Sustaining Change by Learning from Collective Experience
Aim: To develop peoples and organizations capabilities for effective organizational change through diffusing managerial innovations beyond initial or pilot groups.
Rationale: It is likely that most people and organizations have witnessed or experienced great teams being able to develop and implement significant managerial innovations which lead to high performance, high quality results. It is equally likely that most people and organizations have also witnessed or experienced dilemmas and frustration in diffusing these innovation and achieving outstanding results beyond those initial teams. This research proposes working with organizations to develop and test capabilities for broadly diffusing new innovations within and across organizations.
Background: A "learning history" is a new approach for helping an organization learn from the experience and implications of its own innovations. All efforts to innovate sooner or later run up to the challenge of demonstrating their value. Traditional "assessment" approaches can easily undermine innovation. As people become aware of being judged, they perform to satisfy the measure instead of improving their capabilities. The intrinsic motivation which drives learning and creates change is supplanted by a desire to look good. Yet, feedback is vital to providing guidance and support for innovation. Learning histories, as assessments for learning, were invented in response to this dilemma.
A learning history is 1) a document that is disseminated to help an organization become better aware of its own learning and change efforts; 2) its contents come from the people who initiated, implemented and participated in the original efforts, as well as non-participants who were affected by them; 3) it presents the experiences and understandings of the groups of people who have gone through a learning effort, in their own words, in ways that helps the rest of the organization move forward, without having to "re-invent" what a small group of learners have already discovered; and 4) the learning history creates a context for a conversation, that the organization wouldnt be able to have otherwise, which develops individuals insights for effectively adapting others innovations to their actions.
Methodology: The learning history is planned with champions and participants in the innovation, focus attention on overall scope of organizations experience and existing assumptions via its accomplishment. A team of insiders and researchers work together with participants in the innovation in reflective conversations - asking people to consider what was accomplished and their own and others roles in that. These confidential conversations are taped, transcribed and distilled, with systematic attention being paid to drawing upon the data, developing a pragmatic orientation for how to tell the companys story, and eliciting mythic force in narrative that can draw others into the learning process. A manuscript is drafted, and its materials are individual quote-checked and validated as a whole. Through this whole process there is an effort paid to creating an infrastructure for teams to come together for conversations that help others in the organization learn and move their own innovations forward.
As participants later read the learning documents and find that their own points of view are fairly treated, they become better able to understand the many other perspectives of people involved in the learning effort. The way in which different perspectives are captured and reported tangibly documents the range of peoples experiences on paper. In specially designed workshops, managers elsewhere in the organization discuss the learning history, to see how they can apply its implications to their own situation.
The learning history draws upon theories, techniques, and skills from action science intervention, oral history, anthropology, sociology, literature and theater. The integration of these theories and techniques, using a philosophy consistent with organizational learning principles, makes this approach unique. The learning history work is a critical element in developing an organizational infrastructure to support learning and the research materials upon which to study how organizations change through learning.
Budget: Depending upon scale and scope of project, number of participants and extensiveness of dissemination/diffusion workshops: $40,000 to 200,000. Ideal situation would include working with three companies/projects simultaneously to establish training program for practitioner/team member skills, project design, feedback and measurement mechanisms to test alternative dissemination designs.
Timeline: Six months to one year, depending upon scale and scope of project
Researcher: George Roth, Research Associate, 21st Century Initiative, MIT Sloan School (groth@mit.edu; http://ccs.mit.edu/roth.html; tel. 617/253-8407)
Comments: Methodology for learning histories was created through a 3 year effort involving a group of about twenty researchers, managers and consultants from sponsoring companies of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning who sought to develop an approach for capturing, assessing and diffusing learning in coordination with their own management innovation efforts. The research and teaching that was part of this program included work with Arthur Anderson, AT&T, Chrysler, Federal Express, Ford, Harley Davidson, Intel, Motorola, Pacific Bell, Philips Electronics, National Semiconductor and Shell Oil.
See Appendix for web-accessible references for research on diffusing learning and learning histories. For additional resources see "How to Make Experience Your Company's Best Teacher," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 75, No. 5, September-October 1997, page 172-177.
Appendix
- What Is a Learning History?
- Creating a Learning History
- Characteristics of a Learning History
- A Learning Historian's Bibliography
- Turning Experience Into Action
- Designing an Organizational Learning Initiative
- When Measurement Kills Learning
- Field Manual for a Learning Historian
Learning Histories on the Web:
AutoCo Epsilon
http://www.sol-ne.org/pra/pro/aut/index.html
Electro Components:
http://www.sol-ne.org/res/wp/eclh.html
AutoCo Delta
http://www.sol-ne.org/res/wp/AutoCoDeltaLH.html
Mighty Motors