Stephen Billing’s Blog

To ask whether organisations can learn is to ponder on the very nature of organisations themselves.

The previous post identified the difference between organisational learning – people learning in an organisational context, and learning organisations – where the organisation itself is seen as being able to learn.

Let’s take the latter argument that organisations can learn. If organisations can learn, then this is saying that an organisation is a living organism that has a mind that can think and learn from its experience. If an organisation is to be thought of as a living organism, then you would have to be able to point to its body and its consciousness.  

While one might argue that the top managers of the organisation do the thinking (in the form of strategy) for the organisation it is surely not accurate to say that an organisation is living in the sense that it has consciousness and can think for itself.

After all, an organisation has no physical body (an organisation is only a convenient legal construction) and no mind of its own. The decisions of the organisation are made through interaction between people, such as debate amongst the senior managers.

So, to me, saying that an organisation can learn, i.e. "Let’s create a learning organisation," amounts not only to saying that an organisation is a thing in itself, but to anthropomorphise the organisation – to give it the characteristics of a human being.

But an organisation is neither an inanimate thing, nor is it a physical living being with consciousness, choice and will.

The alternative of thinking that only individuals can learn within organisations is not very appealing either. It implies that individuals make independent autonomous decisions in isolation of others and ignores the impact of social influence and processes.

Hmmm, there must be an alternative.

I am grateful to Ralph Stacey for the stimulus of these ideas in his article "Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People" (subscription required) 

Much of my work recently has been helping people to learn to do things that will be helpful in their jobs. For example, I have been teaching managers such topics (I hesitate to use the word skills!) such as delegation, planning, and problem solving. I am also helping a group of staff to learn effective procedures and how better to handle customers. Additionally I am part of the off-campus faculty team for NZ’s Open Polytechnic, so am currently involved in organisational learning (or learning organisations) from a number of perspectives.

This has led me to think about learning in organisations and a distinction made by Easterby-Smith and Araujo between organisational learning and learning organisations. I am grateful to professor Ralph Stacey for making me aware of this.

The organisational learning school of thought concentrates on individual and collective learning within organisations. It concentrates on understanding the nature and processes of learning, according to Easterby-Smith and Araujo. The learning organisation school on the other hand is thinking about the organisation as a whole and how it can learn so that in the future it is better placed to anticipate and respond to its changing environment than it was previously.

So, this raises the question then, is it possible for organisations to learn? Or is it only possible for individuals to learn within organisations? 

What do you think?

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

This article was published in the Changing Organisations Newsletter ISSN 1174-5576 Num 4: May 2009.

Informal communications – for example gossip over coffee – are what make or break change efforts. A rumour or a concern can so easily be fanned through informal communication into a wildfire of suspicion and resistance. And yet change leaders often concentrate on formal communications (e.g. written) at the expense of informal channels of communications.

My scientific survey tells me that 75% of projects concentrate on formal communications and ignore informal. 75% of change efforts are reputed to fail. You do the maths.

I really think that sponsors of change projects, project managers of change projects, those involved in change project teams and business unit managers have a big problem on their hands.

Even though you may plan the project well, sign off on the risk and issues registers, conduct steering group meetings that are efficient and get through everything on the agenda, deliver the deliverables on time and within budget, and give progress reports to line managers, these are all inputs, not outcomes.

Of most importance to you as a sponsor of a change project are the outcomes. Line managers are most concerned about the impact of the project on their operations and what they will have to do to make it work (i.e. outcomes for their business unit). Project managers and their teams, by contrast, become more concerned about deliverables, which are inputs. Project management structure and planning drives them in this direction – to have all the papers ready for a steering group meeting, for example.

Immediately you can see the dilemma of inputs versus outcomes. Deliverables (a concept invented as a way of measuring progress towards the desired outcomes, i.e. to measure progress of inputs, especially useful for long term projects) include things like project plans, reports on progress, strategy documents, databases, people recruited, leases secured, and equipment purchased. Unfortunately, success in these things is then taken to equate to the success of the project overall.

Project sponsors, through their close alliances with project managers and their teams, also run the risk of being seduced into prioritising deliverables at the expense of outcomes. By contrast, line managers are seldom influenced this way, perhaps because they often don’t develop the same close associations with these project teams.

From a project sponsor’s point of view however, outcomes can only be measured after the change project is implemented. At the same time, project sponsors play a pivotal part in whether the outcomes of the project are achieved or not. They are the ones with relationships with their senior level peers, who secure and commit resources and who provide real world guidance to their project, programme managers and steering groups.

Your project management effectiveness is one component of the solution. And you surely do need good project management, make no mistake. You also need the right mix of technical skills on the team. But good project management and good technical skills are often seen as the whole story. In reality they are only part of the mix. In order to achieve the outcomes you desire, you also need to make sure that the right range of views have been incorporated into the decision making, and that the shadow conversations have been taken into account.

So one thing that you can do as sponsor of a change project is to keep in touch (perhaps informally, and definitely with an open mind) with the line managers. Project managers would also do well to adopt the same approach.

The grave danger I am warning you of, is that initiatives live or die in the shadow conversations – over the coffee machines, in the smoking rooms, in the cafeteria, in the corridors, at staff drinks, around the water cooler. And project sponsors, project managers, project teams, and human resources people, typically do not spend their time in those places. Blinding flash of the obvious – if informal communications are so critical to the success of change initiatives, why are all the communications efforts concentrated solely on the formal communications channels?

No wonder the failure rate for change projects is reputed to be so high.