Agile Learning
Dec 26th, 2009 | By Gene A. Wright | Category: Breakout Topics, Feature, Knowledge Management, LeadershipFrom an Article in Chief Learning Officer
Agile Learning: Thriving in the New Normal
From the article
“Organizational learning agility is an enterprise capability that requires deliberate and systematic design, including essential cultural, structural, process and technology-support elements. Based on studies from TRClark, a research, consulting and training company, there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations:
1. Intelligence function: The capacity of an organization to survey and interpret its entire business ecosystem, including both internal and external competitive environments. The intelligence function interprets information for the strategy function, which feeds the learning function.
2. Learning mindset: The prevailing assumptions, beliefs and dispositions relating to the way people learn.
3. Leadership behavior: The dominant patterns of leadership within an organization.
4. Organizational support: The processes, systems, structures and other forms of support that organizations provide to help employees in their formal and informal learning and execution activities.
5. Learning technology: The forms of technology employed to enable learning at both individual and organizational levels.”
This article presents a number of important ideas about what organizations need to do to compete.
The article goes on to explain each of the five factors.
What do you think?
In general, the first four factors seem to be more guided by the senior leadership and culture of the company than actual work of knowledge management. The fifth factor, is the one where the people who do actual work within the company can contribute. Therein, Learning Technology consists of the virtual place of learning and the resultant efficiency and effectiveness of the learning process it supports. Although the article is brief it yields some good thoughts. One in particular that I like is how leadership is defined more as learning and adapting than a result of current knowledge or competency.
I think all the five factors listed above are very important that can hinder the learning agility. For instance, organizational support is a key thing. If the Organization does not have the processes and systems setup, it can be very hard. Also, I think the mindset and policies of the company towards their employees. Some companies mandate that their employees have to be up to date with technology and gives all sort of support for the growth. What I heard is in Qualcom, they say even high level project managers should be involved from a technical perspective rather just being a manager. With recession, I do see some companies cutting back on training and inhibiting the future growth of their employees as well as the company’s
This is a great way to get leaders in a proactive mindset, allowing them to take advantage of the organizations that focus too much on the past and concentrate on following market/industry trends. All companies will face challenges when trying to focus on the five factors explained in this article, but each is critical in learning above the speed of change. During a time of increased competitiveness, leaders much take the time to refocus and integrate the appropriate strategies for future success.
Historically, in the financial industry, where these five factors are important (more important of all is understanding the business “ecosystem”), many bankers relied on old habits when reviewing credit relationships. I think that the recent economic downturn has caused all banks to reevalute their educational programs and become much more proactive.
To me the most striking part of the article deals with Leadership Behavior, as far the leader/manager/boss needs to become something less of an expert on something and more of an expert learner. Too often I hear relatives and friends working in a much more rigid/traditional business then myself complain about new methods they are expected to embrace with little top down leadership on how to adopt them. I think in any industry change is happening rapidly, and the belief that you can remain an expert without adaptive and responsive learning is old and outdated. Management simply cannot be the know all source. As management becomes comfortable showing that they too must learn and relearn over and over again to compete in the permanently “new” workplace they can set the pace for improvement of any organization. I think that a manager who can say “we need to learn to work like this, and I will help us all figure it out” is way better then one who just sends out a memo.
This was a great article and a topic that crosses my mind on a daily basis. As a student in and out of the classroom, I am always learning. Working for a company with an older workforce makes the importance of education and the ability to learn so much more obvious. The article stated, “Organizations must accelerate knowledge cycles to keep pace with competitive cycles.” This is a very true statement in my opinion. With the rate of advancement, advancing…people need to be equipped with the capability to perform at 100% in critical times. I also liked how the article didn’t necessarily rank the five factors because they are all equally important and should be strived for rather I think it’s interesting about the comments on leadership; “Although some leading companies are making significant gains in various aspects of learning agility, few are excelling in all five factors. There simply isn’t a more important leadership challenge today than to move an organization to higher levels of learning agility” I believe that leaders are not always leaders however developed. The followers help create leaders and with such a competitive employment environment, people are working less together. I believe this is on it’s way up to improving. Now more than ever, education is important and many people are taking advantage of the time and government support to do so. I thought this article was very powerful and I will be using some of this information on a current project. Thanks for posting this!