Learn to organise, organise to learn
Posted by Guest Blogger on 16 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Guest Blogger, Manufacturing
Published by guest blogger Jeff Gold, Professor of Organisation Learning, Leeds Metropolitan University and Fellow of the Northern Leadership Academy
I recently returned full time to Leeds Met as a Professor of Organisation Learning. When I told one of my clients, his first response was ‘Yes, well done and about time too’ and his second response, after a moment was “but what does ‘organisation learning’ mean?”. And, what relevance does this have to leaders in manufacturing businesses in the current economic climate? Read on.
Consider the two terms, Organisation and Learning. The first implies co-ordinating and bringing things into some kind of order – you get things organised and working with some kind of clarity and direction. Learning is about upsetting the status quo or the current kind of order. Hence the contradiction.
To understand the value of thinking in contradictions requires a bit mental gymnastics and is one of the reasons so many businesses have been unable to cope in recent years. Organisation and Learning may be in tension, but they have to be reconciled. The danger of missing this trick can be found by considering each part in separation, for example by putting effort into organisation at the expense of learning. This can appear very enticing, after all to be organised means that work is proceed as planned, against targets with great clarity. Things are done on time and efficiently. People know how to do things right and any training can correct those who don’t. Continued emphasis on organisation allows improvement by eliminating waste and doing things faster by resetting targets, etc.
The danger is that you sucked into what is clear, ignoring other possibilities or assuming that things will carry on as before, so that any changes from outside are not considered before it’s too late. As the saying goes, ‘if you do what you always do, you get what you always get’. But supposing the customers change their minds about what you do? So concentrating on doing things right, could mean you miss doing the right thing. This is where learning as a disturbance comes in.
The disturbance could involve changes for what people do at work, the things that are produced and how they are produce. Learning as disturbance can also come from exploring what customers and suppliers think and want.
The idea of the Learning Organisation became very popular in the 1990s. It was a lovely ideal that could help any business change radically. However, many managers and leaders found they simply did not have the access within their organisations to enable them to initiate, promote or sustain approaches that required an organisation that ‘continually transformed itself’. Another problem is that when business is struggling to meet or even find orders, there is not a lot of time for learning, even if the evidence says you should (findings from a very important piece of research on creating space for learning in SMEs can be found at; http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-334-25-0015 ).
The problems of being too organised are tackled by more space for learning as disturbance. And the problem of wasting too much time exploring for learning is to make sure you are better organised. This sounds like setting up a competition between organisation and learning but that’s the nature of contradiction and the source of its potential for responding to difficult times now and in the future. You need to consider the interplay of these two processes by providing support for both organising and learning. If you can do this, you become a two-sided thinker and doer or, in a word that reconciles contradiction, ambidextrous
If you would like to read more about the Ambidextrous Organisation, contact me at j.gold@leedsmet.ac.uk and I will send you a very useful article with key ideas for what to do.
5 Comments »
Great concept Jeff – “learning as disturbance”. As you point out, organisations and businesses don’t tend to be comfortable with disturbance yet this is a basic driver for learning. We change in response to our changing life conditions – when current behaviours don’t help any more, we tend to change. Except that we also, either individually or collectively, don’t like to change and often tend to stick within our comfort zones.
Overcoming this tension is what helps individuals and businesses be successful and continue to grow and develop even in challenging times such as those we are experiencing now.
That is also why creating coaching cultures or personally having a coach is essential to creating learning and growth. A coach will create the disturbance whilst at the same time helping you manage it effectively!!
I always enjoy reflecting on Jeff’s reasoning because it often leads me in to new ways of thinking. The idea of “learning” got me thinking. We often understand the “learning” process as the journey by those who “do not know” into existing knowledge banks which then improves their own store of knowledge. But what about the literally unknown? Half a millenium ago men built on their knowledge of making and sailing ships, but the real learning process began surely when they sailed across the ocean beyond their resources to return safely and then discovered new (to them) lands? Imagine the courage it must have taken for a captain (Columbus?) to look at his depleted stores and know he could not return home so he had to go on? The fear of starvation, shipwreck or worse must have been a factor, but they went on, beyond the norm, beyond safety, beyond the mundane. Can we do the same in our learning journey? Don’t be restrained by convention and what is generally accepted as the “norm” and let us journey into real new worlds!
MMmmm … very interesting Jeff and good food for thought! Challenging status quo is, I believe, now a pre-requisite for survival and sustianability; particularly if we want our manufacturing base to do just that …. survive and grow.
This means that traditional business practice is no longer good enough, we have to be ingenious in how we commercialise our creativity and innovation in every aspect of our enterprise. This means change and change means leadership …. enlightened leadership with the courage to grasp the opportunities presented by such change; for it is the world thats changing not just ‘us’. Those who successfully embrace this change will be our new champions and this is much easier at SME level than it is for larger enterprises who lack the flexibility to be so pro-active or even responsive. I refuse to subscribe to the ‘city’ rhetoric that manufacturing/engineering is not profitably sustainable in the UK. As such, I’ve been evangelising this challenge to ‘status quo’ for quite a while and its great to see/hear/read such a blog! Take a look at my website and blogs/papers thereon for similar views.
“The problems of being too organised are tackled by more space for learning as disturbance.”
To be organised, I read, in this context, ‘is the absence of uncertainty and insecurity’ not ‘just well organised’. “Bad” Modernity (the bit it shouldn’t have spawned) has imbued ‘management practice’ with a strange notion that ‘to be have a spirit of enquiry’ = ‘weakness in the individual’. In a sense, hide your spirit of enquiry and you hide your weaknessness… voila! Discreet souls = discreet organisations maybe?
Real parallels with the tensions between ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ and between ‘operations’ and ‘strategy’.
In my experience the key barrier to managing these tensions profitably is finding people (not always the boss) who feel comfortable making the transition to spend significant amounts of time and effort working on leadership/strategy/learning which means spending less time on management/operations/organisation. The key to this is often effective delegation and, perhaps even trickier, effective integration between operational development and strategic development. In my book this is integration IS the role of management.
In SMEs of course the challenge of reconciling the tensions often falls on a small number of shoulders – and often blind spots develop because the often deferred value created by working on strategy/leadership/learning is ignored because of the apparently more immediate value created by management/operations/leadership.
And in times of recession shifting the balance can become even more difficult until it is obvious that the incremental gains available through management/operations/organisation are no longer sufficient. And then, often, it is too late.