Organizational and Managerial Culture as a Facilitator or Inhibitor of Organizational Learning
Edgar H. Schein
May 19, 1994
MIT Sloan School of Management
Table of Contents
1. Organizational and Managerial Culture as a Facilitator or Inhibitor of Organizational Learning2. Two Kinds of Learning
3. Anxiety 1
4. Anxiety 2
5. Proposition 1 About Learning
6. Learning Method 1
7. Learning Method 2
8. How to Reduce Anxiety 1
9. Can Learning be Perpetual? Or is it Episodic?
10. Elements Of a Learning Culture
11. Cultural Inhibitors
12. Pro-Active Pragmatism
References
1. Organizational and Managerial Culture as a Facilitator or
Inhibitor of Organizational Learning
In this talk I would like to explore the relationship of culture to
learning. We all seem to agree that one of the key characteristics of the
21st century organization will be the ability to learn. Many of us even
believe that the ability to learn will be the major competitive advantage
that some organizations will have over others. We are therefore caught
up in a frenzy of trying to figure out not only what organizational learning
is but how to do it and how to do it faster than the competition.
In that frenzy I find more optimism than realism. Learning and the change that inevitably accompanies it is a complex process, often less successful than we would like it to be, a source of joy when it works, but a source of pain and tension when it does not. The result of shared learning in a group is what we come to call the culture of the group, so if further learning is needed, we face the difficult problem of unlearning, of giving up something that we have come to value because it made us successful in the past. Much of the explanation of why learning to learn is so difficult therefore has to do with culture, so it is incumbent upon us to understand more about the interaction of culture and learning, and to identify, if possible, what the elements of a culture might be that would truly facilitate learning to learn.
2. Two Kinds of Learning
My inquiry begins with some analysis of the learning process
itself. First of all we have to make the distinction between "adaptive
learning and coping," on the one hand and what Peter Senge calls
"generative learning," what Argyris and Schoen call "double loop
learning," and what Don Michael, Gregory Bateson and others have
identified as "learning how to learn." I think we all agree that the
competitive edge for the 21st century organization will be in this latter
learning how to learn domain.
Adaptive learning is usually fairly straightforward. We identify a problem or a gap between where we are and where we want to be, and set about to solve the problem and close the gap. Generative learning comes into play when we discover that the identification of the problem or gap is itself contingent on learning new ways of perceiving and thinking about our problems. For example, from an adaptive point of view we may realize that we have to replace steep hierarchies with flat networks in order to reduce costs and increase coordination. From a generative point of view, however, we might have to change our entire mental model to one in which we can see how hierarchies and networks are not alternatives but mechanisms that can be integrated. From "either this or that" thinking we might have to develop the capacity to think about "this and that," a difficult feat given our normal modes of thinking.
The very process of identifying problems, seeing new possibilities and changing the routines by which we adapt or cope will require rethinking and redesign. And therein lies a problem because we are now talking about changing our mental models, our personal habits of perceiving, thinking and acting, and our relationships with others that are thoroughly embedded. We are talking about having to unlearn some things before new things can be learned. And this level of change involves two kinds of anxiety.
Instability or unpredictability or meaninglessness is
uncomfortable and arouses anxiety, what I have called Anxiety 1 or the
fear of changing. based on a fear of the unknown. Learning how to learn
may require of me the deliberate seeking out of unstable, less
predictable and possibly less meaningful situations. It may also require
me to become a perpetual learner with the possibility of being
perpetually subject to Anxiety 1. This is a situation most of us would
prefer to avoid. We want to solve problems and we want the solutions to
stick.
As we think about this from the perspective of the teacher, coach,
or manager, how does one make sure that Anxiety 2 is greater than
Anxiety 1?
Unfortunately, as humans we don't always do what logic dictates.
My Anxiety 1 may be so high that I may become defensive, misperceive
the situation, deny reality, rationalize, eventually fail, and then wonder
what happened, or, worse, blame others for my failure. The problem
here is not that I have been "bad" to have done this. None of us can
tolerate very high levels of Anxiety 1. As Change Agents we often give
up in frustration at this point and retreat to the rationalization that it is
human to resist change, so what can you do?
How then do we do focus on and reduce Anxiety 1? How do we
make learning, even perpetual learning a safe and desirable process?
We can identify eight conditions, all of which have to be created.
Second, instead of threatening learners with scenarios of
disaster, we can provide a vision of a better future that makes it
worthwhile to put in some effort, run some risks, and tolerate some pain.
Developing a positive vision for ourselves, the group we belong to, and
the organization we work for can become very important in facilitating
learning to learn. Sometimes leaders provide such visions but often it is
the learners themselves that create it.
Third, we have to provide a practice field where it is OK to make
mistakes and learn from them. This means giving people some time off
to learn, and a place where they can play around, experiment, and
practice. Creating practice fields is one of the central goals of the MIT
Organizational Learning Center, by the way.
Fourth, we can provide direction. Often the hang-up or source of
Anxiety 1 is that the learner simply does not know where to start and how
to go about it. Giving the learner some direction, a yellow brick road,
and a little guidance on how to get started can be crucial in reducing
Anxiety 1.
Fifth, there is a good deal of evidence that when we are anxious
we seek out others with whom to share or simply to get some sense of
not being all alone in a difficult situation. Starting the learning process
in groups is, therefore, and important principle. If I see that I am not
alone in being anxious, temporarily incompetent, and slow in catching
on, it makes it easier to keep going.
Sixth, we can provide good coaching and help which often means
teaching a few of the basic skills of learning and providing feedback
during practice periods.
Seventh, we must reward even the smallest steps in the direction
of learning, lest the learner gets discouraged and assumes, often
correctly, that we don't care anyway. The evidence is overwhelming that
rewarding correct steps is far more effective than punishing mistakes.
Eighth, and most important of all, we must provide a climate in
which making mistakes or errors is viewed as being in the interests of
learning, so that, as Don Michael has so eloquently noted, we come to
embrace errors rather than avoid them because they enable us to learn.
Though these conditions might be difficult and expensive to
implement, they are not mysterious. We do know how to get a learning
process started. What we know much less about is how to keep learning
processes going.
Is there such a thing as perpetual learning or do we have to think
in terms of episodes of stability during which we might do some adaptive
learning, punctuated by periods of more intense generative learning?
How long are those period of stability for an individual, for a group, for
an organization? Will the environment dictate the pace rather than what
might be naturally comfortable for us?
In the learning center we have progressed quite far in figuring out
how to get the learning process started, at least at the individual and
small group level. But so far we know very little about how to proliferate
the generative learning process across various kinds of organizational
boundaries and how to sustain the learning process over longer periods
of time, given the tendency in all of us to cling to our hard earned
learning of the past.
The managerial version of this question that I have encountered
frequently in my consulting with companies is "How many new initiatives
such as total quality, bringing in information technology, becoming a
learning organization, re-engineering, empowerment programs for
employees, team building, organization development, downsizing,
rightsizing, and so on can we absorb in any given period of time?"
Yet our friendly futurists tell us that learning how to learn even
faster is necessary because the global environment out there is not
sitting still waiting for us to get comfortable. Anxiety 2 is building up
rapidly, so we had better figure out how to reduce Anxiety 1, how to get
more comfortable with at least more frequent episodes of generative
learning if not perpetual learning. And that brings us to an important
question--can we Identify the characteristics of systems whether
individuals, groups, or organizations that do seem to be able to learn all
the time, and, if so, what are those characteristics and how might we
acquire them?
Let me put this another way, what would an organizational culture
look like that supported perpetual learning at the individual, group, and
organizational level? In my 1992 revision of my Organizational Culture
and Leadership book I thought about and described what an innovative
culture might look like. I would like now to adapt and elaborate some
elements of that model to the current question.
Culture is about shared mental models--shared ways of how we
perceive the world, what mental categories we use for sorting it out, how
we emotionally react to what we perceive, and how we put value on
things. Culture is about shared tacit ways of being, it reflects the deeper
and more pervasive elements of our group life, and it operates out of our
awareness so we are often quite ignorant of the degree to which our
culture influences us until we run into someone from a different culture.
I make this point to get us away from thinking that we can just set
about to create whatever culture we want, as if it were the same as
espoused principles and values. Unfortunately as all too many
executives have learned--just espousing a new way of doing things, a
new way of perceiving, a new set of values does not make it happen.
Only shared experiences of success in using a new way of thinking of
perceiving or valuing create a new approach and that takes time. So I
will describe what a learning culture might look like, but getting there is
quite another thing. Seven elements characterize a culture supportive of
perpetual learning.
Second, though the evidence here is less well documented,
adaptive and innovative companies share a belief that people can and
will learn, and value learning and change in its own right, a set of
assumptions that is very akin to what McGregor meant in his classic
Human Side of Enterprise as Theory Y. It takes a certain amount of
idealism about human nature to create a learning culture.
Third. learning organizations have to have the shared belief that
the world around them is malleable, that they have the capacity to
change their environment, and that ultimately they make their own fate.
If we believe that the world around us cannot be changed anyway, what
is the point of learning to learn. Relax and make the best of your fate. A
learning culture must be pro-active and pragmatic in its world view.
Fourth, there is a good deal of evidence that we cannot learn
generatively if we are totally pre-occupied with coping and adapting. For
an organization this means not only that there must be some slack, some
time available for generative learning, but equally important there must
be enough diversity in the people, the groups and the subcultures to
provide creative alternatives. Maintaining some diversity is expensive
from a pure adaptive point of view, but is essential if one does not know
what the future will require of us. Lean and mean is not a good
prescription for organizational learning.
Fifth, at the organizational level there must be a shared
commitment to open and extensive communication. This does not mean
that all channels in a fully connected network must be used all the time,
but it does mean that such channels must be available and the
organization must have spent time developing a common vocabulary so
that communication can occur. Openness need not be absolute. We do
not need to "let it all hang out" in all our conversations as the old
sensitivity training philosophy at one time argued. We do need to tell all
relevant to the tasks at hand and we need to tell each other the truth.
Sitting on relevant information, putting a spin on things to protect our
power position, actually lying to put ourselves in a better light all make it
virtually impossible to learn. Learning cultures assume that full and
open task related communication is essential.
Sixth, it is increasingly clear that economic, political, and socio-
cultural events are all inter-connected and that this is just as true inside
the organization as in the environment. To understand how things work
and especially the consequences of our actions over time we must
develop a shared commitment to learning to think systemically in terms of
multiple forces, events being over determined, short-run and longer
range consequences, feedback loops and other systemic phenomena.
Linear cause and effect thinking will prevent accurate diagnosis and,
therefore, undermine learning.
Seventh, because the world is getting more complex and
interdependent coordination and cooperation take on more importance.
Whether or not one values teamwork is not so much a cultural matter any
more; it is increasingly a matter of whether or not one can get the job
done at all without teamwork. In other words, as technologies become
more complex, work will be divided among more different people with
different specialties, but these people will be more and more dependent
on each other. And if interdependence increases, the need for teamwork
increases. We must, therefore, have shared beliefs that teams can and
will work and that individualistic competition is not the answer to all
problems.
If we now look at western, particularly U.S. organizational and
managerial cultures, what are some of the inhibitors, some of the shared
assumptions or myths we hold that prevent organizations from
developing the kind of learning culture I have just described?
One consequence of this set of historically based cultural
assumptions is that managers (who are mostly male) start with a self
image of having to be completely in control, decisive, certain, and
dominant. Neither the leader, nor the follower wants the leader to be
uncertain, to admit to not knowing or not being in control, to embrace
error rather than to defensively deny it.
Of course, in reality leaders know that they are uncertain, that
they do not know all the answers, but few are psychologically strong
enough to be able to admit this and to share power with others in their
organization. And, since the subordinates also demand of the leader a
public sense of certainty, they reinforce the facade that leaders adopt.
Yet if organizational learning is to occur, leaders themselves must
become learners and in that process begin to acknowledge their own
vulnerability and uncertainty.
In the U.S. we have the additional cultural force of "rugged
individualism" that makes the lone problem solver the hero. The
dependent cooperative team player is not typically a hero. Individual
competition between organizational members is viewed as natural and
desirable, as a way to identify talent--"the cream will rise to the top."
Teamwork is viewed as a practical necessity, not an intrinsically
desirable condition. If teamwork were more natural, "team building"
would not be the popular topic it is in the organization development
literature. Individual competition is perceived to be the natural state.
Another myth that has grown up in managerial circles might be
identified as the myth of the "divine rights of managers." I have often
heard senior managers defend secrecy around the financial condition of
their company on the grounds that employees have no right to that
information. Management has certain prerogatives and obligations that
are intrinsic and that are, in a sense, the reward for having worked
oneself up into management.
As the late Karl Deutsch the eminent MIT political scientist once
put it, "power is the ability not to have to learn anything."
The relatively young and egalitarian social structure of the U.S.
feeds into this problem in emphasizing achievement over formal status.
We have as yet no clear class structure that provides people a clear
position in social space. Hence they have to rely on earned position,
title and visible status symbols such as cars, fancy homes, and other
material symbols. Given this situation it is not surprising that once one
has been promoted into a managerial position one wants to use one's
authority, to act like a boss. Otherwise what was the point?
The competition based work hierarchy then ultimately becomes
the main source of security and status, and the higher level managers
can be expected to act in a more decisive and controlling manner to
express that status. In other words, power that is earned or achieved
through individual competition corrupts all the more in a society that
does not have an aristocracy or class structure as an alternate source of
status.
Another barrier to learning is the fact that work roles and tasks
are very compartmentalized in the U.S. These roles are separated from
family and self-development concerns, and they are supposed to be
treated in an emotionally neutral and objective manner, which makes it
very hard to examine the pros and cons of organizational practices that
put more emphasis on relationships and feelings. Even to talk about
Anxiety in the work context is taboo.
Within the work context we have the further problem that task
issues are always given primacy over relationship issues. We build
relationships if they are pragmatically necessary, but we automatically
pay attention to whatever are the demands of a task even if that forces us
to sacrifice relationships.
A major set of cultural constraining forces to learning is the myth
that management can be sorted into hard and soft things. Our public
images of management, the depiction of management in textbooks and
other literature, the implicit model of management held by many teachers
of business all proliferate the notion that management deals with hard
things--data, money, bottom lines, payoffs, production, competition,
structure. And it is even better if these hard things can be quantified.
Everyone pays lip service to the notion that people and
relationships are important, but basically our society's assumptions are
that the real work of managers is with quantitative data, money, and
bottom lines. People in the end can seem to be nothing more than
another resource that can be manipulated like any other resource. In
this model, people and their feelings are not the prime or most important
focus of management. If we have any doubts about the reality of this
myth consider how many performance appraisal and potential systems in
our organizations prefer to reduce both performance and potential to
numbers rather than dealing with qualitative descriptions of performance
and leadership potential.
This bias shows up most clearly in graduate schools of business
where the popularity of quantitative courses in finance, marketing, and
production, is much greater than the qualitative courses in leadership,
group dynamics or communication. If one examines the implicit
assumptions about people held by professors of economics and finance
one will probably find that they are perceiving people primarily in a
machine-like rational economic sense not as humans with feelings.
Though they will argue that this model is a necessary convenience for
theorizing, teaching from such a model nevertheless sends a strong
message to all business students that people are just another resource,
not a prime factor of concern to management. Creating a learning
culture from this set of assumptions becomes very difficult.
Associated with the myth that management is only about hard
things, is the myth that management is basically a short time horizon
occupation. Driven by our reporting systems, managers learn early on to
pay closer attention to the progress of their financial numbers than to the
progress of the morale or development of their employees. To create an
environment for learning is a long range task, and few managers feel
they have the luxury to plan for people and learning processes.
The task orientation, preference for hard numbers, and short-run
orientation all conspire to make systems thinking difficult. Systems are
ultimately messy and they cannot really be understood without taking a
longer range point of view as systems dynamics has so convincingly
demonstrated.
What all of this adds up to, is that it is one thing to specify what it
will take for us to become effective perpetual learners. It is quite another
thing to get there, given some of the strong cultural inhibitors that are
acting on us all the time. But the first and most necessary step is always
a frank appraisal of reality. If we understand our cultural biases we can
either set out slowly to overcome them, or, even better figure out how to
harness them toward more effective learning. Ultimately cultures cannot
be judged except in relation to some goal we are trying to accomplish. If
learning is our goal, then we must figure out how to become effective
learners with the culture we have. Because even if we decided that
some elements of our culture were dysfunctional, it Is not likely that we
could quickly produce culture change. Such change is itself a long and
slow process.
How then to proceed?
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1973.
Kotter, J. P. & Heskett, J. L. Corporate Culture and Performance. N.Y.:
Free Press, 1992.
McGregor, D. The Human Side of Enterprise. N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1960.
Michael, D. N. On Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn. San
Francisco, CA.: Jossey Bass, 1985.
Schein, E. H. Organizational Culture and Leadership (2d Ed.). San
Francisco, CA.: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
Schein, E. H. "How Can Organizations Learn Faster?" Sloan Management
Review, 1993, 34, 85-92.
Senge, P. M. The Fifth Discipline. N.Y.: Doubleday Currency, 1990.
3. Anxiety 1
Anxiety 1 is the fear of learning something new. Adaptive
learning in individuals, groups, and organizations tends toward stability.
We seek to institutionalize those things that work. We seek predictability
and meaning. Indeed it is all those stable routines and habits of thought
and perception that we call "culture." We seek novelty only when most of
our situation is pretty well stabilized and under control.4. Anxiety 2
But if, as many predict, the economic, political, technological, and
socio-cultural global environment will itself become more turbulent and
unpredictable, then new problems will constantly emerge and the
solutions I have developed will constantly become inadequate. I will
discover that if I don't change and learn how to learn. things will go
badly for me. That brings us to Anxiety 2, the uncomfortable realization
that in order to survive and thrive I must change, and that unless I
change and learn how to learn I will fail.5. Proposition 1 About Learning
How then does learning at this level, or for that matter at any level
occur? For change or learning to occur we can state the following very
general proposition: Anxiety 2 must be greater than Anxiety 1.
Somehow I must reach a psychological point where the fear of not
learning is greater than the fear associated with entering the unknown
and unpredictable.6. Learning Method 1
Learning Method 1 is to increase Anxiety 2 until the fear of not
changing is so great that it overwhelms the fear of changing. I suspect
that most of us find this to be the method of choice because it is entirely
under our control. We can threaten the learner In various ways or
provide such strong incentives for learning that the prospect of losing
what the incentives offer serves to escalate anxiety 2 to a very high level.
For example, I might feel that if I don't learn to use the electronic mail
system and conduct my meetings with the latest groupware I will not get
promoted in this organization. At that point logic would dictate that I will
begin to learn something new.7. Learning Method 2
But note, there is another way that Anxiety 2 can be made greater
than Anxiety 1, and that is by reducing Anxiety 1. We can concentrate on
making the learner feel more comfortable about the learning process,
about trying out new things, about entering the perpetual unknown. In
fact, if the world is as we describe it, most of us already have enough
Anxiety 2 just from the daily disconfirmation of how our old habits are no
longer adequate to coping with current realities. From the trivial
problems of not knowing how to program our VCR'S to the complex
problems of not knowing how to organize ourselves for more productive
output, we have plenty of Anxiety 2 already.8. How to Reduce Anxiety 1
First of all we have to provide psychological safety, a sense that
learning something new will not cause loss of identity or our sense of
competence. I will not embark on a path that I perceive to be destructive
to my sense of self-worth. Friendly, supportive encouragement from the
coach is essential.9. Can Learning be Perpetual? Or is it Episodic?
How does one avoid what I think we have all witnessed that once
we have gone through a learning process and experienced both the pain
and joy of it, we now think we have the answer, the new skill, the final
insight and, therefore, we want to continue to do what we have just
learned? Over what time span does one need to enjoy the fruits of
earlier learning before one is ready to tackle another learning step?
How long does it take to practice a new skill or a new way of thinking
before one can be sure that one has mastered it and go on to the next
level? And what happens if demands are made on us to learn something
more before we have mastered what we learned initially, or to learn
something faster than we think we are able to?10. Elements Of a Learning Culture
First, there is a growing body of evidence from studying
organizations that have been both adaptive and innovative over a long
period of time that they have in common a concern for people which
takes the form of an equal concern for all of their stakeholders--
customers, employees, suppliers, the community, and stockholders. No
one group dominates the thinking of management because it is
recognized that any one of these groups can slow down and destroy the
organization.11. Cultural Inhibitors
Human history has left us with a legacy of patriarchy and
hierarchy, and a myth of male dominance and superiority based on the
male as the warrior and protector. One can think of this as almost a state
of "arrested development" in the sense that we have very limited models
of how humans can and should relate to each other in organizational
settings. The traditional hierarchical model is virtually the only one we
have.12. Pro-Active Pragmatism
I believe that one mechanism by which cultures change is to
reprioritize some of the shared assumptions that conflict with other
shared assumptions. For example, I believe that the U.S. is a very pro-
active, pragmatic, task driven culture and that such pro-active
pragmatism will force us to pay more attention to people, to team work,
and to relationship building and dialogue. As we discover that
competition and rugged individualism fail in solving important problems,
we will experiment more with other forms of organizing and coordinating.
Initially we may do it only because it is pragmatically necessary. But
gradually we will discover the power of relationships and teams for
getting tasks done better and for learning. Groups are an anxiety
reducer and, in the end, we will do more things together because the
levels of both Anxiety 1 and Anxiety 2 will be higher than ever. So if I
allow myself a bit of optimism I think our proactive pragmatism will
eventually force us into creating a learning culture and, in that process,
will produce new and quite different 21st century organizations.
REFERENCES
Argyris, C. & Schoen, D. Organizational Learning. Reading, MA.:
Addison-Wesley, 1985.