Will Companies Ever Learn?

Most organizations have real structures that limit learning.

There's a tremendous urgency in business today. Everyone is connected to the financial markets, and quarterly results matter more than ever before. That sense of urgency creates a bias for action. And that, in turn, prevents organizations from taking the time to learn. You have this phenomenal asset -- your organization's collective experience -- but this bias for action keeps you from focusing on it.

After all, taking the time to think would mean stopping what you're doing. And you're not rewarded for stopping what you're doing. You're rewarded for doing more. The way that most organizations work is very simple: You think about what you already know, and, using what you already know, you take action. From that action, you get results. And in most organizations, that's where it stops. Either the action worked, or it didn't. If it worked, you do more of it. If it didn't, you try something else. In a learning environment, you ask people to go further: After you get results, you take the time to ask, "Why did we get those results? And how can we use those results to grow what we know?" It's that last loop that people in most organizations feel that they don't have time for.

There are other structural obstacles to learning. In most organizations, "learning" still equals "training." More and more companies have people called "chief learning officers." But, say what you will, what those people really focus on is old-style training. Another obstacle is compensation: Most companies reward people on the basis of individual performance -- so why should anyone focus on collective learning? If you're serious about learning, you have to confront those structural obstacles.

Learning involves both a leadership decision and a way of leading.

The way that we think about leadership, what we expect from leaders, and what leaders demand of themselves -- these things can stop learning in its tracks. The fact is, not all leaders see learning as a way to lead. There are still a lot of leaders who think that their job is to control their organization. And control and learning don't usually mix very well. At the same time, there are plenty of organizations in which followers impose this old style of leadership on themselves. New-style leaders will go to their people and say, "Here's a direction that I'm interested in exploring, but I need your best thinking about it." Too often, the response from people is "You're supposed to tell us! You mean that you don't know?" Again, it's hard for an organization to be committed to learning when its people expect to be told what to do.

This is a real dilemma: If you go all the way toward a command-and-control style of leadership, then learning simply can't occur. At the same time, learning can't occur without some kind of direction. So lots of leaders are caught between "control" and "direction."

Corridors are essential for productive learning.

Where do you see a solution to the leadership dilemma? You see it in companies that are explicit about their values -- companies that hold constructive conversations about their mission, their core strategies, the core competencies of their people. Those fundamentals provide what I call "corridors" -- spaces within which people can move. People know that they can learn and work within those corridors, so managers spend a lot less time trying to chase down people who are outside the "appropriate" space.

Think of it this way: Imagine a building with no hallways. If you're in that building, it's very difficult to find out where you're going, or what direction you're moving in. You find yourself wandering around more, and you have to check with more people more often just to see if you're headed in the right direction. You have to stop and look at different signposts to know where you are. To me, that describes a company that can't articulate clearly to its people what it stands for. So a company needs to provide corridors: "Here's our purpose, here are our values, here's how we do things, here are the core strategies that we're focusing on, and here's what people need to do to succeed here." People who work in a company without those corridors end up wandering around. They spend time on what they think are constructive activities, but they never really know whether they're focusing on the right things -- things that are essential to the future of the business.

Having those kinds of corridors in a company is good both for leaders and for followers. Corridors give people informal guidance -- a sense of whether they're in the right space, going in the right direction. People don't have to ask for directions all the time. They don't have to check to see whether what they're working on is relevant or not. They don't get nailed for doing things that aren't "on strategy." They have freedom to act -- and their leaders don't have to exert very much command-and-control authority. Providing corridors gives both sides the freedom to act and to learn. In my experience, a learning environment is neither completely open nor completely boundary-less. But it does have corridors -- spaces that are well defined, clearly marked, and designed to lead people in the right direction. That way, followers won't get lost, and leaders won't have to micromanage them.