Support Organizational Learning Articles
Reading is essential for professional development. We encourage our credential holders to read regularly. Reading promotes reflection and critical thinking about the competency domains, leader tasks, and supporting knowledge associated with each level of certification. The articles below are relevant to the Support Organizational Learning competency domain. We add new articles here regularly.
Creativity and the Role of the Leader
Motivate people to contribute ideas by making it safe to fail. Stress that the goal is to experiment constantly, fail early and often – and learn as much as possible in the process. Convince people that they won’t be punished or humiliated if they speak up or make mistakes.
Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire in Harvard Business Review
Throughout your organization, there are people with deep smarts. Their judgment and knowledge – both explicit and tacit – are stored in their heads and hands. Their knowledge is essential. The organization cannot progress without it. You will be a more effective manager if you understand what deep smarts are, how they are cultivated, and how they can be transferred from one person to another.
Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap in Harvard Business Review
Don’t Just Tell Employees Organizational Changes Are Coming – Explain Why
During times of uncertainty, people experiencing change want a clear view of the path ahead. It’s important to share what you know – including what’s changing, when, and how. But for most change initiatives, it is also helpful to start with a narrative or story that clearly articulates the “big picture” – why change is important and how it will positively affect the organization long-term. This should serve as the foundation for how you communicate about the change moving forward.
Morgan Galbraith in Harvard Business Review
Making the ground rules for risk taking explicit, whether in a contract or by other means, can be useful as well. Telling stories about failures past can make people more comfort-able talking about failures in progress. And having graceful ways to shut down initiatives and move on makes the inevitable failures much more palatable. Fumbling toward success by learning from failure will differentiate firms that can thrive during uncertainty from those that cannot.
Rita Gunther McGrath in Harvard Business Review
Building a Learning Organization
For learning to be more than a local affair, knowledge must spread quickly and efficiently throughout the organization. Ideas carry maximum impact when they are shared broadly rather than held in a few hands. A variety of mechanisms spur this process, including written, oral, and visual reports, site visits and tours, personnel rotation programs, education and training programs, and standardization programs.
David A. Garvin in Harvard Business Review
Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier
The participants in these communities of practice were learning together by focusing on problems that were directly related to their work. In the short term, this made their work easier or more effective; in the long term, it helped build both their communities and their shared practices – thus developing capabilities critical to the continuing success of the organizations.
Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder in Harvard Business Review
Designing Effective Knowledge Networks
“Knowledge networks” are collections of individuals and teams who come together across organizational, spatial and disciplinary boundaries to invent and share a body of knowledge. The focus of such networks is usually on developing, distributing and applying knowledge. For-profit and nonprofit organizations of all sizes are seizing on this model to learn more quickly and collaborate productively.
Katrina Pugh and Laurence Prusak in Harvard Business Review
Help Employees Create Knowledge – Not Just Share It
Without diminishing the value of knowledge sharing, we would suggest that the most valuable form of learning today is actually creating new knowledge. Organizations are increasingly being confronted with new and unexpected situations that go beyond the textbooks and operating manuals and require leaders to improvise on the spot, coming up with new approaches that haven’t been tried before. In the process, they develop new knowledge about what works and what doesn’t work in specific situations.
John Hagel III and John Seely Brown in Harvard Business Review
How to Make Sure Good Ideas Don’t Get Lost in the Shuffle
Even though many employees had good ideas, they were sometimes afraid to speak up because of their low status in the organization and because they believed that their ideas were not mature enough and therefore would not be implemented. When they did offer ideas, they often failed to explain the potential value of those ideas to their managers. And they were understandably reluctant to invest the extra time and effort needed for developing ideas in their after-work hours…Further, some employees were concerned that others would take credit for their ideas, or blame them for an idea’s failure.
Ella Miron-Spektor, Dana R. Vashdi, Teresa Amabile and Vered Holzmann in Harvard Business Review
Increase Your Return on Failure
Some failures provide immediate value in the form of market insights that can be capitalized on. Others provide broader lessons that lead to significant personal or organizational development. There are three steps you can take to raise your organization’s return: First, study individual projects that did not pan out and gather as many insights as possible from them. Second, crystallize those insights and spread them across the organization. Third, do a corporate-level survey to make sure that your overall approach to failure is yielding all the benefits it should.
Julian Birkinshaw and Martine Haas in Harvard Business Review
Is Yours a Learning Organization?
With tougher competition, technology advances, and shifting customer preferences, it’s more crucial than ever that companies become learning organizations. In a learning organization, employees continually create, acquire, and transfer knowledge – helping their company adapt to the unpredictable faster than rivals can. But few companies have achieved this ideal. Why? Managers don’t know the precise steps for building a learning organization. And they lack tools for assessing whether their teams are learning or how that learning is benefiting the company
David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson, and Francesca Gino in Harvard Business Review
The Competitive Imperative of Learning
Fostering an atmosphere in which trust and respect thrive, and flexibility and innovation flourish, pays off in most settings, even the most deadline driven. When managers empower, rather than control; when they ask the right questions, rather than provide the right answers; and when they focus on flexibility, rather than insist on adherence, they move toa higher form of execution. And when people know their ideas are welcome, they will offer innovative ways to lower costs and improve quality – thus laying a more solid foundation for their organization’s success.
Amy C. Edmondson in Harvard Business Review
What presents your company with its toughest challenges? Shifting markets? Stiffening competition? Emerging technologies? When such challenges intensify, you may need to reclarify corporate values, redesign strategies, merge or dissolve businesses, or manage cross-functional strife. These adaptive challenges are murky, systemic problems with no easy answers. Perhaps even more vexing, the solutions to adaptive challenges don’t reside in the executive suite. Solving them requires the involvement of people throughout your organization.
Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie in Harvard Business Review
Why do companies struggle to become or remain “learning organizations”? Through research con-ducted over the past decade across a wide range of industries, we have drawn this conclusion: Biases cause people to focus too much on success, take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on experts. In this article we discuss how these deeply ingrained human tendencies interfere with learning – and how they can be countered.
Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats in Harvard Business Review
