Lesson-learning - a lesson is something you teach. Something I often make plain at the start of Lessons learned meetings, is that when identifying and recording lessons, we should think of them, not as something we have learned, but as something we can teach others. This is a subtle shift in emphasis form looking inwards, to looking outwards, and from looking backward, to looking forwards. For much of the lessons workshop, the participants are looking back at what happened. "We had a difficult time with the client", they might decide, and then follow this Observation with a whole set of reminiscences about how difficult the client was, and what trouble it caused. With good facilitation, they can reach Insights about why the problems happened. However the facilitator then has to turn the conversation outwards, and ask - "based on what you have learned from your reflection on the client difficulties, what can we teach the organisation about how to better deal with clients".
Designing a Learning Organization. How organizations can use design to better implement, share, and expand on knowledge. Anyone who regularly attends professional conferences or tries to keep up with the overwhelming volume of relevant published work available in the digital age has experienced the challenges of retention and application.
A lot has been written on the subject of “curation” in our modern world—specifically where and to whom we turn to help us find the right knowledge in the sea of information we have at our fingertips. An equally important but less discussed subject centers around how we implement, share, and expand on the right knowledge so that we are building learning organizations. Here I want to suggest a few ideas that have worked for our design studio—and specifically, how design plays a role in solving this problem. As an avid reader of nonfiction, I thoroughly enjoy detailed and well-researched presentations of subjects that relate to my work. Let me give a concrete example.
Knowledge re-use - the final and most difficult step. I was having a great conversation with a Knowledge Manager today, who was grappling with the final, and most difficult, step in the Knowledge Transfer process, the step of knowledge re-use (what Nonaka and Takeuchi call the Internalisation step). She had a great system of collecting knowledge, and a great system for synthesising knowledge, and when she showed the knowledge to the users they said "Wow, great, that's very useful", but when she asked them later whether they had actually used the knowledge, they said No.
We had a look at the reasons behind this. There were several blockers - the knowledge was not to hand when they needed itthey had no time to go looking for the knowledgethey may not trust the provenance of the knowledgethe knowledge did not solve an immediate pain, but was more of a long term benefit (see blog post on why some ideas spread and others don't). they could get away with doing things the way they had always done, even though the new way was better. What’s wrong with Lessons Learned? Part 4. Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at three of the inherent weaknesses of “Lessons Learned” and the way the label is perceived: Passiveness, Negativity and Ambiguity.
We will move onto a more positive note soon, but before we do, I want to introduce one further weakness: Bad Teachers. At this point I want to make it clear that I have seen the Diaz/Timberlake/Segel film of the same name, and that they are 92 minutes of my life that I would like to have back! However, the image was too good not to use. What do I mean by bad teaching? In the educational sense of the word, a lesson is deliberately crafted and designed in order to teach.
I can say from experience of being married to a teacher, that every hour of teaching she delivers requires another hour to cover preparation, marking and feedback to the learners. Lessons are carefully formulated to take account of learning styles, levels of capability and connections with other parts of the syllabus. Those who can, do.
Like this: Peter senge and the theory and practice of the learning organization. Contents: introduction · peter senge · the learning organization · systems thinking – the cornerstone of the learning organization · the core disciplines · leading the learning organization · issues and problems · conclusion · further reading and references · links Peter M. Senge (1947- ) was named a ‘Strategist of the Century’ by the Journal of Business Strategy, one of 24 men and women who have ‘had the greatest impact on the way we conduct business today’ (September/October 1999). While he has studied how firms and organizations develop adaptive capabilities for many years at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it was Peter Senge’s 1990 book The Fifth Discipline that brought him firmly into the limelight and popularized the concept of the ‘learning organization’.
Since its publication, more than a million copies have been sold and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. Peter Senge The core disciplines. 10 dimensions of a learning culture. Our latest Knoco newsletter is now freely available for download, and covers the topic of "the ten dimensions of a learning culture". The ultimate goal of Knowledge Management implementation is for Knowledge Management to become "part of the way we operate" - to become embedded in the culture as well as the business. But what is a learning culture really like? We have looked in detail at the topic, and see potentially 10 different dimensions to the culture. These dimensions look at the way people think, feel, prioritise and react - they don't look at the cultural drivers. The 10 dimensions are described below, and you can test your own culture against these dimensions using our free online survey.
Open vs. defensive.