster questions

How does your organization learn? How can it learn better?

Alternately: pick any equivalent questions. They need to be big, fat questions so when  people attempt to answer they see why they are monsters. Don’t forget, monsters can be friendly too! Read on for more examples.

2 Change: you must be joking!

Have a look at the cartoon.

Make a note of what you think the organizational culture consists of at JW.

Learning prompt 2:  Going drawing

Get a group of managers together. In groups of two, make a cartoon of what the organizational culture consists of now. After that, make a cartoon of what you want it to consist of in the future. To qualify as a cartoon, people must laugh.

Compare cartoons. Select and agree 2 aspects from the future cartoons. Now begin (the start of) a longer discussion/argument about how they can become reality.

Alternately: pick any other cartoon and create an equivalent task Contact us if any issues arise or to discuss further. Stay tuned.

Learndontlearn aims to build that misunderstood beast ‘organizational learning’ and to surprise and entertain by disrobing ordinary thinking.

The resources here are based on manager and consultancy promising practice used to create wider possibilities when organisations face problems. They are designed to tackle ordinary defensiveness ‘we can’t do it, it’ll never work, not invented here…’ and transform it, as the first point of learning. So they need a degree of ‘inappropriate surprise’. They can be used by managers and organizations as techniques, tools, ideas or learning prompts to improve performance.

Trams, jams and avoiding gridlock

Transformative techniques: some more promising practice from learndontlearn

Tramlines

1.	What international sport begins with a T?
2.	Ant and Dec are lying dead on the floor surrounded by a large puddle of water. There is lots of broken glass lying around. What happened?

If you immediately think of tennis or trampolining (for 1) and they drowned (for 2) don’t worry. Most people do. After all, the statements are set up to encourage this. However both answers are ‘wrong’. When asked again, most people repeat their original efforts seeing T as the letter ‘t’ (table tennis, tobogganing) and seeing Ant and Dec as the tv hosts. Pushed further, they increasingly find it difficult to get beyond this predictable pattern. More effort produces less insight, only more of the same. Their thinking is now well and truly tramlined. Trapped and stuck. And the answers are still wrong.

Tramlining does not only happen with quizzes and games. It happens to managers too. Imagine an organisational problem. Most managers use methods which they have used before, their standard responses. When these don’t work they try more of the same with probably more effort and muscle. This at best makes only marginal difference. Remember that if you are on a tram it leads to a terminus and this one is called ‘not solved’. Only now it is more fully armed. And much harder to pronounce, like disengagement, falling market share and so on…

Critical Difference specializes in i2i: translating ideas into impact. We recognise that when stuck, the first revolution is a new idea. This involves learning (the hard stuff) and enlarging both manager and organisation repertoire of responses.

We know how hard this can be.  Apparently when scientists send rockets into space, a huge proportion of fuel is used in the first part of the journey simply to break free of the earth’s gravity. Similarly when organisations are stuck in tramlines - they need ferocious energy to break free of their own habity. 

We will help you get to the first change, an idea, then help you develop the rest, to apply new ideas to old organisational problems.

Trams, jams and avoiding gridlock

Transformative techniques: some more promising practice from learndontlearn

Tramlines

1.	What international sport begins with a T?
2.	Ant and Dec are lying dead on the floor surrounded by a large puddle of water. There is lots of broken glass lying around. What happened?

If you immediately think of tennis or trampolining (for 1) and they drowned (for 2) don’t worry. Most people do. After all, the statements are set up to encourage this. However both answers are ‘wrong’. When asked again, most people repeat their original efforts seeing T as the letter ‘t’ (table tennis, tobogganing) and seeing Ant and Dec as the tv hosts. Pushed further, they increasingly find it difficult to get beyond this predictable pattern. More effort produces less insight, only more of the same. Their thinking is now well and truly tramlined. Trapped and stuck. And the answers are still wrong.

Tramlining does not only happen with quizzes and games. It happens to managers too. Imagine an organisational problem. Most managers use methods which they have used before, their standard responses. When these don’t work they try more of the same with probably more effort and muscle. This at best makes only marginal difference. Remember that if you are on a tram it leads to a terminus and this one is called ‘not solved’. Only now it is more fully armed. And much harder to pronounce, like disengagement, falling market share and so on…

Critical Difference specializes in i2i: translating ideas into impact. We recognise that when stuck, the first revolution is a new idea. This involves learning (the hard stuff) and enlarging both manager and organisation repertoire of responses.

We know how hard this can be.  Apparently when scientists send rockets into space, a huge proportion of fuel is used in the first part of the journey simply to break free of the earth’s gravity. Similarly when organisations are stuck in tramlines - they need ferocious energy to break free of their own habity. 

We will help you get to the first change, an idea, then help you develop the rest, to apply new ideas to old organisational problems.

Avoiding jam at Newmarket Races

Here are 3 transformative techniques, or as ldl calls them, learning prompts They are meant to help avoid jam, unstick ‘stuckness’ and smooth out noise.

Confusing? Read on.

Try them if this occurs in your organisation.

Working life is an endless ‘Jam’ (just another meeting). Meetings follow a predictable pattern, operate in a dehydrated atmosphere, where ‘normal’ is to arrive in closed mental mode and stay there regardless of any new opportunities, or the need for better thinking.

These techniques are designed to avoid jams, noise and getting stuck. They can help change the initial meeting climate, get participants more relaxed, encourage more divergent thinking, better ideas, and help people imagine a state not existing to which they can aspire. The also value play

1. Silence

If things get ‘stuck’ try this: Get the group to sit quietly for five minutes. Or, if possible, get the group to go for a short walk -max 5 mins. (no conversing in either)

2. Metaphor

The future is out of reach because my imagination is…

How people are oriented toward problems influences greatly how -or if, they can solve them. Commonly new situations are viewed in a certain ways, along automatic tramlines, which limits new possibilities. Using metaphors offers an opportunity to get beyond habits or the purely ‘rational’, to use the freeing power of emotion and imagination to concoct new states, feelings, relationships or organisations. The technique here is to devise a metaphor and then extend and develop it. Once the metaphor is up and going, (has legs) this encourages an imaginative dimension to mingle more fruitfully with the rational one, rather than being stifled by it.

At a recent conference held at Newmarket Racecourse Conference centre, the room I was allocated to facilitate smaller group work was called the ‘Cool More Stud Room’. How could such an imaginative invitation be passed over?

On the spur of the moment I asked each delegate as they entered the room, to ‘Invent a horse’. They responded so well we extended the ‘game’ through the meeting, as follows:

Invent a jockey	How would we know if they were?
Invent a meeting and prize	Why are they not fixed?
Invent a race horse owner	What would a public sector race meeting look like?
Who won the race?	Can we invent races where there are no ‘losers’?
Was the winner known in advance?	How do the public hear about races?
Are races equal?	How do the public hear about horses?
Is there a patsy?	Are jockeys managers?
Are jockeys managers?	How important is the race course?
What’s an alternative race?	What’s an alternative to racing?

3 Stealing

At a recent play in London ‘Things of dry hours’ about Black Communists in Alabama in the 1930s, this authentic document of the time, was on each seat as the audience came in. The author, Naomi Wallace, a white woman, said she was motivated to write the play by ‘angry optimism’. This technique is simple: Ask managers what they are angry and optimistic about.

Then ask them to apply this to an enduring problem they face.

Try these and let us know how they work

On final question: which of these techniques do you think is the most radical?

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...

Words Alan Sugar is scared of...

‘Learning’ for one…

Well that’s where this blog started…However, I also wanted to respond to a recent comment (22 June) about the Simon Caulkin podcast (the SICO tapes) suggesting that private equity ‘was financial engineering for the future’. Yes, but whose future? See also Simon Caulkin’s ‘Why humans snap at the heels of private equity from Observer 17 June 2007

So I want to link private equity and learning ie ‘heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together..’ (now who said that –and who would he be writing for today?)

First, learning: what is it? Individual learning is commonly defined as a ‘change in behaviour over time, due to experience…’ However, for most people at work what more forcibly applies (or should) is ‘organisational learning’, broadly defined as ‘an organisation that facilitates the learning of all its members and continuously transforms itself…’ Definitions are fine but it’s like reaching the front door of a club –you still have to traverse various barriers to get in. They don’t tell us how.

So here’s the point: learndontlearn claims that for all the riches accumulated by private equity this is peanuts compared with the great untapped resource of organisational, that is, collective learning. (the sort of claim that elevates blogs from simple digital narcissism to something more useful…) By organisational learning we mean minds@work -if anyone will listen. And organisations can show they want to listen louder by creating the conditions for commitment.

Over the summer ldl will give, and seek, examples of organisational learning as evidence for the above claim. Remember that org learning already has a head start on private equity as it’s free; but it is also highly discretionary, (eg ‘I work here in spite of the firm’) which is why most organisations neither invest in nor reap its dividends. The big ones are more confident with learning though: IBM’s ‘innovation index’ attempts to directly link organisational climate to revenue growth.

And just in case you though private equity and learning might not be serial divorcees, have a look at Gordon Brown’s new ‘Business Council for Britain’, to inform his Dept of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) or a new Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR). Who’s there: among others, Alan Sugar, (entrepreneur, anti-ageing cream and property), Terry Leahy (Tescopoly) and Damon Buffina (Permira private equity –fatten companies, with the sole purpose of ‘exiting’ in 5 years, with a wallet so fat it’s got financial cholesterol).

Anyone from a college, even an ‘excellent’ one – you guessed it. Rare as an Arsenal supporter in Barcelona.

So: let us have your examples of organisation learning to get us going.