Last week we got real with the fact that learning is hard.
Today I want to talk about how this is amplified in a work context.
My friend, Khalid Halim, is an executive coach to CEOs of venture-backed companies. He thinks deeply about human performance, emotion, and interaction.
I recently re-read a feature on him in First Round Review - Hypergrowth and the Law of Startup Physics.
He explores the idea that companies and people grow at different rates — and what this tension means for how both will break while scaling.
In Khalid's experience, even incredibly talented people at fast-growing companies fall behind for two primary reasons:
Ego.
Company structure.
My 3 favorite suggestions to solve this are:
Talking about your last day first - sitting down with a new hire to pledge. You, as the leader, make two pledges: one to the continued growth of your new hire and the other to the company (and investors) for its continued growth. You explain to your new hire that those two promises won't connect at some point, and you both commit to having a conversation about what's next when that happens.
Peak positive emotions - we operate at our best when we have peak positive emotions, which come from outside our work - connecting with others, sleeping well, taking a vacation. Seek more of this out.
Repair mode - related to the above point, our body has two modes on a cellular level: growth and repair. "It doesn't go into repair mode if it has an unlimited supply of growth and fuel.”
Read the full feature to get more of Khalid’s insights.
This made me think about tacit knowledge and the importance of institutional learning in organizations.
How To Make Human Growth = Company Growth
Arie de Geus defines institutional learning as:
“the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models of their company, their markets, and their competitors.”
Decision-making in an organization is a learning process
We must constantly update our knowledge with new data to apply judgment to new decisions. The problem is the speed of this process is slow. The lowest common denominator is the learning level of the team. Anyone who has been part of “decisions by consensus” knows what I mean.
According to De Geus, natural learning by management as a team is inefficient for three reasons:
individuals can only deal with 3 or 4 variables at a time, through 1 or 2 time iterations at a maximum
in complex systems, cause and effect are separated in time and space
we have trouble filtering for relevant information
At the same time, management have the power to act. As we’ve seen, learning by doing is a critical part of the Circle of Learning.
Team learning by those with the power to act is the only relevant learning
The best learning occurs in teams that accept that their whole is greater than the sum of their parts and can evidence this through actions. Therefore we need to focus our efforts on managers and above, and find better ways to accelerate learning through the process of making decisions.
De Geus argues that we need interventions aided by transitional objects such as consultants and computers.
We can accelerate the team learning of managers
One powerful suggestion is to avoid predictions ("will X happen?") and instead answer the question, "what will we do if X happens?"
A related approach is to use transitional objects in games to draw out the team's model of reality (not reality itself, for this is too complex to capture). Transitional objects are representations of the real world (like how a child learns about others by interacting with a doll). They can take the form of outside parties, like consultants, or of information repositories, like computers, databases or mindmaps, or a combination of both.
Using games and transitional objects works like this:
the starting point is the sum of the individual members' mental models brought out either through co-creation (brainstorming) or interviews (by consultants).
through this process, a map of the perceived reality is created, and a new common language is developed.
as the implicit knowledge of each member becomes explicit, his or her mental model becomes the building block of the organization's learning culture.
individual members can then compare their mental model with the co-created model of the team and update either (or both) accordingly until the shared model is adopted by all.
We see this play out in our work with clients at Curious Lion (our discovery process is very interview-heavy) and even in how we work as a team ourselves. Below is an example of a recent team activity to co-create a framework for measuring the health of a learning culture.
What can you apply this to?
We’ve seen successful use of this approach in a number of scenarios at clients:
deal reviews on key accounts by sales teams.
task forces working on special projects.
monthly manager meetings.
leadership team offsites.
You can apply this top any activity that involves decision-making, benefits from a diversity of viewpoints and has the implicit goal of making the organization better and the connections between people stronger.
Which companies does this work best in?
Influencing our work on measuring learning culture, De Geus shares two organizational characteristics that influence the success of an approach like this:
Teams with flexible, open communication channels will learn faster.
Autocratic institutions will learn faster or not at all - relying on the ability of one or two leaders is a risky bet.
What kind of an organization are you?
As you ponder that, consider also the business imperative of getting this right.
I’ll leave it to Arie De Geus for the final word:
“The only competitive advantage the company of the future will have is its managers’ ability to learn faster than their competitors. So the companies that succeed will be those that continually nudge their managers towards revising their views of the world.”