The Performance Improvement Blog

AUGUST 21, 2014

All organizations have a culture. Some cultures support learning more than others. Some cultures stifle learning by marginalizing the training and development function, by discouraging risk-taking, by not rewarding learning, by not allowing opportunities for informal and social learning, and by undermining performance improvement efforts. In a learning culture, the pursuit of learning is woven into the fabric of organizational life.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JULY 1, 2016

To what extent does your organization have a learning culture? What is your current culture? Using Edgar Schein ’s definition of organizational culture, you’ll want to know to what extent: Underlying beliefs and assumptions support learning in your organization. Values and principles drive learning in your organization. Do employees, their teams, and the organization as-a-whole know what they need to learn to be successful?

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The Performance Improvement Blog

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Organizational learning has, for too long, been owned by consultants and chief training and learning officers. Any effort to learn how to improve leadership, management, team building, communication, planning, or other organizational skills, has started with these external and internal gatekeepers. This has made learning generally inaccessible to the people with the greatest need. . This is why Jim Stilwell and I have created Learning to be Great tm.

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Ed App

OCTOBER 20, 2020

When a company supports an “open” organizational climate and feedback in support of organizational learning, and when it includes management in the educational process, we are talking about a learning organization. Key Benefits of LMS Learning.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JUNE 21, 2012

What are the tools of organizational learning? As I’ve stated in a previous blog post , a high performing organization needs a comprehensive approach to learning and a set of tools to facilitate learning. A training program, or an educational event, or even a CEO’s speech about the importance of learning is not enough. These categories of learners and tools translate into a four by three matrix of learners and learning tools.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JUNE 26, 2014

Disruptive innovation has become a very popular notion about competition and organizational change. Rather than trying to predict disruptive innovation or create a department for disruptive innovation, executives and employees need to be continually learning so that they can adapt to change quickly, whether that change is external or internal. For example, they need to learn how to know what’s happening in the marketplace (i.e.,

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The Performance Improvement Blog

MAY 27, 2016

That “Steam Engine” mindset, as described by Jonathan Gifford and Mark Powell in their new book, My Steam Engine Is Broken: Taking the organization from the industrial era to the Age of Ideas , creates a command-and-control culture that has become a barrier to success in companies today. A culture of command-and-control is a barrier to organizational learning. Without these qualities, an organization can’t learn.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

AUGUST 25, 2016

How do we know if an organization has the “DNA” that predisposes it to organizational learning? Gary Neilson and Jaime Estupinan have been studying and writing about "organizational DNA" for the past 10 years. They explain the term this way: We use the term organizational DNA as a metaphor for the underlying organizational and cultural design factors that define an organization’s personality and determine whether it is strong or weak in executing strategy.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JULY 11, 2013

In order to change, colleges and universities must first learn; that is, acquire new organizational knowledge and new organizational skills. They must create an organizational routine of feedback, reflection, and active social learning. They need to learn how to examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned from their actions, and make the needed changes in the organization.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

MARCH 15, 2016

learning) and the factors that block people from achieving that change. The table below lists forces that commonly drive learning in organizations and the factors that block learning in organizations. Work vs. Learning. The usefulness of this force-field analysis of organizational learning is in stimulating action to add and enhance the factors that drive learning and stimulating action to eliminate and reduce the factors that block learning.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

What’s the difference between a “training culture” and a “ learning culture ”? As the chart shows, in a training culture, responsibility for employee learning resides with instructors and training managers. In that kind of culture the assumption is that trainers (under the direction of a CLO) drive learning. Whereas in a learning culture, responsibility for learning resides with each employee and each team.

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Experiencing eLearning

NOVEMBER 18, 2009

These are my live blogged notes from Jay Cross & Clark Quinn’s LearnTrends session on Reinventing Organizational Learning. Article they wrote for CLO mag: “Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer&#. If you don’t know the solution & need to network/collaborate to find it, that’s learning. Internet Learning Alliance: They were all working independently, decided to work together and practice what they preach. improve learning process.

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ID Reflections

JANUARY 6, 2016

We have to think agile, instant, accessible, contextual, micro-sized, real time… We need to uberize organizational learning. Uberization ” has taken off as the new term that according to me has come to stand for – disruption, innovation, lean operating model, harnessing of the affordances of the sharing economy, and a hyper-connected world driven by imagination and creativity where everything is a mobile-click away – including learning. Learning is no exception.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JANUARY 14, 2016

Are employees constantly looking for more opportunities to learn and grow both in your company and in other organizations? Are you not getting the impact on organizational performance that you would like from current training programs? Is the multi-generational and multi-cultural nature of your workforce a challenge to increasing the engagement and productivity of employees?

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JANUARY 31, 2015

How do you know your organization has a learning culture ? How will people be learning? While a learning culture is an environment that’s always being developed, certain signs indicate that you are making progress. In a learning culture…. Managers are coaching ; they are partnering with direct reports to develop their capacity to achieve organizational goals. What will you see people doing?

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JUNE 25, 2018

The culture that underpins a managing minds approach must support and encourage an ongoing and collective discovery, sharing, and appli­cation of knowledge and skills at the individual, team, and organization levels. A culture that supports managing minds is a culture of inquiry; an environment in which people feel safe challenging the status quo, taking risks, and enhancing the quality of what they do for customers, themselves, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

FEBRUARY 21, 2014

In the online course that I teach for ASTD on Developing an Organizational Learning Culture , one of the questions I hear most often is, “How can I change the culture in my company when there is little support from management and our unions resist any change that might affect the work rules?” It took decades to create the culture that currently exists in many of these organizations and any significant change is going to take time, effort and perseverance. .

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The Performance Improvement Blog

AUGUST 31, 2015

Imagine a company that, in the face of unprecedented change, is continually learning how to learn fast: managing tremendous amounts of information; creating new products and processes in response to global competition; using new apps to be more efficient and effective; and being responsive to learning preferences of a multi-generational and diverse workforce. Imagine a company in which employees are hired because they are excited about learning and improving themselves.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

NOVEMBER 13, 2015

The culture-change bandwagon keeps rolling. In a New York Times column titled “Rethinking Work”, Barry Schwartz writes: We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. In each case, the policy changes should be treated as experiments with learning as a goal. More and more companies are making fundamental alterations to the way they work.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

DECEMBER 19, 2014

In a blog post titled, "Building a Productive Learning Culture", Thomas Handcock and Jean Martin say that businesses, because of need and demand, are increasing employee participation in training but failing to increase productivity. Even with all of these additional opportunities for learning, most workers are not acquiring the knowledge and skills they need to be successful. The authors believe that a culture change is required.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

OCTOBER 15, 2013

A “learning culture” is a community of workers continuously and collectively seeking performance improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieve the goals of the organization. A learning culture is a culture of inquiry; an environment in which employees feel safe asking tough questions about the purpose and quality of what they are doing for customers, themselves, and other stakeholders.

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WalkMe Training Station

JUNE 19, 2016

The first article was titled “How ‘Learning Organizations’ Beat Natural Selection” After detailing the importance of a learning culture within a learning organization, I would like to briefly look at several barriers to organizational learning. Yet a setback, or we can even refer to it as failure, are really the major driver of adaptation, or organizational learning itself. Lack of Value for Learning Itself.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

AUGUST 27, 2014

Changing an organization’s culture is not easy. It doesn’t happen simply because of the pronouncements of the CEO, or a reorganization of business units, or by conducting an organizational pulse survey, or by hiring new managers. Culture is much too complex; it’s the how and why of what an organization does internally and externally. As I have argued in previous posts , to be successful in today’s world, companies need to have a culture that values and supports learning.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

MAY 30, 2017

This reminds us of the warning attributed to Peter Drucker : “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Strategy is important, but given the kind of transformation that must happen in preparation for the future, creating an organization that fundamentally changes the way people are managed and learn must be the focus. It’s more about developing the right culture than implementing the right strategy. How do we create a culture that will be sustainable and successful?

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The Performance Improvement Blog

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

If you’re looking for examples of companies that are striving to create and sustain a learning culture, PwC ( PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP) of Canada should be on your list. I recently had the pleasure of speaking about the importance of a learning culture to the Edmonton meeting of The Conference Board of Canada’s Council for Learning and Leadership Development. Incorporating structured learning routines into our working practices (e.g.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

DECEMBER 8, 2014

A learning culture is a community of workers continuously and collectively seeking performance improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieve the goals of the organization. A learning culture is a culture of inquiry; an environment in which employees feel safe challenging the status quo and taking risks to enhance the quality of what they do for customers, themselves, and other stakeholders.

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Matrix

AUGUST 15, 2019

Learning measurement is one of those topics that constantly seems to need revisiting. Much of the corporate learning has moved online – even something as personal as one on one coaching is often done via some communication app between individuals situated in different geographical areas. Learning evaluation needs to be simpler. Ultimately, this will lead to a learning culture that is data driven. Read more: 4 Great tips for developing a learning culture.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JULY 31, 2014

Eight leader habits are essential to a learning culture. These are behaviors ingrained in the routines and rituals of organizations that are continually learning and learning how to learn. Leaders in these organizations do the following: Send the message - Leaders communicate the importance of learning to the organization. Build trust - Employees will invest time and effort in learning if they trust their managers.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JUNE 25, 2018

The culture that underpins a managing minds approach must support and encourage an ongoing and collective discovery, sharing, and appli­cation of knowledge and skills at the individual, team, and organization levels. A culture that supports managing minds is a culture of inquiry; an environment in which people feel safe challenging the status quo, taking risks, and enhancing the quality of what they do for customers, themselves, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

APRIL 24, 2015

One of the keys to creating and sustaining a learning culture is hiring people who are continuous learners and who help others learn continuously. You want people who recognize the learning needs of others and can figure out ways to support their growth as part of the day-to-day work of the organization. Edgar Wilson, in a post on e.Mile , writes that a “healthy” learning culture has four features: . It’s learning ability.

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Clark Quinn

DECEMBER 5, 2008

What I realized today was that what I’m really about is improving organizational learning infrastructure. It’s about culture, policies, processes, procedures, tools, templates, incentives, and more. With culture, it’s about willingness to share, trust, take considered risks, or developing that ability. It’s about knowledge and skills how to learn alone and together, using the infrastructure.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

AUGUST 3, 2015

Recently, I had an experience that, for me, exemplifies the meaning of “situated learning”. With my iPad next to the water heater, I learned how to reset the little computer that regulates the pilot light and gas. Learning in this case required all of the elements of the actual situation: the particular water heater; the basement environment; the pressure I (and my wife) felt to have hot water; and my limited knowledge about modern heating and cooling.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

MAY 15, 2015

The academy faces extinction unless it learns how to learn. It is a world that is shaking the foundations, values, guiding principles, mores, and customs as well as the very existence of many institutions of higher learning. In a chapter I wrote for this book, I argue that the future success of colleges and universities must come from creating a learning culture. They know how to teach but they don’t necessarily know how to learn as organizations.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

FEBRUARY 17, 2017

Any company, faced with these kinds of disruptive forces must keep learning. Employees must learn how to use new computers and new apps, how to operate new, high tech machinery, how to be responsive to customer demands, how to create innovative products and services, how to manage a multi-cultural, multi-generational workforce, how to work effectively in cross-functional teams, and how to plan for a future that is constantly in flux. Learning is just-in-time, on-demand.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

DECEMBER 19, 2016

Most companies today have a “training culture”. ATD’s 2016 State of the Industry report concludes: …the traditional, instructor-led, face-to-face classroom continues to play a crucial role, and it was still the delivery mechanism for 51 percent of learning hours used in 2015. Which is to say that most learning in organizations is still delivered using formal, structured, leader-centered training methods.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JULY 9, 2014

Smith (author of The Wisdom of Teams ) writes in the Forward to the book, Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology, and Practice : Today, you cannot avoid human questions like these: What must I learn next? What do I need to be learning in order to be more productive? What does my organization need to be learning in order to compete more effectively? How can we learn best? Douglas K.

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Learnnovators

DECEMBER 13, 2015

The usual culprits are the hapless organizational culture closely followed by hierarchy and leadership lethargy. We have become accustomed to blaming the culture of an organization for the failure of any initiative, and more so when the change calls for redefining and re-imagining how people work and interact. No matter how hard we try to change the culture – and I do believe that leaders and managers are trying – the discourse we use lets us down.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

As a proponent of a learning culture in organizations, I’m always on the lookout for methods and products that contribute to creating and sustaining that kind of culture. KnowledgeStar™ promises to deliver just-in-time, just-enough learning to make machines smart and employees smarter, increasing safety and productivity. We are replacing 100 years of traditional training with a new way to learn.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JULY 5, 2012

Several excellent blog posts have recently come to my attention that, when combined, provide a how-to for creating a learning culture in organizations. One of these posts appears in Jane Hart’s blog, Learning in the Social Workplace. In this post , she writes that workplace learning is: Structured learning experiences (e.g., training) and informal learning experiences (e.g., Helping workers learn continuously on the job.

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The Performance Improvement Blog

JUNE 17, 2015

In a discussion started by Camilla Keen on LinkedIn, she asks, “In order to find out and evaluate if a company has an effective learning culture, what would be your top ten questions?” I commented: Are leaders communicating the importance of learning (acquiring new knowledge, skills, and capabilities) and holding managers accountable for learning and applying that learning to making a difference for the organization?

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