We're living in incredibly turbulent times.
The well spring of this uncertainty lies in one of the
characteristics of the newly-arrived Information Age. Business
people are being buffeted by an increasingly rapid rate of
change. Consider this. In 1900, the total amount of knowledge
available to mankind was doubling about every 500 years. In
1990, it was doubling about every two years.
Imagine the implications of that kind of increase in the rate
of change! It means new products, new regulations, new market
configurations, new customers, and new technology in almost every
industry. It's no wonder that we're confused and uncertain about
what to do.
And the growth of that knowledge continues at an expanding rate.
One futurist predicts that today's high school students will have
to absorb more information in their senior year alone than their
grandparents did in their entire lifetime. And Nesbitt is on
record as predicting that in the year 2020, the rate of knowledge
will double every 35 days!
That incredibly rapid pace of new knowledge is driving the forces
of change at an unprecedented rate. And that rate of change is
continuing to accelerate. The effect of that snowballing rate of
change on our businesses and our jobs can be cataclysmic. It's
almost as if a malevolent spirit were stalking our economy,
rendering all the wisdom of the past useless, and casting a spell
of confusion and uncertainty over the land.
The indications are that this rapid state of change will not be
a temporary phenomena we all must live through. Rather, it will
be the permanent condition we must accept for the foreseeable
future. Rapid change is not a phase we're passing through, it's
a process we're entering into.
That means it is likely that the conclusions, paradigms and core
beliefs upon which we based our decisions just two or three years
ago are likely to be obsolete today. Even more sobering, the
conclusions and strategies which we develop today will be
obsolete in a couple of years. We can count on this continuing
obsolescence of our best ideas and strategies to be the constant
state of affairs.
One of my clients recently told his employees, "The only thing
you can count on is that you won't be doing this job in three
years." His point was that the job will change in that period of
time to such a degree that it'll be a different job. The
technology used will likely change, as will the customers, the
systems and the focus of the job.
The insightful person will accept that rapid change is now a
defining characteristic of our economy, and plan to deal with it
effectively on an on-going basis. Instead of thinking we should
just persevere until it's behind us, we should prepare for rapid
change to be a way of life.
What's the best way to go forward in the light of this rapid
change? What mind sets can we adopt that will equip us to survive
and prosper in turbulent times? What skills do we need to survive
and prosper in the information age?
I believe there is one core skill which will define the most
successful individuals. It's the ability and propensity to engage
in self-directed learning. The only sustainable effective
response to a rapidly changing world is cultivating the ability
to positively transform ourselves and our organizations. And
that's the definition of self-directed learning.
In the face of a world that is different one week to the next,
our most powerful positive response is to cultivate the ability
to learn. By "learning," I don't mean just the acquisition of new
information, although that is a necessary prerequisite. Rather, I
mean the kind of "learning" that requires one to change behavior
on the basis of an ever changing understanding of the world.
Learning without behavior change is impotent.
The individuals who become disciplined, systematic self-directed
learners will be the success stories of the information age.
Likewise, those organizations that become learning organizations
will have the best chance of surviving and prospering.
Read what other have said about it:
"...the key thing as we go forward is the ability to learn. You
can not arrest the pace of development in the marketplace, in
the world, socially and technologically. It is coming at an
increasing rate. You've got to be able to learn and adapt..."
Beale.
Because of the forces surging through our economy, it's safe to
say that tomorrow will be significantly different from today. It
will be more complex and somehow significantly changed. And that
will be true of all the tomorrows in the foreseeable future.
The most skilled employees, therefore, will be the ones who can
continually access the changing facts and growing complexity of
their jobs, and then change appropriately.
That's "self-directed learning."
"We understand that the only competitive advantage the company
of the future will have is its managers´ ability to learn faster
than their competitors." Arie P. DeGeus.
In a world that is rapidly changing, today's hot new product is
tomorrow's obsolete dinosaur. More important than any one product
is the ability to continually create new products. Today's
strongest employee could very well be tomorrow's employment
problem. More important than any one employee is the ability to
find and maintain employees who are constantly growing. Today's
closest customers could be out of business tomorrow. More
important than any one customer is the ability to attract and
retain customers.
All of these are applications of the ultimate competitive
advantage -- the ability to learn faster than your competitors.
"In fact, I would argue that the rate at which individuals and
organizations learn may become the only sustainable competitive
advantage." Ray Stata.
As the economy becomes more and more global, competition will
increase. Few businesses will enjoy a secure market position. The
quality of competition will also improve as competitors strive to
out do one another in providing customer service and value added
products and services. In this new economy, those who survive and
prosper will be those who know how to learn, and who do so faster
and more systematically than their competitors.
And those organizations that become learning organizations will
be those who fill themselves with people who regularly engage in
self-directed learning.
How, then, do you instill this "self-directed learning" in your
organization?
Here are three tactics to begin the process.
1. Wipe the Slate Clean.
Imagine that you have written the history of your company or your
career on a blackboard. You have every decision, every strategy,
every success and every failure noted in detail. The sum of this
experience provides the rationale for why and how you do
everything that you now do.
Now, take a wet towel, and wipe the board clean. Erase the past.
As you do so, you eliminate the unspoken acceptance of the way
things are, and replace it with the new understanding that things
may not be the way they should be. Just because something is,
doesn't mean it should be. The reason you started doing something
may no longer exist. Remember, with a world turning over more or
less completely every two to three years, any decision or
procedure which had its roots in a situation that three or more
years old may not be justified today.
This little exercise provides a mental image for a change in
thinking that needs to take place if you're going to become a
learning organization. You must begin to think about things that
you do, not on the basis of the past (three or more years ago),
but rather on the basis of the present and the future.
It's a way of eliminating one of the biggest barriers to learning
and changing. That barrier is the mental obstacles that we put in
our own way. Here's an example. One of my clients was frustrated
with his continuing inability to motivate his sales force. He
spent much of his mental energy and financial resources
attempting to get his force of largely independent agents to
spend more time with his product. Yet he never thought about
going to market in ways other than through his traditional
methods. When we broke down that barrier of relying on the past
and wiped the slate clean, we discovered a marketing method which
holds tremendous potential for his business. However, it took a
change in thinking, a thought process that wasn't tied to his
past in order to look at the situation on the basis of the
present and the future rather than the past.
That principle can be applied in every area of your business,
from something so fundamental and important as your method of
reaching your customers, to something as mundane as the way you
answer the phone, or fill out a receiving document.
2. Give Learning a Strategic Emphasis.
Build in the need to become a learning organization in the most
fundamental building blocks of your business.
Write it into your mission statement. Get the board to pass
a resolution advocating it. Display your commitment to it
predominantly in your personnel manual.
Talk about it at your employee meetings. Make it an agenda item
in your executive meetings. Articulate it as an initiative in
your strategic planning sessions. And, begin to model learning
behavior yourself.
3. Make self-directed learning a part of everyone's job
description.
Begin to create learning expectations for yourself and all your
employees. Talk about their need to learn and grow. Include it
as an item on every job description.
Then encourage, develop and support learning opportunities
throughout your organization. Here's some things other
organizations have done:
ONE: Require every employee to attend a certain number of
outside seminars per year.
TWO: Create "Learning Groups" within your company. These are
temporary groups of people who come together for a short period
of time to learn from and with one another. One of my clients,
for example, has a weekly manager's lunch where everyone brown
bags lunch and discusses one chapter of Steven Covey's book,
Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. The principle of short
term, small group meetings conducted around the free-flowing
discussion of some body of content, can be used throughout your
organization. We organize and train sales people and sales
mangers to enter into this process, for example. People on the
shop floor, service technicians, customer service reps, etc.
can all enter into short term learning groups. Since they are
temporary, the configuration of the groups constantly change,
thus exposing everyone to diverse perspectives. The groups can be
homogeneous (people from the same department or job title) or
heterogeneous (people from different departments and job titles).
The important thing is that your employees are expected to engage
in self-directed learning, and you're encouraging and
facilitation that process.
THREE: Reward the effective application of learning. In other
words, when someone finds an effective way to change things,
reward them. One of my clients holds a monthly employee meeting,
where the employee who has made the biggest positive change in
the way things are done is rewarded with $150.00 cash bonus.
Begin to implement these strategies and you'll take the first
steps to transforming your organization into a learning
organization. You'll begin the process of mastering the ultimate
skill for the information age.
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