Here I do not mean education, though it is not impossible for an educational institution to also be a Learning Business.
A learning business is one which learns from its experience and uses this to improve its performance. Many will immediately say 'But we all do that'. No, we don't. Learning requires us to reflect on past procedure and performance and to ask, in a very open-ended way, if the objectives were achieved, whether the results could be somehow improved, whether even the objectives are the right ones, how the objectives are stated and measured, how the resources used are described and measured - and whether this affects the result or the objectives themselves. For example, if the target is 'best possible', that implies that use of resource is no object, or that all available resource is to be used. It leaves very open when any state of completion has occurred. It may well be altogether more effective to declare some sort of 'satisfactory' state and use that as a target to meet or exceed.
Trust is an essential element of a learning business. Without trust the business will not learn and so the ethos of the business has to create situations where it is very easy to offer improvement, very easy to work independently and somehow at the same time relatively easy to recognise when unproductive effort is occurring. That mutual trust makes it likely that work is task-based, even when these tasks are open-ended. It makes metrics difficult and it is likely that many of these are subjective measures ("We did that well", "We got that wrong"); it requires reflection, which in turn means there is time put aside for recognition of the learning that has occurred and, perhaps extensive record of that having happened. Many of these attitudes run counter to 'old' management attitudes.
Learning businesses do not / cannot tolerate selfishness. Some forms of 'protected space' need to disappear. There are issues with hierarchy. Cross-relate to earlier chapter.
Indeed. I think as a society (as well as within organisations) we need to find a much better way to allow people to admit they got something wrong. It seems to me that we spend very little time interrogating how an error occurred - the emphasis is often on 'lessons learned', but how can lessons be learned without that interrogation? If and when I make a mistake when working for a customer, I really try to drill down into exactly how it happened so that I can a) apologise in a meaningful way and b) avoid it in the future. I'd say in about 60% of cases this process involves the revelation that I didn't actually make a mistake (e.g. they sent me the wrong version of a file, or they are using a Mac and didn't tell me, or a setting has inexplicably reset, or similar), and when an error *is* revelated the customer is greatly reassured by being told exactly what the error was, how it happened and how I've fixed it (e.g. I recently conflated two Jewish societies in an index for a book about Jewish societies. They had very similar names in English, German and Hebrew but were in fact two different things. The author confessed that she had also mixed them up and we added a note to the index to help the reader avoid the same error. Overall, then, the error had a positive effect on both the index and my relationship with the author *because* I interrogated it; if I had just tried to cover up the mistake that would have been far worse).
I had a similar one last year with a book that contained two men called Joseph Rowntree (the famous one, and a less famous one). The author flagged this in the text, so I disambiguated them in the index, and then had to have a fight with the idiot publisher who thought this was an error (at one point I wrote the immortal line, 'I suggest you try reading the book before you assert that you know where its defects lie').
Academia, especially at university level may be in the business of learning but consistently fails to be a Learning Business. A lot of this (failure) follows immediately from academics being in competition with each other. That ought to leave all of university administration available to become a learning business but this too fails to occur. Some of that follows from it being very difficult to remove people from a post; the system has allowed many layers of protected space to develop and so there are topics of responsibility whose guardians act as if they answer to no-one. Challenge is defeated in the best buck-passing (in circles) bureaucratic style and, in many ways, witjhin the admoinstration the purpose of the university is simply to continue to keep the adminstration in employment – and at some leveated levels, in the style to which they have become accustomed. This sort of institutional behviour is almost unable to change; it would require remarkable external change to create any situation which the university powers would notice enough to act on and it woudl take a vice-chancellor of extraordinary power to be able to cause change to percolate through the layers of the bureaucracy - and stick.