The Business Sensei

Organizational Learning

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Fans of James Bond movies might recall a scene that goes something like this:

We are looking at an unidentified room. Two people we’ve never seen before are standing in front of a desk. We might be able to see the back of the head of the man who sits behind that desk. A voice rings out:

“You have failed SPECTRE. Number 3, why did you not kill 007 as ordered?”

Number 3 stammers out some response and the voice turns its attention on the other person.

“Number 5, you have also failed SPECTRE…”

Eventually, Number 3 is told everything is forgiven and he can leave. Of course, this is SPECTRE. As soon as he walks out of the room he’s dropped into a tank of piranhas, or the bottom of the elevator turns out to be a trap door and Number 3 learns that Maxwell Elevators really are good to the last drop, or he dies in some other Rube Goldbergesque manner.

SPECTRE, as all Bond fans know, is the villainous organization headed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the evil genius who spends most of his time trying unsuccessfully to kill 007. Given his track record, as evil geniuses go, he frequently seems more like Wile E. Coyote.

Blofeld’s problem, of course, is that every time one of his agents makes a mistake that agent dies. Those whom James Bond doesn’t kill are terminated by Blofeld himself. This makes it extremely difficult to conduct any form of on-the-job learning. When every mistake is fatal, the lessons tend to come a little too late to do much good. As learning organizations go, SPECTRE has issues.

Although the consequences are generally not so flashy, businesses do face some similar problems. Granted, most business mistakes don’t make for a good action movie, and dropping people in piranha tanks is generally frowned upon. However, there is still the very real problem of figuring out how to enable people to learn from their mistakes without those mistakes harming the business. James Bond, after all, at least gets a script.

Part of the challenge is that even when leaders are well-trained and highly skilled, there is a big difference between what one learns in most management training classes and the actual experience of leading a team, department, division, or company. That doesn’t mean that the training is useless, but it does mean that the training needs to be appropriate.

In sports, for example, athletes drill constantly: they practice the fundamental skills of their sport until they can execute those skills without thought. Doing that, however, is not enough to make an athlete a successful competitor. Such training is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

As a soccer-playing friend once commented to me, there’s a big difference between the drill and the game. The drill is controlled and predictable; the game is not. The game is confusing and chaotic, and in the moment of truth all those carefully drilled skills simply vanish away. The problem is that chaos is overwhelming: it takes getting used to in order to navigate it. The Japanese term, “randori,” used to describe Judo competition, means “seizing chaos.”

Athletes practice getting used to chaos by moving past drills and practicing in various free play scenarios: mock games, spring training, practice randori, etc. These experiences enable the athlete to experience the chaos in small doses and hence become increasingly comfortable with it. They learn which skills to execute when. The day of the actual tournament, they are ready. When they do make mistakes, they have something to fall back on to help them recover quickly, as opposed to something to fall into and get eaten.

Businesses are in a fundamentally similar position: while there are some obvious differences in the details between learning the skills of a sport and learning sales or management or computer programming, the fundamental process is the same. Since organizational performance is ongoing instead of being organized into discrete chunks such as tournaments, organizational learning needs to be ongoing as well. Optimally, organizational learning should also be an enjoyable experience, not just because that makes people happy but because people learn best when they are enjoying themselves. The methods and approaches to organizational learning should also serve to simplify other issues, such as orientation, accreditation, and organizational change. The lessons of sports and games will serve us well in understanding how to make organizational learning effective.

To begin with, though, we need to understand what learning is and how it works.

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Focus on experiences, not things

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the perils of rewards, and now I’m going to talk about using rewards. Bear with me. As we discussed earlier, rewards can be very useful when they are a form of feedback. It’s when they become the goal that they become problematic. The nature of the reward also matters: some rewards force us into the motivation trap, while others are easily amenable to becoming something we do with people.

It turns out that the most common form of reward, cash bonuses or items, easily slip us into the motivation trap. Cash or items, be they t-shirts, fleeces, laptop bags, tech toys, all produce much the same results: a short-term blip followed by, at best, nothing, at worst long-term dissatisfaction. While some people use cash to buy something they’d like, most of the time the extra cash goes to paying bills or toward a rainy day fund. Cash also creates an expectation of an even larger cash reward the next time around.

Giving people tech toys or other things seems like a nice idea, but actually doesn’t work. First, the reward feels impersonal: look, everyone in the department got a new phone. Of course, that can get tricky, since some people like Android and others iOS. A more serious problem, particularly with technology, is that the gift loses its appeal very quickly. All it takes is a newer, fancier tech toy to hit the market and suddenly that old gadget is no longer cool: Now it makes you look behind the times. In early 2012, Apple announced the iPad HD, popularly referred to as the iPad 3. It was definitely an amazing gadget. In October, they announced the iPad Retina, an even more amazing gadget. As several newspapers reported at the time, Apple fans were furious. Suddenly their new iPad HDs were obsolete. One analyst commented that he didn’t understand the fuss: if the HD was a good device on Monday, before the iPad Retina was announced, why wasn’t it a good device on Wednesday? He was, of course, missing the point: the excitement wasn’t in having just any gadget, it was in having the newest gadget. In the end, things lose their motivational power very quickly: getting a new iPhone is fun for a week or two, but after that it’s just another item that I stick in my pocket along with my wallet and keys.

Rather than things, lasting happiness and motivation are produced through experiences. It is the opportunity to go off and do something that we enjoy that really builds long-lasting motivation. There are several reasons why this works.

First, in order to give someone an experience, you have to have taken the time to get to know them and know a little bit about what they’d like. If you have an employee who loves watching the Olympics, giving her tickets to attend the games would be extremely effective. However, if you gave her tickets to the opera, maybe not so much. As we learned as kids, it’s the thought that counts. While that is not an absolute truth, as anyone who has ever received a particularly ugly sweater can attest, knowing that someone cared enough about you as a person to arrange for you to do something you deeply care about is a very powerful motivating force. Again, treating someone as a person as opposed to a generic tool on the team is extremely important.

The other thing about experiences, though, is that they never lose their value. Our memories of the fun times we’ve had remain positive memories. They don’t stop being positive just because we might do something else. Graduating from high school can still evoke memories of pride and accomplishment even in someone who went on to gather advanced degrees from a top college. If you enjoyed learning to wind surf while on a vacation, the memory of that enjoyment will always be with you even if you never wind surf again.

The things we do become part of who we are; they shape us as people in a way that gadgets cannot. Sure, it might be nice to receive a new camera right before a major vacation, but the camera isn’t what makes the vacation fun. It may help us remember our trip and it may enable us to share some of our enjoyment with others, but rarely is it the point of the trip.

Experiences do not have to mean vacations, although that is important. We’ll discuss that further later in this chapter. Experiences can be work related. For example, continuous learning is a form of experience provided by the organization to those who desire it.

Providing people with the opportunities to do things they value builds their relationship to the organization: by providing the opportunity, you become their virtual partner or supporter.

Experiences can be used on a group level as well. While having organized, group activities is certainly a good thing, it should not be the only thing. Low level teams try to do everything together to build team unity. This is silly and counter-productive. In one case, a certain organization sent members of a group to a state fair. The manager insisted that everyone stay together and attend the same events, whether everyone was interested or not. Rather than building unity, it only created division.

Physical objects are ephemeral. Experiences never grow old, never get stale, and don’t become obsolete when someone announces a new model.

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author