By Clark Quinn

There’s a famous saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast (with various attributions). The important element, then, is making sure that culture and strategy are aligned. Which isn’t likely to be the case. What to do?

Ultimately, informal learning is about creating a learning culture. Which isn’t likely where we start, or this exercise isn’t needed. So, what does a learning culture entail? A place where it’s safe to share, where we contribute to each other voluntarily, and take contributions as well. It’s also a place where experimentation is expected, and failure is for learning from. There’s also not only a regular input of information, but ways to get to what’s needed. Critically, it’s where leaders walk the walk as well as talk the talk. How do we get there?

First, we need to identify the culture we have. There are tools to do so, e.g. Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino’s 2006 Harvard Business Review article which provides questions to assess your organization. It also points to the direction you’d like to go. Then, of course, you have to figure out how to get there.

Mark Britz & James Tyer, in their book Social By Design, suggest that systems lead to behaviors which lead to beliefs which determine culture. Which suggests that the systems in place determine the rest. Certainly, ‘the way things are done here is a critical part of determining the culture. If the way things are done is by hierarchical decision making, you’re not going to see social flourishing. If, instead, the decision-making process is open and transparent, where everyone has access to the information and a chance to provide input, there’s more likely to be the opportunity and desire for learning.

Which suggests that the policies about how things are done matter. You’ve probably seen organizations that are collaborative, perhaps to a fault. Then others that are directive, perhaps similarly overbearing. You want to be moving in a direction to more unfettered thinking and innovation. Technology can help, if we design it to align with how we think, work, and learn. For instance, artificial intelligence (particularly Large Language Models) is all the rage, but is demonstrably flawed. We can use it, in particular ways. That takes leadership.

The leadership approach proposed by Matt Richter and colleagues talks about contextual leadership; when to be collaborative, when to be decisive, and when to just execute on the known.  To successfully move to a learning organization, I argue that learning & development needs to lead the way. In this case, it’s internally learning and implementing the practices, before taking it outside. It can be collaborative, convincing the L&D unit to start working in these ways. Critically, I argue that the L&D unit leader needs to model the performance desired: sharing mistakes and learning, taking feedback and offering it, and making it safe for others to share.

Overall, the point is to start looking at the ways in which things are done, and find ways to make them more conducive to participation and learning. Most importantly, folks have to feel that their input is valuable. If they believe it, they’ll share (though they then may ask for more return on their investment ;). That’s not a bad thing, overall, because when everyone’s working together, the benefits should flow and thus there should be returns on those gains. It’s about creating a dynamic learning environment where individuals, communities, and the organization as a whole are learning and improving. That’s the goal, and the path is definitely ‘through’, not over or around. It’s always a probabilistic game, requiring persistence, but when you align the systems and behaviors with the cultural goal, you have a better chance of getting there.