How to Create a Intelligent Learning Organization

Almost every organization* [whether it is business, political or governments] works on the principal of concealing mistakes and highlighting only the accomplishments - As a result – improvement becomes impossible as we don't know/hide/ignore the mistakes.

Big breakthroughs* happens when - what was hitherto-impossible meets with - what is desperately needed.

In this permanently VUCA global environment - the way we do business, the types of channels used in selling, marketing and buying, the buyer's-needs/preferences/ desires, the technology is changing so fast that – the future of almost businesses has become kind of un-predictable, at least for long-term.

In this environment only those organizations as well as people would survive, succeed and grow –which becomes Intelligent* Learning organizations/entities/ employees.

The newer job-roles, functions and operations are redefining the education, competencies and skills that we need to remain employed as well as unemployable – as the employable skills of today is already becoming obsolete.

We [hence forth the word we would be used to mean both the people as well as the organizations] – have to continually expand, relearn, develop, adopt and grow - our capabilities, thinking-patterns and aspirations.

Crating a learning organization is a huge transformation and would takes years through the 100% commitment, dedication and focused action on consistent and persistent basis from the top leadership and all the leaders.

Like all my blogs – all the *marked ones mean there is a separate Do-It-yourself article on that topic in the Success Unlimited Mantra Blog Section.

Basic Qualities of Learning Organization

• 1.Systems Thinking - Identifying what in current process, thinking, culture, system, people and mind-set caused any mistake
• 2.Developing the capabilities-matrix [the knowledge, the competencies, the attitudes, the soft and hard skills, the assumptions, the perceptions, the expertise and the exposure] of each link [i.e., the people] of the organizations – as Any organization's learning-ability and its position on the value-chain is directly proportional to its weakest link
• 3.Continuous Buy-in from each stake-holders on why continuous learning is essential and non-negotiable AND what all of us need to learn*, unlearn* and relearn*
• 4.Involvement of Employees to Build and Implement Shared Vision to finds meaning, direction, and reasons for existing as well as future
• 5.Collective Team Learning through focused dialogues among the team members
• 6.Enhancing the 36 types of Intelligence*
• 7.Reinventing itself continually
• 8.Going for Disruptive* Innovation
• 9.Being Unique*, Different and Standalone

The Role and critical-contributions of the Leaders

• 1.Accept and Take complete responsibility and be fully accountable
• 2.Clarify and reinforce within themselves as well as among the employees - why our organization exists and where we are planning to be in the future
• 3.Story-telling* communication to create mental-pictures and exciting triggers in each individual
• 4.Communicating your passion, belief and drive – through living it ourselves
• 5.Focusing on continuous improvement, development, refinement and growth strategies – for employees, for customers, for vendors, for partners and other stakeholders - for products, for services, for newer-concepts
• 6.Building consensus, involvement and ownership around this vision
• 7.Being action-person by focusing on Implementation, Execution, Improvisation, Tracking, Monitoring and Course-Correcting till reach the milestones
• 8.Welcoming and creating energies around the Changes that will accompany the newer Vision and Implementation
• 9.Being a situational leader and creating a culture [just like few top global institutions where the head is on rotational bass] – to allow anyone whose competency is the best for a particular task at that moment
• 10.Learning themselves continually AND sharing their learnings within the organization
• 11.Fostering an environment to Empower* people
• 12.Encouraging employees to go for intelligent risk-taking*
• 13.Transparent sharing of information, challenges, threats, situations with employees to enable them make better decisions*
• 14.Giving credit to others
• 15.Encouraging disruptive* thinkers

44+ Tips to Create a Learning Organization -

• 1.Everyone in the organization must contribute
• 2.Learning* Together - All the learning of individuals whether from attending a course, a workshop, a book mandatorily to be shared with the relevant groups
  On a regular basis doing SWOT* with small as well as in large group of stakeholders for solutions, possibilities and future actions
• 3.Create additional Alternative Sources for Learning
• 4.Debrief, Dissect Every Project and Initiative – both the successful as well as the failed ones--Debrief what went right, what went wrong, and what you will do differently in the future
• 5.De-briefing process has to only aim for shared understanding*, clarifications and future action – not blame
• 6.Encouraging* the employees to share ideas without any inhibition - for improvement and on the solutions of the challenges faced by the organization
• 7.Rewarding the employees for their suggestions and inputs
• 8.Create an environment in which people feel safe to share the truth about what they think, feel and what happened
• 9.Going for all-round development by including cross-functional assignments, challenging goals, meaningful responsibilities
• 10.Making most of the employees interact with the customers* – to experience and learn first-hand their needs to help them to make better decisions for delighting the customer
• 11.Finding ways to make the employees feel and realize naturally - that the leadership and the organization appreciates, recognizes and rewards their contribution, pain and position
• 12.Let employees learn from vastly non-competing organizations of different fields – by partnering other businesses [like the student exchange programs – the schools and universities follow]
• 13.Have a Learning-Meet Regularly Across Departments
• 14.Always In-breed and grow talents in-house – through dynamic talent-pools
• 15.Using Cross-Functional Teams To solve problems and to explore new opportunities
• 16.Investing-in for upgrading skills and education for All Employees
• 17.Creating a Mentoring* and Coaching* Culture by cascading it down from Top till the ground level
• 18.Having strong succession pipe-line
• 19.Being totally meritocratic*, impartial and fair - make the exceptional performers get into limelight
• 20. Spend time with people thinking about and planning their next objective
• 21.Form Study Groups – on common interest topics AND also to talk about New Trends, Ideas and Work
• 22. Using the concept of Exclusivity
• 23. Training* Yourself as well as the employees to focus both on Forecasting as well as Predicting - -A forecast is an attempt to get some quantitative information about the future. A prediction, however, is an understanding of certain predetermined consequences
• 24. Encouraging the employees to be great observers* by spotting the emerging trends
• 25. Creating a circular Hierarchy - That is breaking the conventional norm of two-dimensional authority and responsibilities — levels of authority that flow up and down and responsibility that flows right and left
• 26. This can be accomplished by making every manager interact with five levels of management — two levels up, two levels down, and across at his own level.
• 27.At the very bottom of the organization, the work groups should be small enough so every employee of the organization has the opportunity to serve on the board of his boss.
• 28. The major roles of this circular Hierarchy
• I.Produces plans for the unit
• II.Establish policy/ process / procedures
• III.Coordinating the activity of the level below yours
• IV.Integration all these together
• V.Evaluating the performance of the manager whose board it is, and are responsible for helping him increase his effectiveness
• 29. Finding ways to beat Resistance to change* - we as Humans by nature are slave to our comfort-zones* - anything that threatens we resist
• 30. Never confuse a culture of learning is confused with training – most organizations are guilty of this
• 31.Creating buy-in for the learning organizations starts from the Top-down – but in practice – the top tends to pass the buck to the middle and junior levels – AND – the organization goes nowhere
• 32. When C-level executives set a benchmark by the way they conduct themselves and their activities, the pattern permeates downwards in the organization
• 33. Encouraging innovation* and creativity*
• 34. Empowering* your employees
• 35. Using technology to accelerate learning and ensure accessibility of knowledge
• 36. Involving people in important change initiatives
• 37.Allowing the employees to experiment* and to make mistakes*
• 38. Creating a 360-degree feedback* culture
• 39. Hiring the best talent* that the industry got – they will pay back multifold than what you spend by paying top-salaries
• 40. The create processes and cultures to retain your star-performers
• 41.Enlist Key People Throughout the Organization- as internal champions for what could turn out to be a major organizational change effort
• 42. Define Clear Objectives with End Results
• 43. Make Time for Reflection – creating Continuous constructive, candid Two-Way Feedback culture
• 44. Maximizing human resources with AI - Achieving Intelligence Maturity - This can be achieved through refining
• I.Analytical capabilities, Insight Creation Capabilities, Insight Deployment Capability, Insight Adoption Effectiveness
• II.Start by Recording the daily business interactions and the experiences your organization's consumers, supplier's, employee's and your other partner's
• III.This Raw data needs to be converted into rational easily understood information - for creating new insights as well as to spot the future-trends
• IV.Then we need to use Business-intelligence Tool-kit to generate insights for the business leaders to enable them make informed decisions and take effective actions
• V.After this decision-making* science has to be used to make data-driven decisions and take appropriate actions to influence changes at the user-experience* level