Roll the Stone
 (of Mediocrity) Away

As a consultant, I sometimes feel like a morbid ambulance chaser. I make a career from working with organizations with serious problems. Now, some problems I don't mind — we all make mistakes. But some organizations seem trapped in a sisyphean cycle of not just making mistakes but repeating the same mistakes again and again. For example:

• They make and have to undo poor senior appointments.
• They embark on quixotic, ill-thought-out campaigns.
• They set unachievable and 
un-credible service goals.

I'm less keen on working with these organizations. They seem dispirited and are frankly dispiriting to work with. Yet other organizations can make mistakes, even lots of mistakes, and still produce outstanding results. I call these organizations "learning organizations," and it's a pleasure to work with them — there's a sense of progress every time.

You've probably heard the term "learning organization" before. But what does it actually mean? For Peter Senge, who coined the phrase, "learning organization" means something very specific. He talks about "the continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into knowledge — accessible to the whole organization, and relevant to its core purpose" from "The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization."

There are some key and challenging ideas present in that definition. It's about constantly 
trying new approaches even when things seem to work and turning that experience into something that everyone can use, with a very 
specific purpose — to deliver on the mission.

(If you're interested in Senge's broader theories, he expanded his ideas in a second book, "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization.")

Being a learning organization isn't about having cool, fun offices, or lots of training for staff, or formal policies for everything — and it's never about having an online knowledge management system. (That last item can bring an organization to its knees financially and intellectually. Somehow IT and learning hardly ever seem to match up in real life.)

Learning organizations are about cultures and a way of doing things that is empowering. Leaders can help create such cultures. It's simple. But as author and Harvard Business School professor John Kotter says, "It's not even about that most beloved of CEO projects — strategy."

"The central issue [for organizational success] is never strategy, structure, culture or systems," Kotter is quoted as saying. "The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people and organizations."

So how do you work at becoming a learning organization? Here's my checklist of five characteristics drawing on Senge's work and my own thinking and experience. I also added some examples of real charities working at becoming learning organizations.

Do you continuously test your beliefs and experience?

Specifically, are you willing to examine and challenge your sacred cows — not just during challenging times, but also when things seem to be going well? What kinds of structures have you designed for this testing? When people raise challenges or even question received wisdom, is there a tendency to "shoot the messenger"? To succeed in learning, you have to be prepared to systematically and regularly test every aspect of your operation — and that can feel very uncomfortable.

A while back, I ran the world's first Sacred Cow Bar B Que with Amnesty International's board and senior leadership team. This was literally a meal in the middle of a planning workshop. The deal was the participants only got something to eat if they listed on a Post-it some fundamental aspect of Amnesty's strategy they were prepared to review after lunch. They had to hand it over to the chef — me — to get any food.

At first, people thought it was a joke. But driven by the smell of cooking — and a premeditated absence of any other nutrition — participants gradually came forward with "fundamental principles" they were prepared to at least challenge. As part of the process, Amnesty re-examined its strategy of not taking money from governments, not allowing sections to work on domestic human rights issues, etc. And changes were made, as well as principles reconfirmed. I recommend a Sacred Cow meeting once a year at least.

Do you review results?

Learning organizations make sure they review outcomes and the processes that lead to the outcomes. Of course it's often easier to review BIG issues. But a key factor in organizational learning is the ability to review all action in a systematic way that produces positive change for the next time — so creating a virtuous cycle.

This involves the ability to analyze events and activities without seeking to attribute blame or praise. An additional payoff, if you run a blame-free analysis, is that individuals are more inclined to "confess" to mistakes and misjudgments rather than defend themselves and their actions.

When working with the British Red Cross on fundraising during the London bombings in 2005, I came to understand the value of its wonderful "after-action review" process. It involves asking three simple questions after any activity.

• What actually happened?
• What was supposed to happen?
• Why was there a difference?

Try these questions the next time you're trying to analyze and learn from a project — regardless of whether it worked or not. Notice the focus on facts rather than opinion. And notice especially the absence of a "blame" question! "Why" is a much more powerful interrogative than "who" when you're trying to create learning.

UNICEF uses a similar technique of asking "why" five times to get to a root cause of something. Try it with something as simple as: "Why was our meeting so disorganized?" "Why" might produce "because we didn't have time to prepare." Another "why" drives down to the next level of cause — "because we're understaffed," etc. Whatever your answer, ask "why was that" until you come up with a profound cause rather than a symptom.

Are you producing 
knowledge?

Knowledge, in this case, means the capacity for turning data into effective action. This can involve turning implicit knowledge — stuff in people's heads — to explicit knowledge — ideas expressed publicly as a system. You're a knowledge creator if you feel as if what you know is qualitatively different — "value-added" — from the data you took in.

Knowledge creation also involves consciously creating new capabilities. A good question to ask yourself is if your organization shows capabilities and competencies it didn't have three years ago. Let's be honest — if you're not producing knowledge, then you're probably relying on that hoary old standby of the lazy "best practice." Usually, "best practice" means "what's safe and used to work."

It's like trying to drive by looking in the rear-view mirror — noticing where you've been and what the traffic was like. You also need to look "outside." Some of the best knowledge creation involves taking ideas and experiences from one setting and applying them elsewhere for a completely different use.

Sightsavers, one of my favorite innovative NGOs, worked with McDonald's in India to help make its eye operations faster, more efficient and more quality-standardized. It took knowledge from a completely unrelated field and turned it to its advantage.

LEPRA Health in Action used to deal just with the challenge of leprosy. The bad news from an organizational sustainability point of view was that leprosy was being more or less conquered. However, instead of closing down, LEPRA decided to identify its core competence as dealing with certain kinds of disease and now tackles tuberculosis and other infections.

Is the knowledge shared?

Producing knowledge is great, but it's not enough. A further key challenge is whether the learning is accessible to all staff and stakeholders. Here's a test. Do you hear people walking around saying, "You know, I could have sworn we put out a report on this subject three years ago"? Are there manuals for elegant but unimplemented project-management processes lying untouched? Does the central drive for your IT network have hundreds or maybe thousands of files — some important, some not — with impenetrable names like "finalreport.doc"? If so, maybe you could try some different ways to share knowledge.

You may be able to use storytelling as a way to share knowledge. One of my colleagues, Angela Cluff, is working with UNICEF internationally, helping it produce its global case for philanthropic support. UNICEF is, not unreasonably, an organization committed to accuracy and transparency. However, instead of the usual dry, schematic document explaining how worthy UNICEF and its work are, it uses stories and storytelling as a core technique to share ideas and principles across the organization and then with donors.

Is the learning relevant?

Charities aren't universities. They're not there to create learning simply for learning's sake. (Though that's not a bad thing!) To be accountable, charities have to demonstrate the relevance of the time and resources they invest. In some organizations, training and development are seen essentially as perks — ways to reward and motivate staff. In my view that's not enough.

Equally, don't simply screen out training in new ideas or techniques simply on a short-term, utilitarian basis. Ask yourself: Is this learning aimed at developing or defining how people can contribute to the organization's core purpose? Can people make use of it — if not now, then in the long term? Will it help us deliver on 
our mission?

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution spends huge sums of money on training and development. Its learning center in Poole, U.K., is one of the best purpose-built educational settings I know. It has an enormous pool and wave machine in which it can literally create hurricanes to practice rescues in the most extreme conditions imaginable. That's good.

But what's even better is that much of this training is directed not at full-time staff, but at volunteers whose contributions sit at the center of RNLI's ethos. It's the commitment to volunteers at the highest level that distinguishes it as an outstanding learning 
organization.

So how good are you?

All this is very interesting. But here's the killer question. How do you score on these five dimensions? Give yourself a score from 1-5 on each dimension in table 1 in the upper right of this page.

Now add up your score, and follow my interpretation in table 2.

You can take it from there. And if you have any examples of learning in your organization or in others, let me know. I'd love to share them. Contact me at b.ross@managementcentre.co.uk. FS

Bernard Ross is director of The Management Centre and author of the Bernard Ross Blog. Reach him at b.ross@managementcentre.co.uk or follow him on Twitter at @bernardrossmc.