Going beyond speed | Winning the Knowledge Game. Smarter Learning for Business Excellence

Many of us have heard the story of the tortoise and the hare, where the tortoise calmly walked during the race, eventually beating its much faster and frantic rival. A similar story is told in Japanese culture where two samurai warriors are racing through a field of long bamboo. Here the samurai who took the time to stop and sharpen his sword was victorious. Such simple wisdom, that we need to reflect and catch breath , is vitally important when it comes to putting knowledge to work. Speed by itself is not enough!

I remember presenting my first training session in Singapore, where I was using a combination of PowerPoint slides and small group activities. The briefing that I had been given was that in Singapore it was customary to present very fast, with many visuals and minimal interaction. I was told that learners wanted to collect the information quickly and leave with the collected ideas for future use. At the time this raised a tremendous dilemma for me because over the past twenty years I had learnt that the best learning occurs when you stop racing and instead create opportunities for people to interact, share insight and collaborate.

As I adapted my training style to the Singaporean culture, I quickly discovered that my assumptions were also correct in their culture. All I needed to do was to spend a little more time gaining permission for involvement and making sure people felt safe before you expected them to express their views and be actively involved. As a result my newly adapted style led to greater learning and flow because the training delivery was correctly paced and people were able to share key issues and discoveries as they occurred. The insight of gaining permission has helped me with other cultures since then, as well.

The lesson behind this training scenario of course translates into other situations in business. It could be a team meeting, a chat over a business lunch or having a conversation on the Internet, all of which need the right level of permission, interaction and openness for faster and deeper learning to occur.

Clearly, moving from a world of speed to one of combining speed with depth will, for many people, be an unnatural act. It requires people to break lifetime habits and develop new skills of reflection and review. It also requires mutual support and peer assistance that is sadly lacking in many places and situations. For example, if a manager is working in a business which is in constant crisis and chaos, it makes our task of smarter learning somewhat harder. However, the good news is that there are some simple things you can do to help you.

First, you need to organize the right times and places in which to have deeper conversations. There are certainly times when you will need to farm out high volumes of information but there are times when you should slow down and encourage deeper reflection. One such example was recently shared by Cris Townley from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu at a Standards Australia s national conference on Knowledge Management. She discussed how a carefully organized and facilitated lunch between business partners had helped create a much needed cross-fertilization of ideas in the business. She used the metaphor of seeing the lunch gatherings as bringing the various nomadic campfires together to build higher levels of support and know-how in the business.

Second, you must be prepared to move beyond just doing activities and tasks , and to encourage people to learn from what they are doing. This is particularly tough in a project-driven business, where the next task is always the next item on the agenda. So somewhere, we must create different dynamics for people to better circulate and apply their know-how. According to Ron Sanchez, a European authority on organizational learning, there are a number of processes through which knowledge must travel in a business for there to be healthy learning.

First, individuals must create knowledge; second, this is shared within groups. The groups then use their knowledge to understand co-ordinated action and to jointly develop new capabilities. Finally, these groups share their knowledge with other groups to generate a business-wide benefit. The flow and transfer of knowledge which is circulated is the heartbeat of business change and innovation. For an organizational learning cycle to be successful, you need knowledge to be explored and evaluated by a combination of individuals and groups who passionately believe in the benefit of building and sharing wisdom.

Sanchez also explains that if you wish to guide healthy business learning you must understand that learning fundamentally occurs in the minds of individuals as they try to make sense of their world. For example, what we believe to be true (in other words, what we think we know) must always be subject to ongoing tests and validation, and we must be willing to replace old beliefs, old knowledge and models. An individual manager, like anyone else in a business, must convincingly explain their ideas to others before those ideas will ever become accepted or seen as creditable. The essential role of managers must be done in a spirit of exploration, support and stimulation for it to generate breakthrough thinking and innovation. So, when we interact and collaborate with others, we need to be tuned into three basic problems when you are seeking to raise the level of wisdom. These problems are:

People may know more than they say.
People may say more than they know.
People place their own meanings on what they hear, see or experience.

Here again there are many ways to generate this spirit of exchange and to ensure you are learning both more deeply as well as faster. In the following chapters countless ways of doing this will be explained; for the moment, here are three practical suggestions to help the exchange between people in a business and to open hearts and minds.

Learning journals

Keep a written log of what you are learning. It provides a point of reference for your ongoing growth of knowledge. It helps you gain some control and insight into how often subtle changes can make a world of difference. To maintain a learning journal, spend between five and ten minutes a day capturing what you have experienced and what you have observed . If you dislike writing, you can draw pictures or use a Dictaphone or tape recorder.

Peter Honey, a British consultant and author, suggests the following three-step process when logging your entries:

Describe the context of your experience, whether it is good or bad, planned or unplanned . Describe who was involved and how you felt in all its wonder .
Summarize your conclusions or the lessons you learnt and dilemmas you confronted in the experiences.
Develop a plan to do something better or differently in light of your conclusions.

Fifteen-minute action reviews

Make fifteen-minute action reviews part of your daily repertoire . This method has been regularly used by organizations such as BP-Amoco and the US military, and is ideal for projects or tasks.

The fifteen-minute action review asks individuals and teams to explore four fundamental questions, when doing and reviewing tasks:

What is supposed to happen?
What actually happened ?
Why is there a difference?
What can we learn from this?

These conversations can do amazing things to your level of individual, group and business understanding. I use action reviews in most of my work when I coach, train or consult . They are gems, particularly when there are clearly observable projects or tasks being undertaken. They also help to audit your processes and explore why work is being done as well as how it is being done.

Ordered sharing

One of the realities of team or group sharing is that often there are different degrees of vocal contribution. Some people like to verbalize their thinking while others like to sit quietly . There are numerous times when you will desire people to share their thoughts and feelings on an equal basis. Geoffrey Caine, a US change consultant, introduced this method to me which I have been using ever since.

The reason I love this method is that it not only helps share knowledge but it also builds a sense of community and belonging which is so vital to fostering trust and support. It also helps to create a safe space to share. It is worth noting that ordered sharing has very strong parallels with the open space technique discussed in Chapter 2.

This ordered-sharing process follows six steps:

Sit in a small closed circle (this process usually works best with groups of up to twelve).
Select a question or issue to be explored.
Each person expresses an opinion in turn .
Listeners must pay full attention and no one makes any comments on what is being said.
The group monitors timings and participation; each person should speak for ninety seconds.
After each person speaks, the next person proceeds in order, after a brief moment of respectful silence.

Having performed the first rotation of conversation, it is often a good idea to revisit the question and ask for further observations about the themes and common messages discussed. This second exploration helps build threads and shared purpose in what is being communicated. Like most methods , it will take time for people to become comfortable with this method. However, after a couple of practices you will find the quality of learning will improve and, most importantly, you will start to see what really needs to be discussed. Often this takes the form of a different question or a modified topic.