One of my favorite things to do when waiting for a customer in their office is browse their book shelves. It gives me a great sense for the models and theories that they already have in their head, which gives us a good foundation for shared understanding. It's also a great opportunity for my own learning!
Yesterday I was in a new customer's office and came across "The Fifith Discipline Fieldbook" by Peter Senge. I have seen Peter speak and read the original book years ago, but had not come across this particular version. My customer was generous enough to lend it to me.
Peter made famous the concepts of "systems thinking" and a "learning organization" just as we were coming out of the industrial age into the age of the knowledge worker. I was browsing through the text (as the author encourages) and found some very valuable and timeless insights and models. Some are almost a natural part of our collective consciousness, and some are concepts that clearly we are still struggling with in businesses of all sizes.
One chapter restated that the core of having a learning organization is based upon five "learning disciplines" - lifelong programs of study and practice. As I read it, I thought to myself: "for all my exposure to these concepts and familiarity with the book, I can't name the Five Disciplines" (I would love to hear from all of you masters that CAN!)
For those of us that need a refresher, or who have never been exposed to the key disciplines, here they are:
1. Personal Mastery - learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire
2. Mental Models - reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions
3. Shared vision - building a sense of comitment in a group by developing shared images of the future we seek to create
4. Team learning - transforming conversational and collective thinking so that groups of people can create ability greater than te sum of individual talents
5. Systems thinking- a way of thinking and communicating about the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.
So here is my question. Are you a learning organizaition? Do you embody these disciplines as a leader? Do you promote and build the structure so that your team and business meets the criteria for a learning organization?
It is clear in these times, more than it was when the book was written, having a "learning organization" is critical for agility, competitive advantage, and even survival.
Please click here to read more from Senge's website, and make a commitment to take action on at least one of these ideas. If you need a little help getting started, just contact us!
Seize Tomorrow!
Smart, effective leaders share a common trait: the desire and ability to learn new things. To be successful in the future, and build organizations that are able to respond to continuous change, learning is a performance essential.
Business leaders need to be able to quickly learn new concepts, adopt them, and put them into practice within their organization. They also must ensure their employees are always learning.
Learning is a team sport, and winning means using the knowledge you and your team accumulate to gain competitive advantage, build a sustainable organization and achieve your vision. Here are three reasons why:
1. Effective learning requires reciprocity - interaction with others.
Every so often I meet a business owner who tells me that they don't need a peer advisory board because they read books. Now don't get me wrong... I love books, and blogs and all sorts of other content that I can get my hands on. But reading books on your own, pales in comparison to the effectiveness of reading something and then having an interactive conversation with peers to delve more deeply into the subject, how it might be relevant to your situation, and what action you can take. The act of interacting with others is called reciprocity and is a fundamental of learning. It is part of our biology since we are inherently social beings.
I am a big fan of online universities. One of the reasons they are effective is because interaction is built into the design of the course. Meetings with study groups, 1-1 conversations with peers and other similar techniques are very effective for learning. Even though the interaction is virtual, it can be more effective than the stale semi-comatose interaction we have all experienced of sitting in a room with a talking head, and not participating at all.
Online learning can be economical and effective. Just make sure your team has an opportunity to interact and continue conversations about what they've learned after watching the information. I work with teams who have unbelievable access to online content, but no one takes advantage of the courses. Make it a team event: set a time, buy pizza, watch it together, and stimulate some conversation afterward. The rewards will be tenfold.
2. Effective learning requires commitment, discipline and a game plan.
Learning is not a casual pursuit. There is a cost for learning, even if the content is free. Effective learning requires a conscious commitment to use time and resources to gain new capacities. Much like the need to practice before a game, you need to learn before you need to use the knowledge. That means you always need to be thinking ahead about the new practices and capacities you will need in the future. Then you need the discipline to devote time to the learning, even when a dozen urgent things are pulling at you.
3. Until you can put what you learned into action, you have not learned it sufficiently.
Effective learning is defined by gaining a new capacity to do something. In business, the new capacity must be relevant. Just understanding something doesn't cut it....reading about golf or Tiger Woods does not mean you can golf. Understanding is an important but preliminary step on the path to gaining new capacity. Practicing the new behavior, process or practice is essential for learning. Again, this requires others: colleagues, customers, coaches, mentors etc.
"Anything that we have to learn to do, we learn by the actual doing of it" Aristotle
If you are a business owner or business leader, make a commitment to your own learning. Find colleagues, peers advisory groups like TAB, teachers, mentors or coaches to work with. Then commit to building an organization that is always learning. Call us if you want someone to reciprocate with, we'll be glad to have a conversation with you about building effective and always learning organizations!
CARPE MANANA...
Seize Tomorrow!
On my Sunday bike ride along the boardwalk this morning, I ran into an exceptional array of religious diversity. Some Jewish people out for a stroll in Bradley Beach, an open air Methodist service on the boardwalk in Ocean Grove, some people wearing all white returning from the sea where one of them had just been baptized. In Asbury Park I came across an older gentleman wearing an "I Love Jesus" baseball cap and a Mennonite family on the playground. I have had that experience before on Sunday mornings on the boardwalk stretch from Belmar to Asbury Park, and it always makes me appreciate the diverse area I live in. The ocean calls people of all faiths to the boardwalk for reflection, celebration and community.
I kept thinking about diversity as I pedaled home. Building a strong team requires diversity. As a leader, if you assemble a group of people with similar cultural backgrounds, similar talents and similar communication styles your organization will be shallow, and unable to compete in a rapidly changing and global marketplace. Smart leaders embrace diversity because it makes their organizations stronger, more capable and more effective. Innovation comes from the ability to look at problems from diverse perspectives.
To build the capacity to act effectively, leaders must design and build the following types of diversity into their teams and organizations:
Diverse cultural backgrounds so that your organization understands and can coordinate, cooperate and transact with a wide array of suppliers, customers and employees.
Diverse talents so that individual strengths overlap and make weaknesses irrelevant (props to Pete Drucker for that thought - it is one of my favorites, although not an exact quote:)
Diverse working styles that complement each other: assertive people, patient people, people that lead, people more comfortable following, steady people, people who love change, analytical people, people who honor the rules and traditions, people who say "break the rules" when they no longer make sense, and so on...
If you are a corporate leader, you may have more diversity training than you can handle, and the real meaning and purpose of why diversity is important may sometimes get lost.
If you are a small business owner, you may not have the benefit of human resource professionals that can help you build strategies for diversity.
In either case, take some time to reflect on the organization you lead. Where can you benefit from more diversity? Where are you lacking? What action steps can you take to increase the strength of your organization today?
Contact us if you are interested in learning more about building strong diverse teams for the future, or want to see how diverse your current team is in terms of talents and style preferences.
Last year we had Brian Tracy as a speaker at our annual NJ TAB Prosperity Series. My TAB facilitator colleagues and I were treated to an intimate dinner with Brian the evening before and he shared some thoughts with us. The following insight has not only minimized standoffs with my husband, but allowed me to make more strategic decisions for my business, and help my customers see when they are holding on to a decision for the wrong reasons.
It all started with one simple phrase: "I could be wrong, I often am." Brian actually had us all practice saying it out loud a few times. His point was that it is human nature to hold on to past decisions too long. The more comfortable we get with a mindset of "I could have been wrong about that" the more we will see better options for the future. Too much energy and resources are wasted in our lives and in our businesses holding on to past decisions and being right. To be agile, we need to let go...and be always open for better ways of doing things.
"I could be wrong, I sometimes am" is a phrase that is heard often around our house now, even a year after hearing Mr. Tracy. When either my husband or I use, it brings a smile to our faces, and a reminder to be open, and not so certain that we always have it right.