Opportunities For Learning Through Everyday Practice


There are numerous approaches that come under the umbrella of learning through everyday practice. Some of these approaches are discussed below.

Team Meetings

In many Japanese cultures daily communication meetings are the means by which firms, such as Matsushita and Honda, ensure continuous improvement. The Japanese management philosophy is one of ensuring that all of its employees are integrated through open communication, job rotation, consultative decision-making, team working, as well as through the sharing of information across departmental boundaries (Thompson, 1993).

From my consulting work with organisations I am aware of the lost opportunities for knowledge sharing from everyday practice, such as team meetings. So often team meetings are used as forums for communicating down, rather than opportunities for knowledge-building and sharing. In addition, too much emphasis is given to formal meeting structures. While these are important, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of informal structures. A colleague of mine recently recounted how, in a former role as a Lecturer in a College of Nursing, knowledge was built through the daily informal interactions between lecturers and nurse practitioners in the coffee lounge. In these impromptu meetings, colleagues discussed some of the questions (and answers) posed in lectures. Often the nurse practitioners would add in observations from the wards, or pose questions based on their observations on the wards. The interactions provided a forum for developing new knowledge, and for raising questions for further research. Through this daily ritual, those in practice, as well as those learning about practice, were able to exchange ideas and raise questions that enhanced their own knowledge, as well as that of the organisation.

By re-visiting the purpose and practice of team meetings, organisations can benefit from:

  • Regular forums for sharing best practice and for questioning the assumptions upon which operational routines are based

  • Opportunities for identifying solutions to common operational difficulties through joint problem-solving

  • Opportunities for sharing intelligence (gathered internally, or externally)

  • An exchange of operational highs and lows, together with an opportunity to discuss the lessons learnt, as well as discuss where existing processes need to change

  • Shared information to help with the ‘know why’

Informal Meetings And Conversations

Another consideration when building a learning culture is that of revisiting our assumptions about what counts as productive work, as these can get in the way of developing a knowledge-centric culture. As part of the research that I have been conducting into how organisations are developing a knowledge-creating and sharing culture (Evans, 2002) I have uncovered numerous stories of lost opportunities because managers seem to have a narrow perspective on what constitutes productive work. One example comes from a consulting firm where managers were critical of the time consultants spent in conversation with colleagues in other teams, as this was perceived as time taken away from ‘real work’. Another story, told in Chapter 4, is that of the Utilities company where the management team decided to cancel the service engineers’ weekly team meetings because it was felt that bringing the engineers together once a week was not productive use of time. What had been overlooked was the importance of these weekly get-togethers from a knowledge-building and sharing perspective.

What lessons can we draw from these stories? A key lesson is that time spent in conversation with others sharing insights, discussing solutions to common operational problems, and exchanging ideas, needs to be seen as productive work. If they are not then organisations will struggle to develop a high performance culture. Research into the factors that can affect participation in e-learning reinforces this view. Attempts to introduce e-learning often fail because of the assumptions held by managers that learning and development is something that takes place away from the office, or away from an individual’s desk. For some managers, learning is seen as an extra-curricula activity, rather than something that is an integral part of daily work routine.

Cross-Boundary Team Working

In the quest for high performance, many organisations are realising the benefits of learning from difference, whether this be learning from difference within their own organisation, or learning from difference outside (i.e. through benchmarking, study tours, secondments, or community-based projects).

In the late 1990s the Ford Motor Company launched a business leadership initiative, based around cross-functional team working, as a way of developing ideas for improving the way the company runs its business[5]. This Organisational Development initiative was based on a simple assumption that through the casual conversations that individuals have in their day-to-day work there is the spark of an idea of how to improve the business; however, day-to-day responsibilities mean that these ideas often remain untapped. This company-wide leadership initiative brought together managers from different functional areas to develop working propositions. So why has this approach worked? First, those involved believed that well-thought ideas would be adopted, or at least given a trial run. Second, each team is sponsored by a senior executive who is charged with ensuring that the team have access to the necessary resources to develop their ideas into workable business solutions.

But it is not just in the private sector that learning through difference is perceived as a valuable source of learning. In the public sector partnership working is increasingly being seen as a way to bringing about radical change. An example here being the innovative approach adopted by the London borough of Lewisham when they conducted a Best Value review of its entire customer interface. Rather than follow existing approaches, the elected members and council officers adopted a new approach. This involved bringing together a team of independent thinkers from different business backgrounds, to work alongside elected members and officers. One of the lessons learnt cited in the end of project learning review included ‘ This new model of partnership and review had avoided the passivity and other “baggage” traditionally encountered in Council committees and released people from playing pre-ordained roles, so that they could instead challenge each other.[6]

[5]White, D., Focusing on the value of teamwork. The Guardian, Saturday 27 March 1999.

[6]Citizen First. Putting citizens first in Lewisham. A ‘Best Value’ strategic review. Lewisham Council – Directorate for Resources. 2000.




Managing the Knowledge - HR's Strategic Role
Managing for Knowledge: HRs Strategic Role
ISBN: 0750655666
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 175

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