Family Learning

What we mean by learning organization is an organization that can acquire, generate and create new knowledge and also integrate that knowledge to adapt to the environment. So, what we know, is that if your organization is not there yet, there’s a few things you can do as a leader. First of all, you can create a supportive environment. This is going to enable creative ideas to emerge; and what we want, is not only to tolerate mistake but also to welcome them, so we can learn from them. The second thing that we can do is to shift the team’s focus from a problem-solving perspective to an inquisitive mindset. The first thing we can do is to include some small practices, such as after-action review. This enables us to ask four questions after each milestone and each project. The first thing we want to ask the team is; what did we set out to do? What did we actually do? And what was the difference, where was the gap? The fourth question we want to ask is, what should we do the next time? And this one is two-fold. So, we want to make sure that we keep on doing what worked, and maybe even increase what was good. We also want to highlight what we could do differently and what we need to improve on. And the last thing that you can do as a leader is to also, yourself, become more learning oriented. So, then you can have a more learning mindset; and make sure that you learn and practice that muscle. So, if it is not necessarily something that you have developed or have done in the past, you can start small. You can start by identifying one thing that you would like to know a bit more about and share it with your team. As an example, it could be, that you know about agile methodology in the workplace and you want to dig a bit more to understand the research behind it, what companies do with this methodology and how they use it. It’s not to build a business case, it to have your mindset around it and share it with your team. You never know when the next snippet of information is going to lead you to the big change and a greater impact in your organization.