Managing Learning as an Investment Process

If you approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process ”and your scarce time and energy as resources that deserve careful management ”you will realize returns in the form of actionable insights. An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you reach the breakeven point in terms of personal value creation sooner. Chris Bagley would have acted differently if he had known that (1) senior management at White Goods had systematically underinvested in the plant, despite energetic efforts by local managers to upgrade, (2) the plant had achieved remarkable results in quality and productivity given what they had to work with, and (3) the supervisors and workforce were justifiably proud of what they had accomplished.

To maximize your return on investment in learning, you have to effectively and efficiently extract actionable insights from the mass of information available to you. Effective learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so you can focus your efforts. Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it. Efficient learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious time. Chris Bagley s approach to learning about the White Goods plant was neither effective nor efficient.

Defining Your Learning Agenda

If Chris Bagley had it to do over, what might he have done? He would have planned to engage in a systematic learning process ”creating a virtuous cycle of information gathering, analyzing, hypothesizing, and testing.

The starting point is to begin to define your learning agenda, ideally before you even formally enter the organization. A learning agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: What do you most need to learn? It consists of a focused set of questions to guide your inquiry, or hypotheses that you want to explore and test, or both. Of course, learning during a transition is iterative: At first your learning agenda will consist mostly of questions, but as you learn more you will hypothesize about what is going on and why. Increasingly, your learning will shift toward fleshing out and testing those hypotheses.

How should you compile your early list of guiding questions? Start by generating questions about the past, questions about the present, and questions about the future . Why are things done they way they are? Are the reasons why something was done (for example, to meet a competitive threat) still valid today? Are conditions changing such that something different should be done in the future? The accompanying boxes offer sample questions in these three categories.

Identifying the Best Sources of Insight

You will learn from various types of hard data, such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press accounts, and industry reports . But to make effective decisions, you also need soft information about the organization s strategy, technical capabilities, culture, and politics. The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation.

Questions About the Past

Performance

• How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has performed?

• How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious?

• Were internal or external benchmarks used?

• What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage and discourage?

• What happened if goals were not met?

Root Causes

• If performance has been good, why has that been the case?

• What have been the relative contributions of the organization s strategy, its structure, its technical capabilities, its culture, and its politics?

• If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics?

History of Change

• What efforts have been made to change the organization? What happened?

• Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization?

 

Questions About the Present

Vision and Strategy

• What is the stated vision and strategy of the organization?

• Is it really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, is the strategy going to take the organization where it needs to go?

People

• Who is capable and who is not?

• Who can be trusted and who cannot?

• Who has influence and why?

Processes

• What are the key processes of the organization?

• Are they performing acceptably in terms of quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not?

Land Mines

• What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track?

• What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid making?

Early Wins

• In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?

 

Questions About the Future

Challenges and Opportunities

• In what areas is the business most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them?

• What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential?

Barriers and Resources

• What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Are they technical? Cultural? Political?

• Are there islands of excellence or other high-quality resources that you can leverage?

• What new capabilities need to be developed or acquired ?

Culture

• Which elements of the culture should be preserved?

• Which elements need to change?

 

Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning process both more complete and more efficient. Keep in mind that you need to listen to key people both inside and outside the organization (see figure 2-1). Talking to people with different points of view will deepen your insight. Specifically, this will enable you to translate between external realities and internal perceptions, and between the top of the hierarchy and the people on the front lines.

Figure 2-1: Sources of Knowledge

The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following:

• Customers. How do customers perceive your organization? How do your best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? How do they rank your company against your competitors ?

• Distributors . From distributors, you can learn about the logistics of product movement, customer service, and competitors practices and offerings. You can also get a sense of the distributors own capabilities.

• Suppliers. Suppliers can give you their perspectives on your organization in its role as a customer. You can also learn about the strengths and flaws of internal operations management and systems.

• Outside analysts. Analysts can give you a fairly objective assessment of your company s strategy and capabilities, as well as those of your competitors. Analysts also have a broad overview of the demands of the market and the economic health of the industry.

Indispensable internal information sources are the following:

• Frontline R & D and operations. These are the people who develop and manufacture your products or deliver your services. Frontline people can familiarize you with the organization s basic processes and its relationships with key external constituencies. They can also shed light on how the rest of the organization supports or undermines efforts on the front line.

• Sales and purchasing. These people, and customer service representatives and purchasing staff, interact directly with customers, distributors, and suppliers. Often they have up-to-date information about trends and imminent changes in the market.

• Staff. Talk with heads or key staff members of the finance, legal, and human resources functional areas. These people have specialized but useful perspectives on the internal workings of the organization.

• Integrators. Integrators are people who coordinate or facilitate cross-functional interaction, including project managers, plant managers, and product managers. You can learn from them how links within the organization work and how the functions mesh. These people can help you discover the true political hierarchies and identify where internal conflicts lie.

• Natural historians. Keep an eye out for old-timers or natural historians ”people who have been with the company for a long time and those who naturally absorb the organization s history. From this group , you can learn about the company s mythology and the roots of its culture and politics.