Stories

Tag: organizational learning

  • The idea of a university (updated)

    The idea of a university (updated)

    So I’m reading John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which begins by asserting that the university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge”. I’m fascinated by the historical context (Catholicism in Protestant England), by the strength and substance of the ideas, and by the narrative style of carefully-constructed arguments. I’m also struck, however, by the centrality of learning as transmission, the line of demarcation between invention and teaching, and the belief that it is possible to know by disconnecting from society (although I acknowledge that concentration and flow tend to require quiet, in a pragmatic sense):

    To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. […] He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. […] It must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement.

    If all three of these characteristics of institutionalized knowledge creation and production no longer align with the demands of the world we live in, what needs to change and how likely is the change to occur within organizations founded on very different ideas and assumptions?

    Newman’s Idea is also crystal-clear with respect to the relationship between the university and the corporation (in his context, the Catholic Church):

    Just as a commander wishes to have tall and well-formed and vigorous soldiers, not from any abstract devotion to the military standard of height or age, but for the purposes of war, and no one thinks it any thing but natural and praiseworthy in him to be contemplating, not abstract qualities, but his own living and breathing men; so, in like manner, when the Church founds a University, she is not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children.

    Through the lens of organizational learning and the need for mission-driven organizations in a knowledge economy to invest in their people, this rationale stands, in my opinion.

    Photo: Aerial view of Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States (oberlin.edu)

  • Unified Knowledge Universe

    Unified Knowledge Universe

    “Knowledge is the economy. What used to be the means has today become the end. Knowledge is a river, not a reservoir. A process, not a product. It’s the pipes that matter, because learning is in the network.” – George Siemens  in Knowing Knowledge (2006)

    Harnessing the proliferation of knowledge systems and the rapid pace of technological change is a key problem for 21st century organizations. When knowledge is more of a deluge than a trickle, old command-control methods of creating, controlling, and distributing knowledge encased in a container view do little to crack how we can tame this flood. How do you scaffold continual improvement in learning and knowledge production to maximize depth, dissemination and impact? A new approach is needed to apply multiple lenses to a specific organizational context.

    What the organization wants to enable, improve and accelerate:

    1. Give decision makers instant, ubiquitous and predictive access to all the knowledge in its universe – and connect it to everywhere.
    2. Rapidly curate, collate and circulate most-current content as a publication (print on demand, ebooks, etc.) when it is thick knowledge, and for everything else as a set of web pages (micro-site or blog), or individual, granular bits of content suitable for embed anywhere.
    3. Accelerate co-construction of new, most-current knowledge using peer review to deliver high-quality case studies, strategies, implementation plans, etc.

    How do you crack this? Here are some of the steps:

    1. Benchmark existing knowledge production workflows and identify bottlenecks, using multiple lenses and mixed methods.
    2. In the short term, fix publishing bottlenecks by improving existing systems (software) and performance support (people).
    3. In the longer view, adopt a total quality management (TQM) approach to build ‘scaffolding’ and ‘pipes’ that maximize production, capture, flow, and impact of high-quality, most-current knowledge production, with everything replicated in a centralized, unstructured repository.

    Multiple lenses are needed as no single way of seeing can unravel the complexity of knowledge flows:

    • The lens of complexity: Systems thinking recognizes that we do not need a full understanding of the constituent objects in order to benchmark, analyze, or make decisions to improve processes, outcomes, and quality.
    • The lens of learning: Learning theory provides the framework to map knowledge flows beyond production to dissemination to impact. The co-construction of knowledge provides a ‘deeper’, less fleeting perspective than conventional social media approaches. More pragmatically, a number of tools from learning and development and education research can be used to benchmark.
    • The lens of talent: Staff lose precious time and experience frustration due to duplication of effort, repetitive tasks, and anxiety due to the risk of errors. They may feel overwhelmed by the complexity and intricacies of multiple systems, as well as by the requirement to learn and adapt to each one. Informal learning communities can bring together in the workflow to identify potential, develop competencies, and drive performance. Hiring, on boarding and handover can be used to identify gaps and improve fitness for purpose.
    • The lens of culture: Determinants of quality through print-centric publishing processes are grounded in a rich cultural legacy, for example. Other specialists (IT, comms, etc.) also have their own, overlapping universes. Correct analysis of these and how they interact is indispensable.
    • The lens of total quality management (TQM): This lens includes quality development, business process improvement (BPI), and risk management. It can help both in the initial diagnosis (process maps) and in designing systems and procedures for continual improvement.
    • The lens of IT: Information technology management includes both agile methods as well as traditional requirements-and-specifications. Although such approaches on their own are unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes, their familiarity may facilitate acceptance and usage of the other lenses.

    The remaining pieces of the puzzle involve standards, mixed methods, and deliverables.

    Unified Knowledge Universe
    Unified Knowledge Universe

    Photo: Lenses rainbow (csaveanu/flickr).

  • Elements of a learning dashboard

    Elements of a learning dashboard

    “What is clear is that a learning rich culture will emphasize informal learning and more open learning designs rather than relying only on formal training approaches. The learning infrastructure consists of all of the formal, informal, and incidental activities, systems, and policies that promote individual, team, and organizational learning and knowledge creation.”

    Elements of a learning dashboard-Watkins

    Source: Watkins, K., 2013. Building a Learning Dashboard. The HR Review 16–21.

  • From communication to education

    From communication to education

    There is of course an intimate relationship between communication and education. In many universities, both sit under the discipline of psychology.

    However, in most international organizations, these tend to be siloed functions. Communication often focuses on external media relations and, in the last few years, has expanded to take on the role of organizing social media presence. Education is reduced to ‘training’ or subsumed under staff (or talent) development, sometimes (but not always) inside of human resources. Worst-case scenario: an organization may not even have a centralized learning function, even though a quick survey would probably reveal that learning, education and training are at the core of its knowledge production and dissemination.

    Communication counts eyeballs, downloads, or retweets.

    Education tracks what is happening behind the eyeballs – and changes it, in measurable ways. This is equally true of the industrial-age classroom (and its organizational corollary, the training workshop) as it is of online learning environments that maximize technology’s amazing economy of effort.

    In a knowledge-driven economy, impact matters more than perception.

    In addition to being ephemeral (especially social media), this is why communication-based approaches feel increasingly superficial.

    Photo: Philadelphia sunrise, 21 April 2013.