RWD

It’s all a CEO can do just to stay current on the external factors impacting his organization. Determining what course to chart is a difficult decision.

Once a destination is decided and an intended course plotted, how will he quickly get his organization, from the COO in New York to the product engineer in Chicago to the Customer Service representation in Mumbai clearly underway and on course? Though there are many organizational facets to successfully accomplishing this, one thing that is becoming abundantly clear is that the organization must learn new things, learn them quickly and apply them almost immediately. To be successful in today’s world, it is imperative that CEOs begin to shape organizations that can learn. This point is in little dispute by today’s top leaders.

The question is how? How do I get my organization to learn? If the question sounds simple, it’s because we as baby boomers have grown up with a strong preconceived model for achieving this. The model that dominates our ‘learning subconscious’ is based on a mixture of the school classroom and endless corporate training events that have their roots in the 1950’s industrial revolution. This is a model that has, at best, only sufficed during a period that moved at a pace a thousand times slower than today’s maelstrom.

It’s not as if the corporate learning field has been standing still, however. The learning profession has produced a plethora of ever evolving approaches and technologies. So many in fact that today options form an alphabet soup of learning approaches.

To name a few there are:

• Classroom Learning
• eLearning
• mLearning
• vLearning
• gLearning
• LMS

The executive team for most organizations has become stuck between an outdated mental model for how their organization should learn and a seemingly endless parade of the next new things to save the day for organizational learning. Where are they to start in unraveling the mess? To be successful, they must challenge their existing learning paradigm. The world today has transcended the question of how individuals learn. We now operate in a rapidly changing knowledge economy where organizations must learn how to learn.

Fundamental to organizations learning how to learn is a shift from the basic framework in how we think of learning. Classroom training, e-learning, m-learning, etc. are all based on a delivery mode perspective. We must create a new learning framework. To learn how to learn, today’s organizations must view learning from a new perspective, a perspective that is based on treating learning with the same seriousness and expectations as financial systems, production systems or product development systems.

Check for tomorrow’s post on Part II continuing approaches to successful learning initiatives.