Learning by design - organizational learning - The Mandate for Learning

Chief Executive, The, July-August, 1995

Garvin's emphasis on broad skills is critical because, while many companies do have pockets of learning - an R&D center, a planning function, a training and development organization - these isolated centers don't go nearly far enough. To Garvin, a learning organization's capacity to learn is evident in and across all functions and ranks; learning is used consciously to advance the goals of the entire enterprise.

Garvin's definition implies that learning is a process organizations can manage. Recently, he has been working with a team of Arthur D. Little consultants to develop and test a model that demonstrates just how learning management can work. Their model breaks the learning process into two separate activity cycles: one in which the organization applies what it's learned to something new, and one in which the organization learns how to learn better. Each cycle includes four phases:

* Shared awareness. Employees focus on obtaining new information and insights.

* Common understanding. New information is widely distributed, and consensus develops around its interpretation.

* Aligned action. Common understanding is incorporated into behavior.

* Collective review. Employees review what they've accomplished and distill what they've learned.

In true learning organizations, says Garvin, the learning process takes place continually, in a coordinated and directed manner that serves the enterprise's larger purposes. "Organizations learn when learning becomes the focus of management attention," explains Ranaganath Nayak, a senior vice president at Arthur D. Little and head of the firm's Task Force on Learning Organizations. "And they learn effectively when learning happens by design in areas that improve performance and at a rate that outstrips the competition's. To do that, management needs to think about how organizations learn, what inhibits learning, and what can enable it."

How Organizations Learn

Learning organizations start by building an awareness of learning's importance and finding opportunities to learn. These companies constantly scan their own environments - inside and outside the organization - searching for anomalies, unusual facts, problems to be solved, opportunities, and other triggers for learning. For example:

* In a variant of benchmarking, Milliken, a leading U.S. apparel maker, uses a process it calls SIS (steal ideas shamelessly), dispatching teams of eagle-eyed employees to other organizations in search of useful information. Such tactics have helped Milliken remain a savvy competitor and market leader in an industry that's been all but overwhelmed by imports.

* At Motorola, top managers - including the CEO - periodically conduct extended, one-on-one interviews with customers. The company's Baldrige Award is testament to the fact that this practice has had a major impact on Motorola's quality management.

* L.L. Bean holds periodic Quality Forums where employees at all levels report on their business-process improvement projects and meet with experts from both inside and outside the company to hear the latest theories about such topics as quality and productivity and such business processes as order fulfillment. The result: significant gains in productivity and growing skills at managing projects.