02: Organizational Learning

Learning to Unlearn

by

 

Business Man with Ball and Chain
Source: Vibe Images/Shutterstock

Nothing kills a moment of corporate creativity more than this phrase:  “That’s not the way we do things around here.” Once it is issued, it ensures that the status quo, no matter how bad that may be, will remain untouched and, most importantly, unchanged. It is a phrase that is usually uttered by those working within a specific power-brokering segment of an organization.

How is this a power play?

When one part of an organization refuses to move, it ensures that the rest of the organization remains anchored in the past, is resistant to change, and presents no opportunity for creativity or new learning.

How can true learning organizations respond to this type of resistance?

They need to unlearn and let go of that which is holding them back.

According to Vijay Govindarajan, the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, organizations must divest themselves of old ideas and methodologies even though these may be the very things that made the organization great in the first place. In order to move forward, Govindarajan states that organizations must let go of what has been learned in the past.

Click Here to Read the Article

From a Human Resources perspective, Govindarajan’s concept can create great organizational learning opportunities if the Human Resources function has a leadership role.  Human Resources must lead with powerful impact, in order to push the change agenda both forward and throughout the entire organization.

Click Here to Read the Article

Not only must the Human Resources professional be able to provide incentives that pull people forward into change, we must also be vigilant in stopping what is sometimes a cultural and entrenched longing for both the past and not so recent past by helping people to let go of that huge anchor which is represented by the status quo.  We can do well to observe the past, but we must leave it behind and let it go in order to move forward and learn what is new and uncomfortable and create a future that does not yet exist.

To do this, the Human Resources professional needs to be brave.

The brave Human Resources professional will be the leader who will help to break the chain of the status quo, discard the anchor to the past, and set forward, freely, into an uncharted future full of greatness and new learning.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is the difference between ‘unlearning’ and forgetting in the context of employee training and development?
  2. Do you agree with Vijay Govindarajan’s perspective that creativity comes by having to unlearn what was learned in the past? Why or why not?
  3. What do you perceive as the biggest barriers to bringing new learning, creativity, and fresh ideas into an organization from a Human Resources perspective?
  4. Have you worked with someone who was resistant to learning something new? What was that experience like for you? How did it influence your own work and learning experiences?

Why Aren’t We Sharing What We Learn?

by
shutterstock_299587979
Source: Lightspring/Shutterstock

In our Human Resource studies related to Training and Development, we read and hear about collaborative learning and systems thinking as key concepts and drivers for the learning organization.  Systems thinking, in particular, brings forward the need for understanding organizational and management issues in context with each other. Research and analysis are all part of systems thinking which allow for organizations to learn and to grow using evidence based methodologies. It seems, however, that there is a continuing divide between the learning that business organizations achieve based on management research and the learning that is produced in post-secondary communities, based on purely academic research.

This divide is explored in an interesting article, by Fiona McQuarrie.

  Click here to read the article

Isn’t it time for research that results in management learning and research that results in academic learning to come together and be shared in order to be truly collaborative?  Ms. McQuarrie’s article speaks very clearly to the need for all of us to start communicating about what we have learned, so that we move out of a silo-based mentality that hoards information and into a collaborative, shared learning community that benefits all members of our respective academic, management, and Human Resources related constituencies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How will you apply what you have learned through research in your HR studies into practical application as an HR professional?
  2. What benefit does academic research bring to the Human Resources profession?
  3. How should organizations share research based learning inside and outside their respective communities?
  4. Where can you access current Human Resources related research that provides leading edge learning?