Bretton Woods Presentation
What Are We Learning at The Learning Center?
Jeff Clanon
Executive Director
Center for Organizational Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JUNE 30, 1994
Executive Director
Center for Organizational Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JUNE 30, 1994
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Context
3. Aspiration
4. Reflection And Conversation
5. Conceptualization
6. Community Building
7. Challenges
8. Conclusion
1. Introduction
When I read Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline, about four years
ago
and was first exposed to the concept of the learning organization, I was
struck
by my reactions. I was startled at the accuracy of his description of the
disabilities that pervade today's Corporations, and in particular, how they
applied to the one in which I was working at the time. I felt grateful for
what
I thought was a comprehensive framing and articulation of the multi-
dimensional disciplines that need to be applied to address the situation. The
notion of a learning organization and the five disciplines affirmed my own
sense of hopefulness about what is possible for organizations to accomplish,
and at the same time, what I intuitively know is required of us as human
beings to begin the process.
As I became more deeply involved in the work, the core question that emerged for me (that wasn't directly addressed in the book) which has stimulated, intrigued, excited, and humbled me since, is the practical one -- "How do you actually go about creating a learning organization? How do you move from concept to practice? How do you go about making an organization really work for people?"
Attending to this question has resulted in a number of changes in my life, not the least of which is that I now have a job involving researching it as Executive Director of the Center of Organizational Learning at MIT. The stated mission of the Center is to advance the state-of-the-art of building learning organizations. The intriguing question has become the focus of my professional life.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to explore this question with a group of practitioners who I know not only share this interest, but also bring your own unique experience and perspective which I hope you will be willing to share.
There are at least three perspectives I know of that I believe would lead to a fruitful dialogue on this question of what are we learning, including talking about the specific collaborative research projects underway at MIT with sponsoring companies, the formation and operation of the consortium and community as a whole, and the development and evolution of the MIT Learning Center itself.
We are fortunate to have a number of people in the room from our sponsoring companies who are directly involved in the research projects and who also have been involved in the development of the consortium. So we have a wonderful opportunity to explore all these perspectives over the next couple of hours. I thought, given my involvement in the day to day management and evolution of the Center, I would first provide some context for the discussion by describing the Center and the focus of our research.
I'd also like to share my perspectives on the question of what we're learning at the Center from the standpoint of capabilities I see demonstrated there that have struck me as qualitatively different from those I've experienced in other organizational settings. My goal in effect is to bear witness to capabilities I observe in action at the Center, which I believe are directly relevant to what is required to build learning organizations. In particular, I'll talk about the "cornerstone capabilities" -- aspiration, reflection and conversation, conceptualization, as well as the competence of community building which involves creating a context which can facilitate the development of the other three.
Finally, I'd like to relate some of the challenges I've observed and experienced that the development and application of these capabilities seem to entail.
The Center for Organizational Learning, as many of you know, is actually a consortium of organizations (currently 18) working in partnership with MIT researchers to advance the state-of-the-art in building learning organizations.
A core premise that underlies the work (and motivates the people doing it) is that we must fundamentally change how we think and interact in our organizations if they are to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and interdependent world. Members of a newly formed governing council of the Center have described its mission at the broadest level as being about bringing science and the human spirit together in a business context as a platform for affecting change on a global scale. The Center is one of about a dozen of what MIT refers to as sponsored research centers which are part of the Sloan School of Management.
Peter Senge, with the help of colleagues, including Dan Kim and Bill Isaacs, established the Center in 1990 to provide a structure at which organizational learning theories, methods, tools could be developed, researched, rigorously tested and assessed in real world business settings. The intent was also to explore and establish a new kind of research partnership relationship between management academic researchers and business practitioners.
Currently, the research agenda include four major areas:
-
l) Learning laboratory projects which are focused on developing in-
depth knowledge of generic management issues. These projects
involve developing, implementing and assessing learning
infrastructures which can be integrated with how people do their work.
2) Dialogue projects focus on developing theories and methodology which can enhance the depth and generative nature of conversation in diverse working "teams." The process involves developing the new capacities for thinking together.
3) The CEO Leadership Project involves an inquiry into the evolving nature of leadership required to build and sustain learning organizations and the particular issues that need to be addressed by top management.
4) Learning organization curriculum. These projects involve researching what is required from an education and development perspective to enable people to understand and apply
organizational learning concepts and disciplines. It currently involves implementing and assessing the effectiveness of a 5-day learning organization program, and most recently, a 9-month curriculum which involves classwork, on-going coaching, and application projects.
In addition, the Center at MIT itself is a conscious on-going experiment in developing a learning organization where in essence, we are trying to practice what we preach.
Peter Senge characterizes a learning organization as one where people are continually expanding their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are learning how to learn together. (The Fifth Discipline.)
So, how are we doing? What are we learning at the Learning Center? What are we learning that appears to be working and what are we learning about the challenges inherent in building a learning organization? My short answer to the question is that so far we're doing better than any other organization of which I've been a part from the perspective of developing infrastructure and methodology that appear to facilitate learning. What I experienced over 25 years' working in organizations large and small in the public and private sector was that the organizational structures which were in place, or were created to help manage and accomplish the work, often became major obstacles to actually getting it done. Management infrastructure was almost always designed for control, not learning. Learning, particularly at an organizational level, was left to chance.
With the Learning Center just entering its fourth year of existence, it is too early to draw conclusions and certainly to have demonstrated sustainability. The work is a long-term proposition, perhaps a multi-generational endeavor. Nevertheless, there are capabilities that are being developed at the Center that appear to be moving us in the desired direction. These include aspiration, the capacity of the individual and groups of individuals to orient themselves toward creating what they really care about; reflection and conversation, the capacity to reflect on and share deep assumptions, beliefs, patterns of behavior, both individually and collectively; conceptualization, the capacity to see large systems and forces at play and to construct public, testable ways of expressing these views. (Fieldbook).
I experience a qualitative difference in the levels of commitment on the part of people directly and indirectly affiliated with the Learning Center to the work that in fact is deeper than I've experienced in other organizational settings. People believe in what they are doing. They believe it's important and worthwhile. Peter Senge often talks about the work changing the world. At some of our larger conferences, when I experience a deep sense of connectedness and support among a large group of people, I sometimes have the sense that I am getting a glimpse of what that world might be like.
It is interesting to me that I was committed to the work and to pursuing the core practical question of creating a learning organization I mentioned earlier before I was even aware of the opportunity at MIT. I once heard commitment defined as "Something you can't not do." I have a sense that it is true for many of the people involved in the work of the Learning Center. If we weren't doing it at MIT, we would simply be doing it in some other context.
When I think about commitment in action, I think about the newly formed Governing Council of the Learning Center which has replaced a more traditional Board of Governors' structure. Its members were selected on the basis of their experience and wisdom. They were also selected on the basis that they were 100% committed to the work of the Center and had a deep enough understanding of the work for their commitment to be meaningful. Although the Board has only been in existence for a few short months, its influence and support on the development of the Center are already evident.
4. Reflection And Conversation
Another characteristic of the Learning Center that has struck me as different than I've experienced in other organizations is the amount of time spent on reflecting what the organization is about and what should be done that is consistent with its purpose and values. My experience in corporate settings was that the vast majority of time was spent on short-term operational issues and on planning focused on action that would produce the most immediate financial results. When I first came to the Learning Center, it felt like the percentage of time spent on reflection vs. action was suddenly inverted. Conversations among staff often conclude with the acknowledgment that nobody knows what to do, that the issue should be given more thought and that we should reconvene and talk again. In fifteen years' working in a corporation, I honestly can't remember planning time for reflection.
At the Center, there is an active effort to deepen the level and quality of conversation. Every six weeks for the past year, the community has come together simply to talk with no specific agenda other than to engage in a "dialogue." I don't believe there is anyone who has participated in these conversations that feels other than the time is well spent. My own sense is that the structure of the dialogue has enabled a number of issues to surface and begun to be dealt with that would not have come up otherwise.
One example that comes to mind is that being part of the structure and culture that constitutes MIT of which the Learning Center is a part is certainly not necessarily conducive to some of the values we espouse. My perception is that, like most other academic institutions, MIT is quite a stratified culture with tenured faculty at the top, and administrative staff and students at the bottom. The dialogue proved to be a place where people could talk about the pain which this structure produced and potential models that are more consistent with the kind of relationships we want to develop among our staff and, in particular, between our research and administrative staff.
The Learning Center is the most open organizational environment of which I've been a part. It is the only place I've experienced where all the issues that I am aware of (that is not to say all issues) are at least on the table. Again, in all the public and private organizations in which I've worked, there were always issues that everyone seemed to accept or at least acknowledge that couldn't or shouldn't be dealt with.
For me, an ongoing example of developing conceptualization capability and systemic awareness in action is reflected in the design and structure of the Center for Organizational Learning. The Center is in fact composed of 18 organizations (17 corporations and a health care consortium) and a research Center at MIT. The model of the consortium is that of a partnership between management practitioners and management researchers working together to advance the state-of-the-art of building learning organizations.
However, most of us have little to no experience in a genuine partnership relationship in a business or academic setting. What we do have is our more familiar mental models of vendor-client kinds of relationships. It wasn't until the level of activity that was going on between consortium companies with no direct involvement with MIT was pointed out to me by a veteran company liaison officer, that I began to become aware of the mental model I was holding, and the fact that it didn't fit the more systemic reality that was occurring among the consortium members. Since then, as new companies join the Center and new individuals become involved, I have observed a number of similar transitions to a deeper understanding of what partnership means. I believe the dialogue level of conversation that we have at our quarterly liaison meetings has enabled us to gain new ways of looking at organizational relationships.
I also have the sense that we are at the very beginning stages of developing our capacity to see larger systems and dynamic complexities at play as a matter of course in what we do. That was apparent to me in a decision we made recently to cancel an international event we had scheduled when we began to understand the systemic issues involved in working with a global network of learning organizations. We realized we simply hadn't taken enough time both to understand and consider the strategic and systemic complexity which the event would precipitate.
As I reflect on what I've been doing, not just these past two years in my role as Executive Director at the Learning Center, but in the ten years before that as an Artificial Intelligence"Technology Transfer" manager for a large corporation, I realize that perhaps the most important component of my work has been community building. I realized shortly after I got the corporate job that only a small element of my job involved transferring technology. It was almost entirely about people.
What I was doing was developing learning processes that enabled individuals and organizations to understand and utilize a new technology. The technology only became integrated in organizations where a critical mass of people not only had learned the technical skills, but understood and were committed to its power and potential to do work more effectively and which would enable them to focus on higher level, more interesting tasks.
I didn't frame the work as community building at the time. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't have used the terminology in that environment. Perhaps one of MIT's contributions will be to legitimize community building as a complement to the educational model as practical methodology for transforming business organizations.
It seems to me that at MIT, we have more or less stumbled into that realization, but thanks to some expert help from people who have significant expertise in this area, such as Juanita Brown and more recently, Kaz Gozdz, we are now quite intentional about it. Building community has emerged as core work for building learning organizations. As Peter Senge and Fred Kofman say in their article, "Communities of Commitment: The Heart of the Learning Organization," without communities of people genuinely committed, there is no real chance of moving forward.
Having experienced some of these new capabilities in practice at the Center, I am keenly aware and excited about their power and potential. At the same time, I have a sense of the level of challenge they offer to would-be practitioners which seems to me to range between formidable and enormous. I have never worked with a group of people who believe so deeply in the work they are doing. At the same time, the combination of commitment, outstanding intellectual capacity and exceptional articulation skills which can potentially result in world class research also results in demands on people's time to a level that I have not experienced anywhere else. There are tremendous pulls and forces at play that could potentially fragment the Center. This is a complex and critical issue that we are just beginning to address.
Once you start engaging in dialogue level conversation, it is hard to imagine stopping. Issues, sometimes powerful and difficult to talk about, are surfaced that in part transform as new ways of thinking about them are generated. However, generalization to new models and new behavior in the day-to-day activity is not a trivial matter. I am more than ever aware of the perseverance, courage and hard work that are required to achieve real and lasting change in an organizational setting. Ed Schein has articulated some of the cultural forces at work that make these kinds of lasting changes difficult in his May 1994 working paper, entitled "Organizational and Managerial Culture as a Facilitator or Inhibitor of Organizational Learning." These include the myth that leaders always have to be in control, decisive, dominant; the myth of "rugged individualism"; the belief that task issues should override relationship concerns; the bias toward linear, short-term vs. systemic long-range thinking. These are deeply held, often implicit beliefs that are very difficult to change, particularly on a large-scale basis.
Jay Forrester once said that an understanding of system archetypes and systems thinking represents about 10% of an understanding of systems dynamics. Relatively few people have an understanding of systems thinking, let alone what the discipline of systems dynamics offers. Given the ever- increasing level of complexity and interdependence of the issues with which we are confronted today, it is difficult to envision making such progress without a dramatic increase in the number of people who can think systemically. The issue of scale in developing these capabilities is, I believe, our current learning edge and one that must be addressed.
Before we focus on some of these issues from the perspective of what is being learned from the research projects and the development of the consortium community, I want to conclude by saying that the core emergent questions for me have shifted since I have been at the Center. Although still practical, they have become less objective in a sense and more personal. The internal questions I seem to be asking myself these days are, "How do I live learning in a learning community? How can I become more consistently open and receptive to what I need to learn (on an intellectual, emotional and spiritual level), and how can I be most helpful in developing a learning community? On an organizational level, how do we go about creating an organization concerned not only with growth in size and stature, but in spirit and depth?" Challenging questions to be sure, but it is comforting to me to know that I am not alone in asking them.