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Secrets to Accelerating Learning Curves

 

 

This is part 2 of the Lagging Learning Curve Content, read part 1 here

Corporate learning curves are a complicated and sometimes confusing mechanism of corporate innovation. Multitudes of smart employees do not necessarily translate into effective innovations or prosperous companies.

Every innovation based organization can accelerate their corporate learning curve  by implementing the following two project leadership initiatives.

  1. The first initiative is to create one project document that all team members contribute to, a document where all learning’s are documented ongoing.  Call this document a learning’s library and refer to this often, feed monthly reporting information into this document and heavily reward employees who spontaneously report into this document.  Too much information is lost in the monthly report then disappears into “server heaven.”
  2. The second initiative is to create a culture of teaching. Most professionals enjoy teaching other people, teaching creates technical curiosity, teaching often creates a desire to impress and teaching is a great way to stimulate collaboration.  A culture of teaching will bring the corporate learning curve closer to the individual curves. Teaching will extract the intellectual capital from the minds of employees. This wealth of knowledge in the minds of your people is a valuable asset that a company may or may not be harnessing.

How does your company or department organization accelerate learning curves?

This content is explained in greater detail in my upcoming book.  The book is about healthy innovation and creativity in a corporate setting.  Please sign up for my email list for insider announcements about the launch of this book. 

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The Lagging Learning Curves

 

It takes time to teach people, it takes time for knowledge to spread around a culture. Knowledge sometimes can not penetrate business cultures readily. Some people learn slower than do others, decision makers are not as brilliant as all team members in every area of life.

Working in R&D I am constantly reminded and focused on learning curves; my own learning curve on a variety of subjects, my team’s learning curve covering our projects, my department’s learning curve on the technology that we are developing and finally the entire corporation’s learning curve on a wide variety of technologies and markets.

We are constantly learning, and learning progresses as a rapid and as a gradual process.

Corporate learning curves are the learning curves that a team or corporation undergoes in order to execute in a market.  The corporate learning curve is not the sum of the knowledge in each team member’s mind.  Rather the corporate learning curve is the body of knowledge and wisdom about a technology that leaders use to make business decisions. The knowledge may include fundamental scientific understanding, it may include understanding about processes to competitively manufacture, it may include supply-chain connections and it may include insight into future market demand. Anything that the team uses to make business decisions is a part of the corporate learning curve.

The corporate learning curve almost always lags behind (in time) the sum of individual contributor’s learning curve on any topic unless the company is very small or if it communicates very often and very effectively.

There may be 10 scientists on a team who have an understanding of the mechanism and process in order to build the next great cell phone technology however if the management in that team or company do not have a grasp of the technology, or have knowledge of what the technology can and cannot do proper business decisions can not be made.  If the commercial team does not understand and cannot market the technology then the team overall has not advanced up the corporate learning curve and therefore cannot monetize their knowledge.

There can be a gap between what the scientists, engineers and middle management knows and what the organization can execute on in the marketplace.  Because of this, the importance of teaching cannot be over emphasized; if the informed team members cannot (or will not) communicate well to the business leaders then the company will not be able to capitalize on the knowledge.

In fact individuals in any part of the organization may be further up the curve but, if they do not have the ability or authority to lead the technical teams who will to execute and create the divisions and products then the knowledge is of no value to the company.   Claiming technical success and promising a product prematurely is a function of poor teaching and poor communication, knowledge is not enough to create revenue.

Sometimes it is important for ambitious leaders who feel very confident in the team’s abilities themselves and feel far along the learning curve to recognize that what really matters is the corporate learning curve. If they do not have the political clout to educate and persuade, if they do not have the willingness and the ability to teach the organization it does not matter what they know. The only thing that matters is what the organization “knows and will accept” as a whole and can prove in that company’s labs or manufacturing processes.

What is even more remarkable is how much organizational culture can further slow down the corporate learning curve. It is not necessarily a delay due to inability to understand or is it stubbornness in management, sometimes complex office politics further slows down learning curves.  I have seen refusal to learn by senior members of teams from junior members simply because of lack of relationship or competitive resistance.  The organization is accustomed to learning in a certain way and sometimes deviations from that way are rejected.

To read more on this topic click here for part 2 of this post.

 

What is the best way to keep an organization together in learning?

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Secret Tips to Thinking Like a Scientist…and why you would want to

Scientists enjoy a special place in society, I think that sometimes television pushes an unquestionable persona for scientists.  The truth is scientists are just like everyone else in society.  They struggle with the same issues, the same frustrations, they have the same political leanings and conflicts. So this “know everything” persona I think is a well constructed fantasy.

A good scientist is a professional learner.  Science is a learning technique, not a group of unquestionable elites or opinionated professors. A good scientist is a benevolent pursuer of knowledge who learns, teaches and then creates useful things and understanding with his/her knowledge.

Non-scientists can learn to use the tool of science to gain understanding and to even create new things by understanding the following four secret tips.  I call these secret only because you wont learn most of  these by listening to societal ideals of the scientist and if you’re not a practitioner of science you may not think of these.

  1. Respectfully question everything, we are becoming too trusting in this society, especially of government and of scientists.  It is ok to challenge people when they try to persuade you to something.   Even the most intelligent people in the world do not know far more than they do know and they often make bad assumptions.  Start to challenge people, start to look for assumptions and respectfully call people out on them.  Start to challenge what is taught, this is healthy if its done not a in a rebellious defiant way but in a curious learning way. If a person can not explain something then chances are they don’t really understand it.
  2. Begin to research, other people have learned and have documented a great deal of knowledge, choose your topic and start researching, compile a note-book on a topic and start to collect information.
  3. Realize that anyone can learn by experimenting:  Experimentation is a powerful process of learning new things, we don’t always need to be taught new things by other people.  We can press into the unknown and create our own knowledge. Identify a problem that you or others are facing, develop several hypothesis as to what is causing the problem or issue and what might solve it, then determine to test the hypothesis and try to prove or disprove them.
  4. Start Your Experiments and Pay Attention: After you start experimenting pay close attention, there is much to be learned by observation. Enjoy the process of learning and don’t get too uptight about it.

Why Would You Want to Do this:

Simply put; a lot of the information out there to solve our problems or to understand reality is just not reliable.

For example, a great deal of the medical community in the US is based on medical science alone.  There are other health care sciences that may be a much better solution to your medical problem. However for financial and often political reasons most of the time only medicine (chemicals) are pushed as the solution which often only mask symptoms.

Another example, a child may be struggling with learning, the public school may or not be able to help this child, what often happens is the parent just trustingly listens to the counsel of a misguided administrator, takes the child to a doctor who diagnoses a syndrome then medicates.  When all the child really needed was special attention from a parent or loving teacher.

I could give dozens of other examples that drive me nuts however my main point is don’t just accept what is fed to you as your solution, become a learner, if at all possible experiment for yourself, research for yourself, you might find that you can solve your problems in a better way by just thinking like a scientist rather than like a trusting child. Of course I am not suggesting you experiment with medicine, I am suggesting however that we take it upon ourselves to understand and sometimes experiment as a means of learning.

Remember to teach as you go to help others benefit from your knowledge.

How do you think like a scientist? leave comment below

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