Creating a learning culture

In a complex world with so many seemingly intractable problems, it often seems like action bias is the only option for heroic leadership. “Just do it” is the mantra of our time. And bold action very often is the right prescription for change. This bias so permeates our approach that our industry yardstick for creating value, Lean Startup’s Build-Measure-Learn starts from action and never pauses to Think.

Our practice frequently teaches us that this isn’t enough. Thinking is a critical component of the adaptive and flexible approach that successful action requires.

It seems counterintuitive to say that thinking is a necessary condition of action. We’ve become used to thinking of bureaucracy and siloed, frozen ground that resists action and succumbs to “analysis paralysis”, overthinking everything and failing to ever act. In this organisational story, the heroic leader must push stoically through, insistent and unwavering in their convictions.

As powerful as this story is, it’s a fragile approach to change that entrenches broken power dynamics and damages feedback loops, deepening inertia.In contrast, a learning culture that can think and talk to and about itself can make clear choices about action, with the mechanisms in place to learn and adapt to the effects of action. This doesn’t mean an alternative bias to learning, but instead a balance of disciplined thinking providing support for persistent action. We believe this principle helps people act together to create continuous change.

So what does it mean to create a learning culture? We think there are several important elements that are needed to create a productive balance of learning and action:

• Teams need time and space for thinking and talking about their work
• People need clear points of reference to come back to, so we can keep growing our body of knowledge about a topic
• We need to practice communicating the insights, rationales and decisions behind our actions, so actions don’t become black boxes we are doomed to endlessly repeat
• Teams need operational support to optimise the learn-act loop, specifically around knowledge creation and decision-making. It should be simple, natural and swift for teams to create knowledge and act on it.

There’s lots to unpack and a rich history of thinking around each of these topics. We’ll be exploring these further through our Insight practice and in conversations with clients and partners about their learning cultures.

If the challenges of creating purposeful action are something you recognise, reach out and learn with us!