Making Organizations Human Again Through Learning

After many years in the business world, I’ve grown very accustomed to—maybe too accustomed to—the extraordinarily artificial world of The Organization. Constructs like reporting relationships, span-of-control analyses, performance reviews, or rightsizing initiatives simply don’t exist outside the firewalls and badge-access doors of the workplace.

In the world of The Organization, there are good reasons for these constructs. They enable tens of thousands of people to work in a coordinated fashion toward a common goal like creating software, building a new model automobile, or sending satellites into space. But while these organizational constructs are built to support businesses full of humans, they are not all that, well, human. They convert us to productivity units we call FTEs, occupying headcount, that are paid, managed, reviewed and scored.

Enter the opposite: Learning, something uniquely and incredibly human. The act of gaining a new insight or seeing a situation from a different perspective is how we grow and become ourselves. Children learn through play and mimicking others (I remember when my daughter, at 3 years old, loudly declared during a game we were playing in the car, “Focus, people!” I’ll own that one.) Teens learn through experimentation and testing boundaries. And we adults often learn through failure—situations that force us to stop and reconsider patterns in our lives that are not serving us anymore.

Unfortunately, the tolerance for true learning in today’s organization is pretty low. Testing boundaries is risky. Play is looked down upon as unproductive. And failure just might get you fired. That’s why learning and growing into our best selves—our most human pursuit—can be completely at odds with the organizations that are asking us to do so.

As learning leaders, we have the tough job of re-humanizing the workplace, but we often try to do it by leveraging the same kinds of tools and approaches used to control large groups of people and optimize their performance. And that can’t work because learning is inherently messy. It’s unpredictable and unique to each individual. Learning doesn’t roll up easily into quarterly reports. Learning is personal. Learning is human.

Instead, I’d offer that we shift our approach. Instead of attempting to create a learning culture, why don’t we allow a learning culture to exist? By getting the organizational baggage out of the way, people will learn. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

Here are three ways for us to think about it.

First, look at how people learn outside our organizations and allow the same kinds of approaches inside the workplace. For example, when I finish my work day, I find my daughter, now in college, exploring art through conversations online with like-minded artists on Instagram. And my wife, an amateur power-lifter, is perfecting Olympic lifting techniques through a community that has its own YouTube channel. People leverage the power of social, digital communities to share ideas and stretch their thinking. In organizations, instead of creating and controlling learning content in highly structured experiences, we need to explore ways to enable people to learn when they need to, from each other, organically and all the time.

Second, we need to enable our organizations to reflect on their work. So many times, a team will finish a project and just move onto what’s next. But in organizations where projects can mean life or death,  learning saves lives. Hospital surgical teams leverage the Case Review method to understand why surgeries succeeded or failed. The military uses After Action Reviews (AARs) to uncover issues and best practices to improve performance in the future. Imagine what our workplaces would be like if just a single hour was devoted to reflecting on every project to harvest the learning? We can help make that a reality, even if it feels a little outside the box for a learning function.

And third, we can invest in making our people leaders into leaders of learning. A place to start is to develop leaders to ask different questions, like “what did we learn?” instead of “what went wrong?” For some leaders, it might just be getting them to ask questions at all. The combination of challenge and psychological safety is the heart and soul of a learning organization.

We, as learning leaders, are tasked with being the culture keepers in our organizations. And culture may just be the one human thing that can never be erased from an organization. We are not going to create a learning culture if we rely solely on programs and initiatives, but fortunately, we don’t have to. The normal human experience is one of constant, ongoing learning. Our job is to break down barriers to learning in the workplace, and then just get out of the way.

Originally published by Larry Clark here on Harvard Business Publishing’s website