Closing the Loop

Your learning priorities and strategies will inevitably shift as you dig deeper. As you start to interact with your new boss, or to figure out where to get some early wins, or to build supportive coalitions, it will be critical for you to gain additional insights. So plan to return to this chapter periodically to reassess your learning agenda and create new learning plans.

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST

1. Are you effective at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming in with the answer ? If so, how will you avoid doing this?

2. What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiry. If you have begun to form hypotheses about what is going on, what are they and how will you test them?

3. Given the questions you want to answer, which individuals are most likely to provide you with solid actionable insights?

4. How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some ways you might extract more actionable insights for your investment of time and energy?

5. Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan.