6 Key ingredients to build a Learning Organization
Learning organizations are organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.
This is how Peter Senge defined the learning organization in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Don’t we all want that for our organization? Rapid technological changes make it necessary to keep our knowledge and personal development up to speed. If we don’t keep up, we’ll be out of business soon. At the same time, the war for (technical) talent continues, all organizations are in desperate need for the most clever and skilled techies. In winning this war for talent it’s important to invest in the talent that is already there and to be an attractive employer for new talent that desires a career involving continuous learning possibilities. A learning organization is crucial in both cases.
The most important question here is therefore not why, but how to create a learning organization with continuous learning in its DNA. One thing is for sure, there is no one size fits all approach. That’s one reason why it takes time to accomplish this.
Within Technium, continuous learning is one of our core values. That is why we started an initiative to foster our learning organization by introducing Future Fit Friday, a platform that facilitates learning on Fridays. From colleagues or external trainers, with a focus on knowledge sharing and craftsmanship development in both hard- and soft skills. The work format can differ; lectures, workshops, study groups led by senior colleagues or sharing cases with peers in intervision sessions etc, but we have on average 5 learning events every Friday since we started with the concept about 1.5 years ago. Since that time we also learned a lot ourselves. And we are still learning.
When looking back on our journey towards a learning organization, we can identify 6 factors that were key in our transformation that I will share in this blog.
What are these 6 key ingredients to create a learning organization?
1. A way to get people to start learning regularly is to make it fun and easy to do so. To make learning easy on Future fit Friday we took away the hassle for people of the organization around learning initiatives; this is done by the Future Fit Friday team. All upcoming sessions can be viewed by all KPN employees on our Future Fit Friday website, and subscription is also made simple on this same website. Fun fact is that this website is built by junior developers on Future Fit Fridays as a learning project. To bring in the fun, we have different non-work related initiatives on Fridays, like drinks, race simulators, a 3d printer to experiment, a photobooth, and workshops on making music with python or how to make perfect pictures. A fixed part of the Future Fit Fridays is the (free) lunch every Friday, where people can make their own grilled cheese sandwich (tosti!), make a wrap or have hotdogs. This lunch is an essential part of the concept Future Fit Friday, because this is the moment to exchange learning experiences with colleagues you don’t usually see or to even get to know other colleagues.
2. Our second important learning is that it helps to create a learning heartbeat in which learning is incorporated in the weekly schedule. This means no more yearly trainings, but learning every week. In our case we chose to do this on Friday, and we’re making sure everyone knows that we learn on Fridays. The rationale behind concentrating all learning activities on one day, is that people can find time in their sprint planning to spend on learning and be able to learn together on Fridays.
3. A challenge for most of us is to start small: when thinking about this transformation and starting your initiative, it’s tempting to have the ambition to change the whole world (or organization). When you’re thinking too big, chances are you end up never getting anywhere at all. By starting an experiment on a smaller scale it helps you to fail fast and fail often, and to get started in the first place. For us this helped a lot, because in this way we had the chance to learn by doing and explore what worked well and what did not work at all for the Technium population. Even if you take a long time preparing and thinking about your concept, there is no way in knowing beforehand exactly what will and will not work for your population.
4. This might sound obvious, but it’s essential to offer content that’s relevant. What is important for your colleagues to learn? Who is responsible for the content? Ideally in a learning organization, everyone is responsible for their own development and is also helping the development of other colleagues by sharing their expertise. Our main focus is to stimulate people to share their knowledge with their colleagues and come up with interesting content themselves. Employees themselves are the only ones knowing what’s really relevant for them, so the real challenge is to not even try to fill this in for them.
5. Great learning initiatives and great content are worth nothing without good communication. Therefore it’s important to invest time and effort in communication from day one. Think about your audience: Who are they? When, how and on what channel can you best address them? Make sure to be LOUD and get NOTICED. With Future Fit Friday we made sure we had our own logo, communication identity and even our own learning mascot, Future Fit Ted. We had a grand kick-off, posters on all locations, our own Slack channel, a weekly mail with the program, a confluence page and later on even our own website and Mannequin of Future Fit Ted on our main location. This made sure that Future Fit Friday was noticed and became a known concept within no-time.
6. To make sure you don’t have to do all marketing for your initiative yourself, finding ambassadors is key. From day one, find those people who believe in your concept as much as you do and make sure they share their enthusiasm in their environment. Hearing from peers who attend to-, contribute to- or support Future fit Friday is way more convincing than hearing it from the ones starting the idea.
