Learning Organization - Creating a Learning Organization and Leading it

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Knowledge economy, teamwork, Top management, learning, study, practise, I learned something, Jack Welch, Boston Celtics

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Exhibit 1
Jack Welch and Alignment of Mental Models

Jack Welch believes that, the art of running a business is to assume that all important decision makers have access to precisely the same set of facts. If that happens, he is confident that they will reach roughly the same conclusion about how to deal with a business issue. Here by ensuring that the same information was reaching all the decision makers, Jack Welch was ensuring that all the decision makers were operating based on the same "Mental models." At his Corporate executive council meetings he used to ensure that his key leaders at GE exchanged their ideas. This exchange he used to consider as learning. By exchanging their ideas the leaders at GE were forming the same "Mental models." GE relies heavily on employee surveys as part of its learning culture. What is GE doing here? It is ensuring that Leaders at the top are getting a grasp of "Mental models" prevalent in the organization.

Source: ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).

Real work in the organizations is done by teams and not lone individuals. So for organizations to be effective, they need effective teams. Teams are supposed to operate at a higher level of intelligence than the intelligence level of their members. But often they operate at far lower level of intelligence than that of individual members. Further worrying fact is these teams organize and run themselves in such a way that they avoid learning. The cost of this neglected learning can be high. To avoid high costs and to operate at their true potential levels, teams have to continually learn. But defensive routines are often the bane of team learning. People get defensive whenever they are encouraged to open up.

According to Argyris, defensive routines are entrenched habits we use to protect ourselves from the embarrassment and threat that come with exposing our thinking. People use defensive routines as protective shell around deepest assumptions. They employ defensive mechanisms to protect themselves from pain that occurs when these assumptions are questioned or the thinking behind these assumptions is exposed. While these defensive routines protect the people from pain, they will also block them from learning about the causes of the pain.

How to overcome them? There are two ways. First is to diminish the emotional threat that causes defensive behavior. Coach or the leader overlooking team learning has to find what is causing defensive behavior. Then he should marginalize that threat. The second way to reduce defensiveness is to make the defensive routines more discussable. Leaders must learn to confront and discuss defensiveness without again arousing defensiveness. Leaders can adopt self disclosure as a primary step to confront defensiveness. They can start with an attempt to identify reasons for their own defensiveness. While exploring the causes, they can invite members for joint inquiry. Refer exhibit 2 to see how team learning has helped a basket ball team.

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