Is Learning in Organizations the same as Organizational Learning?
By Nigel Paine
Setting the Context
It is almost a given in corporate learning, that when you work intensely with individuals on their personal learning and skill development, the organization, as a whole, benefits. The learning can be widely disseminated, to improve overall competence; or spread out amongst a few key people ( eg leaders) so that their increased insight will change behavior and there will be an enabling benefit to the whole organization. This assumption has been around for over one hundred years since companies and civil servants first set out to develop their staff.
For the British Civil service this was about minimizing patronage and developing a professional class of administrators who worked to common high standards. For companies, it was to stop the chaos and confusion of early production lines where no-one really knew what they were supposed to be doing. Today, the ability and professionalism of well-drilled competent people, reverberates through much of working life and we have a professional and credentialed cadre delivering focused and competent learning. We have learnt to structure learning effectively, package it, distribute it widely and measure not just what has been memorized, but the impact of that learning on business results. There really isn’t that much incompetence around and when it is stumbled upon, you tend to react with surprise and often disappointment. Specialist knowledge abounds and it is pretty much taken for granted. We have sophisticated tools that direct and support us, and we work inside a web of complex information distribution that puts what we need, when we need it, at our fingertips.
That all sounds like a high watermark of engagement and productivity; and probably seems too good to be true, and indeed in many ways it is! If you read the ruminations of Ted Bauer, a well-known future of work sceptic and iconoclast, you see the approach from a different angle. Bauer’s fieldwork indicates a completely different perspective. He shares insights from the worker’s point of view. He concludes that far from fingertip control and access to unlimited expertise, he sees individuals cut off from their managers by a wall of technology, and under intense pressure to deliver to a high standard with little or no support.
He describes a world where
“instead of managers actually having real, human conversations with the people they manage,… we put everything in a platform… spin out a mobile app, and sell it to executives.” (Bauer 2021)
He believes that you “cannot build employee engagement and trust with software” (Bauer 2021) and the ramifications are fascinating. Harvard Business Review published a 2018 study by Bolino and Thompson, of 238 employees in a range of industries, and asked them to explain why they would accept or refuse help from a co-worker. This was followed up by a study of 500 workers asking them to confirm or deny the results of the first study. Two thirds of the latter study indicated that they preferred to finish their work without assistance from colleagues.
The detailed results match their earlier analysis that there were five fundamental reasons why employees rejected help from their co-workers. The first was a general preference to be self-reliant, and the second was to protect their image. The third was to avoid an obligation to return the favour, the fourth was a suspicion of the co-worker’s motives and finally an assumption that their coworkers were incompetent. In the second study over half the respondents agreed that not asking for help,
“allowed them to be seen as “high potential” employees. Almost 20% said that they normally declined offers of assistance so that they wouldn’t owe their coworkers favors. Nearly 10% said that their coworkers were “out for themselves,” and roughly 8% thought that their coworkers lacked the competence to help finish tasks.” (Bolino, M. 2018)
Although the sample of 700 plus participants is small, the trajectory is very clear. Workers are rewarded for individual effort, there is very little trust between workers, and very little respect and the general culture appears to be competitive, contemptuous, and toxic. And this is in a world of unlimited development, software that enables, directs and nudges individuals to acquire new competences and skills, build deep engagement and motivation with the company and develop high levels of engagement. These two perspectives do not fit neatly together, but expose a fundamental contradiction: if you look from the top down, the working environment has never been more supportive because it is directed by technology that can personalize the experience. If you look from the bottom up, there are basic assumptions about the role of work that are toxic and disempowering.
Building the Framework
To resolve this seeming contradiction, we need to plunge back to the 1990s, specifically the work of the MIT Professor Chris Argyris. Argyris was interested, much more, in how organizations acquired agility and resilience than in the quantum of individual learning. His brilliant work has been subsumed by a general shift over the last twenty years to a focus on individual competence. This has been massively accelerated, in the last five years, by the rise of machine intelligence. There is a rapidly rising expertise and increasing software platforms that have the ability to gather individual performance data, make rapid decisions and personalize the learning experience. This corporate learning nirvana is predicated on three individualizations: just for me, just in time and just the right amount of learning. This model is similar in concept to a modern production line where the relevant parts arrive at the site within minutes of being needed. No costly stock, no wastage and a complex logistics environment that can deliver the goods at the point and moment of need.
In a parallel world, the workforce has no intellectual baggage that has to be carried around until the moment when it is required, or to be constantly topped up so that levels of competence remain high even it the skill cannot be used. At the point of need, the required insight is delivered to the desktop where it can be accessed and applied immediately.
How does this square with the work of Chris Argyris? My central point in this article, is that it does not really align at all. Argyris is seeking what Edgar Schein called a “perpetual learning system” Schein (1985) inside organizations. Argyris works from a different premise:
“That organizational learning is a competence that all organizations should develop… the better organizations are at learning the more likely it is they will be able to detect and correct errors….Also, the more effective organizations are at learning the more likely they will be at being innovative or knowing the limits of their innovation.” (Argyris, C. (1992)
He defines organizational learning as a competence that transcends collections of individual competences, because the organization itself has adapted to absorb, and react to insight and ideas from outside and work quickly on perceived challenges to the whole organizational system collectively not individually. This is systems thinking and transcends a myopic focus individual competence.
If we reflect back on Bolino and Thompson’s research, it is possible to see that the failure to operate for the collective good or to act in the interests of the whole organization is a systems failure not a deficit of individual competence or attitude. Organizations flourish when they get good work from their employees; good work comes from empowerment, sharing and a surfeit of trust that allows people to work productively together and make decisions that are carried into the work system not hoarded for individual recognition and blame.
In the research carried out for my book on learning culture (Paine 2019/2021), it became clear to me that increasing the quantum of learning was not the same as building a learning culture. Argyris defined, in 1992, the kind of organizational structures that define or enable organizational learning irrespective of individual learning systems. Amongst them were: flat, decentralized systems; measures of organizational performance, systems of incentives to promote organizational learning and ideologies associate with such measures such as boundary-crossing, openness and continuous learning. (Argyris 1992: 6)
In a single paragraph Argyris aligns with a range of contemporary thought leaders, Senge and his systems thinking (1990) , Revans and his theory of Action Learning, Schein’s corporate culture analysis and Donald Schön’s focus on reflection and embodied learning. In many ways Argyris is an integral part of an intellectual coalition that built up around the key Universities in Boston, Massachusetts in a fecund period of research on organizational competence from the 1980s to the turn of the century. I have sought to realign towards those early ideas in my own work. My model for a learning culture below emphasizes the conditions for organizational learning:
Conclusions
My research showed that without trust, empowerment and engagement and a leadership that embodies all three, sharing and collaboration simply do not occur. Without collaboration and sharing no learning culture will emerge. You cannot create a learning culture simply by increasing the quantum of learning.
The colleagues in the organizations described in the Bolino and Thompson research do not share or collaborate because the conditions for sharing and collaboration are not present. There is limited trust, no empowerment or engagement and therefore there is an inbuilt resistance to asking or offering help or sharing insight and knowledge. This is clearly a problem in those organizations where opportunities to maximize the impact of the ideas and expertise for their staff are clearly missing; but this is not a learning problem. The optimum quality of work is not going to be delivered, and neither will any insight or accrued knowledge enrich the organization as a whole. This failure of learning that emerged, arises from a failure to address the systemic issues and challenges of corporate culture and how and why people collaborate and share. Argyris predicted as far back as 1992 that there would be a need for twenty-first century organizations to leverage insight in order to thrive or even survive:
“Twenty-first-century corporations will find it hard to survive, let alone flourish, unless they get better work from their employees. This does not necessarily mean harder work or more work. What it does necessarily mean is employees who’ve learned to take active responsibility for their own behavior, develop and share first-rate information about their jobs, and make good use of genuine empowerment to shape lasting solutions to fundamental problems.” (Argyris 1992: 229)
Now, we have to relearn clear lessons that were spotted as challenges decades ago. This will require a realignment of corporate L & D, and a refocusing away from individual learning enablement to the building of an environment where collaboration and sharing are encouraged and permitted to flourish.
One of the first psychologists to focus on adult rather than child development: Robert Kegan switched from a sole focus individual growth to a focus on the potential role of organizations to develop and inspire individuals. He called these, “deliberately developmental organizations” (Kegan 2016). To build these clearly requires a new workforce ecosystem that Altman (2021) defines as:
“a structure focused on value creation for an organization that consists of complementarities and interdependencies. This structure encompasses actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals." (Altman, 2021: 1)
What is urgently required is both a software ecosystem that brings these elements together and the right alignment of professional staff. If we return to Ted Bauer and his anger at the substitution of technology for human engagement, we can see a happy marrying of critical technologies and critical professional staff. Many organizations do not have (for want of a better phrase) a coherent talent operation where the L&D staff, HR, organizational development and internal communications lose their individual power bases in favor of a coherent team that only offers integrated and holistic approaches to building excellence, sharing insight and dealing with complex organizational problem solving.
Until we can do this, we will be in the same dilemma that Bolino draws attention to, and Argyris challenges us to deal with. More learning is just not going to cut it. Perhaps the future of some of our most cherished and impressive organizations, depends on address the issue now, and seeing that building a learning culture is not simply and luxury to acquire down the road, but a fundamental challenge that needs to be addressed now.
Endnotes
Altman E.J. Schwartz, D. 2021 et al. Research Report on Workforce Ecosystems Boston Mass, MIT/Deloitte
Argyris, C. (1992) On Organizational Learning Oxford Blackwell
Bauer, T (2021) “Stop letting managers hide behind tech” Retrieved from Medium 15th September 2021 https://tedbauer2003.medium.com.
Bolino, M. And Thompson P.S. (2018)” Why We Don’t Let Coworkers Help Us, Even When we Need It.” In Harvard Business Review Digital Article March 15th 2018 1-4
Kegan, R. And Lahey, L.L (2016) An everyone culture: Becoming a deliberately developmental organization. Boston Mass. Harvard Business Review Books
Paine, N. (2021) Workplace Learning (2nd Edition) London, Kogan Page
Schein, E. (1985) Organizational Culture and Leadership
Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline New York, Doubleday Publishing
Schön, D, Argyris, C. (1996) On Organizational Learning Reading, Mass., Addison Wesley Pub.
Revans, R. (2011) The ABC of Action Learning London Gower Publishing