 Do we ever learn as a global organization?
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BC
I found a new gem this year, encyclopaedia, a site dedicated to “exploring the theory and practice of informal education, lifelong learning and social action.” In these tough economic times it seems like every organization is looking for the right change to their strategy to allow them to become more competitive. If you go to the encyclopaedia site and click on “thinkers” and then click on Chris Argyris you learn about one of the founding authors for the principles governing a learning organization. Chris Argyris became famous thanks to Peter Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline, The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.” Companies now use this term, “learning organization” in many different ways. I want to explore two principles presented by Dr. Argyris, single and double-loop learning.
Single loop learning occurs while performing a defined procedure over and over and recognizing that you could perform that procedure more efficiently if you either changed a step or removed a step. This is reminiscent of “lean manufacturing” and “six sigma” thinking in terms of evaluating a process and identifying inefficiencies or inaccuracies and fixing them. This is a form of learning. You are identifying errors in your process and making corrections. You are learning.
However, what triggered the start of the process in the first place? What is the governing variable, rule or policy that drives the process? Why are you even performing this process? This type of reflection on the reasons why you are doing something a particular way is referred to as double loop learning.
I recently heard a story presented by Tom Kelley from Ideo who sat in an airport in France and watched as people attempted to bring their luggage through a turnstile. There was no way to easily get the luggage through. He observed people throw their luggage over the turnstile or hand it over to a friend. People looked at the situation and learned how to complete the task of getting the luggage over the turnstile. However, did anyone who worked for the airport ever look at the turnstile and ask, why do we have a gate system at an airport that does not permit one to get their luggage through? For that matter does anyone in the Paris airport care? Is there another way? This is the innovative process, reflecting on why something is done a certain way and questioning the entire process. This is double loop learning. It takes courage and creativity.
Ok, so let’s take a look at how online social networks work and whether they encourage single loop or double loop learning. There is a lot of talk in the learning and development community abouto user driven content development as opposed to content developed by expert instructional designers. On a blog, like this one, or a wiki or a social networking site, content is developed rapidly and in response to a query or simply an innovative thought. Someone presents an idea. Ten people reflect on that idea and respond. Someone picks up on one of the responses and presents a new idea. If this process flows through an organization of 10,000 or 100,000 employees will the organization learn to work differently. They might but how will this type of learning environment impact the processes in the organization? If management empowers their employees to make constant changes to processes based on collective intelligence tools like wikipedia then at one point you might be able to say that the organization is in fact learning.
Unfortunately most organizations are built on the traditional hierarchical top down model where the CEO and his/her senior staff develop and advocate their strategy and cascade that strategy down to the underlings. The underlings have to figure out how to develop a process to support the strategy. Rarely do the underlings have the opportunity to question the strategies, chat with a few hundred other employees and dynamically take the organization down a different path. This would make for a very interesting experiment for a medium size organization to allow the employees to set strategy by applying principles of collective intelligence to shape the direction of the company.
Conclusion: Simply adding a social networking tool into an organization will not necessarily lead to the development of a learning organization that employees double loop learning. The organization has to encourage inquiry and freedom to express ideas and when an idea takes root through the collective social networking space to provide the environment in which those ideas can transform into actions.