Develop the Competencies of a Learning Organization
21 Jan
Today I received the latest newsletter from the Society of Organizational Learning. The newsletter picks up Barack Obama’s call to action and illustrates what competencies separate leading organizations from the rest and what organizations need to focus on in the future if they want to stay competitive. They identify three key competencies, let’s take a look at how Agile principles can help you develop these competencies.
Excel at seeing systems. They recognize basic system phenomena everywhere – limits to success, shifting the burden to the intervener, accidental adversaries. In particular, they see the system independent of organizational boundaries.
Very often people don’t see any purpose in their job or they don’t have a vision that’s pulling them forward. They don’t see how the pieces fit together. Everybody is just concerned with their team or functional department. Silo mentality is the result. In today’s economy it is of vital interest that every employee is thinking like an entrepreneur. In order to do that everybody needs to see how the system works, how everything fits together. Companies need to create learning space in which employees can safely exchange and examine their different perspectives – and challenge them.
In an Agile Organization, teams routinely hold retrospectives. These provide a safe container for reflection, inquiry and discovery. Retrospectives are an ideal tool to foster systems thinking. If projects consist of mutliple teams, try to organize large group retrospectives every so often.
Collaborate across boundaries with ease. They know how to get the whole system in the room and respect the different interests and perspectives of all stakeholders, making it possible to build their social networks and realize breakthrough innovations.
Agile Teams are all about collaboration. They closely collaborate with the customer. They really want to understand what the customers need and why they need it. Agile Teams are also cross-funtional. Various specialists collaborate to create something that none of them could do on their own. Co-located teams know how valuable it is to get the whole system in the room. Call it osmotic communication or ambient awareness, the boost in productivity you will experience by letting teams share a common work space is substantial. Agile Organizations also use social media tools extensively to share information within communities of practice and distributed teams. Wikis, Blogs and Social Tagging are powerful tools to collaborate across physical boundaries.
Move easily from problem solving to creating. Fear and anxiety can definitely motivate action, but rarely does it encourage our best contributions or sustained effort. These leaders are both pragmatic – they’re always prototyping and experimenting – one definition of creating. They are also oriented toward possibility, evoking inspiration and creativity throughout the system.
The iterative way of working provides an ideal foundation for this. Every iteration is like a small experiment. And the retrospective at the end of each iteration lets the team examine if the experiment was succesful and if not, how it needs to adapt. The demonstration at the end of each iteration also provides a valuable opportunity for others to learn. The team can share their ideas, their problems and their accomplishments. And everybody else can provide feedback, ask questions and offer appreciations.
If you want to make this work however you need to create a learning culture. A culture which sees mistakes as an opportunity to learn. A culture in which outrageous ideas are answered with “Why not?”
What are you doing to develop the competencies of a learning organization? Do you have more ideas on how Agile Organizations can help bring about change? Please share them in the comments section.
