The Learning Organization

THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

By Tom DeMarco

The Atlantic Systems Guild

The following is adapted from Chapter 26 of Tom DeMarco’s new book, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Random House (Broadway Books Division), 2001 and 2002.

I suppose you could change an organization without ever learning anything, but what would be the point? It’s usually something you’ve learned that motivates the change and a set of new skills you learn along the way that effects the change. Learning and change go hand in hand.

The human learning machine

People are natural learning machines, learning all the time. Evolution built this learning facility into us and didn’t provide a switch. So, for example, when you lay aside your First World War history book in the evening — thinking, “Well, that’s enough learning for one night” — and enter into a conversation with your spouse or your kid, learning doesn’t stop. It just switches gears. Learning never stops till you’re dead.

Organizations too are learning all the time. But it doesn’t always take and not all of it is useful. To become an effective Learning Organization, you need to make a habit of learning those particular skills and directions that become the genesis of constructive change. This is considerably less natural. In (maddening) fact, we tend to sop up new knowledge like sponges when the thing we’re learning is largely irrelevant to us, and resist learning things that really matters. This is true for organizations and also true for individuals. You, for example, may have no trouble learning something about a war that happened nearly a hundred years ago, but might find yourself at least partially blocked when it comes to mastering a drastically different way to do your job.

Classical model of the learning process

Educators tell us that the learning process consists of four elements: learner, facilitator (sorry about the teacher-speak), material and co-learner(s). The model looks something like this:

The learning environment: classical education model

Clearly some learning can happen in the absence of one or more of these elements. Think of yourself alone with that history book: no facilitator and no co-learners. We learn all the time in such a partial learning environment. But remember, it’s not the easy natural, learning of the non-professional that is the subject here, but the learning of those things that really matter, that change the way we do essential, self-definitional, work. And for that kind of learning, the full environment is almost a necessity.

An example: Let’s say that your WWI history book teaches you that the battle called Chemin des Dames in 1918 was complicated by the mutiny of a Russian army on loan to the French. (The pro-revolution soldiers were rebelling against their czarist officers.) As an amateur historian, you can learn this little fact easily and go on. But suppose that you are not an amateur. Suppose you are a professional historian. Suppose that you had written a book yourself about Chemins des Dames and had never heard till this very moment about the Russian mutiny. This is an entirely different matter. What you are being encouraged to learn has significance to your self image. You really ought to put yourself back immediately into basic research mode, track the subject down and either publish a retraction of your own work on the battle or lodge a protest against the mutiny theory. That way you will learn and grow. You ought to do that, but there is a contrary tendency at work within you as well. The contrary tendency is to dismiss the whole idea of the mutiny as preposterous and never think about it again: an opportunity to learn something important has just been lost.

White-faced learning

I know from my early years teaching development methods that when people learn something that really matters to them, they go through a moment of panic. As soon as it’s apparent that this new approach is clearly superior to what they have been doing for years, there is an unspoken “Oh shit” that ripples through the room. Their faces turn white. You can practically hear the flip-flops in their stomachs.

At such a moment, it helps the learner to be able to glance over at someone else whose face is also white, who’s also got a little perspiration showing on the upper lip. The presence of the co-learner, the patient urging of the facilitator, and a lot of unthreatening easy reinforcing material are necessary to help get people past this professional’s learning block. Without all these elements in place, many or all of the potential learners will dismiss the troubling new idea as “preposterous.”

Why teams matter

Teams of knowledge workers are something of a puzzle. Almost all the real work undertaken by the team ends up being done by individuals working apart, little done in true team mode. Why then is the team so important? Why do well-jelled teams of knowledge workers perform so much better than non-teams?

Part of the reason is that the team helps align goals, helps to keep all members pulling in the same direction. It also satisfies some of the individual’s need for community. These are non-trivial advantages that go a long way to explaining the demonstrated advantages of teamwork in knowledge activities.

Now add to this the elaborate learning environment that the team supplies. When you learn within the context of a team, you have a facilitator: another team member who is advanced somewhat ahead of you in the subject. This is your coach. You have material: a comfortably do-able piece of project work that has been carved off for you by your coach to help you master the skill. And you have co-learners: the other team members who are learning at the same time, or who have just been through the experience themselves (and whose faces are still pale). This is a perfect environment for learning what really matters. This is probably the context of most of what you learned early on about your profession.

The team provides an ideal learning environment, a place where coaching and being coached are an integral part of each day’s work:

The idea that teams matter to learning may seem like good news for your organization, since chances are it is highly supportive of teams. That’s fine, but where are those teams? It’s not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy. When that’s true you have to wonder, are we set up to learn only at the bottom level? Do we have teams where learning really matter?

Learning how to manage

Companies need to learn a lot of different things, but the most essential of these is management. Non-managers are promoted all the time, lower-level managers are promoted up to tasks where the management skills required are qualitatively different. How do they learn? Sadly they are most often obliged to learn in a depleted learning environment:

Here we see no coach, no peer facilitator. There is no material, other than the whole job, no easy unthreatening piece carved off to provide an ideal learning exercise. And there are no evident co-learners. The new manager is expected to learn whatever needs to be learned in almost complete isolation.

In my own case as a young manager I was alone inside a closed office. I had access to my boss, but not to the people who really could have helped, the other managers at my own level. Each new management challenge I faced caused me to wonder, How on earth would Sharon or George or Eugene (my peer managers) deal with such a problem? I’d have killed for the opportunity to be a fly on the wall of one of their offices, just to be able to watch an expert at work. There was a complex and ugly set of rules in that culture that made it impossible for managers to ask each other for help.

Oh yes, young managers are often supplied bit of management training. The problem with such training is that it’s all abstraction and no example. It is no replacement for the context of the team where you learned your earlier skills by actually applying them to pieces of real work. While we’re at it, management training tends to teach only the mechanics of management (reporting, running the scheduling system, Gantt charting and PERT analysis), and none of the really difficult things that distinguish good managers from bad: people selection and motivation, team jelling, listening, promoting, choosing correctly when to entrust new responsibility.

Most of us don’t learn well from abstraction. We learn from example. That’s part of the reason why we don’t learn well in isolation. The skills of management — like the skills of parenting — are best learned by example and best learned with the help of able coaching and shared experience of peer learners.

Why can’t new managers learn their skills in the context of a team? After all, there is something that is at least called a Management Team at virtually every company.

The management team

Part of my first day on a new consult is usually spent with the “Management Team.” I find myself in a room with a dozen or so other people, taking part in a weekly status meeting. All these meetings are pretty much of a kind. The boss makes a few comments and then subordinate managers take turns telling the boss what’s happening in each of their areas of responsibility. When Manager D is speaking his piece, you might see Manager G, a bit further down the table, making a few notes. I’ve come to suspect that the notes almost never have anything to do with what others are saying at the meeting; rather Manager G is making notes for her own few minutes of addressing the boss. Managers who have already had their moment in the sun affect a passive listening posture that is very close to Asleep. When the managers stand up and exit the room they will not typically see each other till the next status meeting.

The status meeting I’ve portrayed is not really a meeting at all; it’s a ceremony. At a real meeting, N people put their heads together to arrive at some conclusion or to take some new direction that requires the input and participation of all. Taking turns talking to the boss is not a meeting in this sense. It is, rather, a ritual that acknowledges and celebrates the boss-ness of the boss. There is need for ritual in business, I guess, but let’s at least understand that the weekly status ceremony is not really a meeting.

And the Management Team is not really a team. A team is a group of people who have joint responsibility for -- and joint ownership of -- one or more work products. People who own nothing in common may be called a “team,” but they aren’t. This is not to say that companies never form real management teams, only that they do so too rarely. Most of what are called Management Teams are a mockery of the team concept.

When you find a real management team in action, there are a handful of managers who run their respective subgroups together. People in the subgroups are aware that their bosses are spending a lot of time with each other. (Sometimes they even complain about this: their past experience has accustomed them to a manager who is alone in his/her office for much of the day, and therefore more available to them.) Decisions are made by the team and belong to the team. Responsibility and accountability are spread over the management team, just as they are in the lower-echelon teams that work for them.

This modest diffusing of accountability is the “problem” cited by organizations that allow no real management teams. They trumpet the advantages of having each manager entirely responsible for whatever is allocated to him/her. The flip side of this simplistic accountability scheme is managerial isolation.

Keep your eye on the white space

In the previous chapter, I asked the question Where does change take place? I suggested that since organizational learning and change are so closely allied, your change center would turn out to be your learning center. And I further suggested that all transformational change and learning take place in the middle of the hierarchy. But where in the middle? My precise answer is that change and learning take place in the white space at the middle of the org chart.

Significant organizational learning can’t happen in isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common boss.

Companies that are best at organizational learning have vital, communicative white space. This is true all up and down the hierarchy, but particularly at the middle. The white space between peer middle managers is where reinvention happens. If the white space is not conducive of communication and joint responsibility, reinvention doesn’t happen at all.

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