Business Leadership

WHAT MIGHT A LEARNING CULTURE LOOK LIKE

A first attempt to describe the characteristics of a learning culture leads to identifying the following ten key issues.

1. A PROACTIVITY ASSUMPTION.

A learning culture would assume that the appropriate way for humans to behave is to be proactive problem solvers and learners. The learning leader must also portray confidence that active problem solving leads to learning, thereby setting an appropriate example for others in the organization. It will be more important to be committed to the learning process than to any particular solution. In the face of greater complexity, the leader’s dependence on others to generate solutions will increase, and we have overwhelming evidence that new solutions are more likely to be adopted if the members of the organization have been involved in generating them.

2. A COMMITMENT TO LEARNING TO LEARN.

A learning culture must have a “learning gene” in its organizational DNA: members must hold the shared assumption that learning is a good thing and something worth investing in, and that learning to learn is itself a skill to be mastered. Learning must include not only learning about changes in the external environment but also learning about internal relationships and how well the organization is adapted to the external changes. One key to learning is to get feedback and to take the time to reflect, analyze, and assimilate its implications. Another key is the ability to generate new responses, try new ways of doing things, and obtain feedback on the results of the new behaviors. This takes time, energy, and resources. A learning culture must value reflection and experimentation, and give its members the time and resources to do it.

3. A POSITIVE ASSUMPTION ABOUT HUMAN NATURE.

Learning leaders must have faith in people and believe that ultimately human nature is good—and, in any case, malleable—and that people will learn if provided with the resources and necessary psychological safety. Learning implies a desire for survival and improvement. If leaders start with assumptions that people are basically lazy and passive, that people have no concern for organizations or causes above and beyond themselves, they will inevitably create organizations that will become self-fulfilling prophecies. Such leaders will train their employees to be lazy, self-protective, and self-seeking, and they will then cite those characteristics as proof of their original assumptions about human nature. One might wonder why Douglas McGregor’s (1960) insight into this problem in terms of Theory X (cynical mistrust of people) and Theory Y (idealistic trust of people) still has not taken hold.

4. AN ASSUMPTION THAT THE ENVIRONMENT CAN BE DOMINATED.

A learning culture must contain the shared assumption that the environment is to some degree manageable. A passive organization that assumes that it must accept its niche will have more difficulty learning as the environment becomes more turbulent. Adaptation to a slowly changing environment is also a viable learning process, but the way that the world is changing will make that less and less possible.

5. A COMMITMENT TO TRUTH THROUGH PRAGMATISM AND INQUIRY.

A learning culture must contain the shared assumption that solutions to problems derive from a deep belief in inquiry and a pragmatic search for truth. What must be avoided is the automatic assumption that wisdom and truth reside in any one source or method. As the problems we encounter change, so too will our learning methods. For some purposes we will rely on normal science; for others, we will have to find truth in experienced practitioners; for still others, we will have to collectively experiment and live with errors until better solutions are found. Knowledge and skill will be found in many forms, and what I call a clinical research process—in which helpers and clients work things out together—will become more and more important. One might say that in the learning organization, we will have to learn how to learn. The toughest problem for learning leaders will be to come to terms with their own lack of expertise and wisdom. The learning task in learning cultures becomes a shared responsibility.

6. AN ORIENTATION TOWARD THE FUTURE.

There is an optimal time orientation for learning, somewhere between the very far future and the near future. One must think far enough ahead to be able to assess the systemic consequences of different courses of action, but also think in terms of the near future to assess whether or not one’s solutions are working. A similar argument can be made about assumptions about optimal units of time—should we think primarily in terms of minutes, hours, days, months, quarters, years, decades? This will, of course, depend on the task and the kind of learning that is going on, but the optimal assumption is that one should pick medium-length time units for assessment: enough time to test whether a proposed solution is working but not so much time that one persists with a proposed solution that is clearly not. For any given task, the learning leader will have to make an instant diagnosis of what an optimal time orientation and a medium length of time is, and that will vary from situation to situation. As the world becomes more complex, we will be less and less able to rely on standard time units such as quarters or years.

7. A COMMITMENT TO FULL AND OPEN TASK RELEVANT COMMUNICATION.

A learning culture must be built on the assumption that communication and information are central to organizational well-being and must therefore create a multi-channel communication system that allows everyone to connect to everyone else. This does not mean that all channels will be used or that any given channel will be used for all things. What it means is that anyone must be able to communicate with anyone else in the organization and that everyone assumes that telling the truth as best one can is positive and desirable. This principle of openness does not suspend all the cultural rules pertaining to face or adopt a definition of openness equivalent to “letting it all hang out”—there is ample evidence that such behavior can create severe problems across hierarchical boundaries and in intercultural settings. It means, rather, that one must become sensitive to task-relevant information and be as open as possible in sharing that. One of the important roles for the learning leader will be to specify, in terms of any given task, what the minimum communication system must be and what kind of information is critical to effective problem solving and learning.

8. A COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY.

The more turbulent the environment, the more likely it is that the more diverse organizations will have the resources and capacities to cope with unpredicted events. Therefore, the learning leader should stimulate diversity and promulgate the assumption that diversity is desirable at the individual and subgroup levels. Such diversity will inevitably create subcultures, but those subcultures will eventually be a necessary resource for learning and innovation. For diversity to be a resource, however, the subcultures must be connected and must learn to value each other enough to learn something of each other’s culture and language. A central task for the learning leader, then, is to ensure good cross-cultural communication and understanding throughout the organization. Laissez-faire leadership does not work, because it is in the nature of subgroups and subcultures to protect their own interests. Optimizing diversity requires higher-order coordination mechanisms and mutual understanding.

9. A COMMITMENT TO SYSTEMIC THINKING.

As the world becomes more complex and interdependent, the ability to think systemically, analyze fields of forces and understand their joint causal effects on each other, and abandon simple linear causal logic in favor of complex mental models will become more critical to learning. There are many variations of systemic thinking, such as “systems thinking” as promulgated by Senge (1990) and Sterman (2000), systemic thinking in biology, systemic thinking in family therapy, and so on. The learning leader must believe that the world is intrinsically complex, nonlinear, and interconnected, and that most phenomena are multiply caused.

10. A COMMITMENT TO CULTURAL ANALYSIS FOR UNDERSTANDING AND IMPROVING THE WORLD.

Finally, a learning culture must understand the concept of culture and the learning leader must be willing and able to work with culture [Schein, 2004].

THE EVOLVING ROLE OF A LEARNING LEADER

The role of the learning leader changes in different stages of organizational evolution. In launching and growing an organization, leaders externalize their own assumptions and embed them gradually and consistently in the mission, goals, structures, and working procedures of the group. Whether we call these basic assumptions the guiding beliefs, the theories-in-use, the mental models, the basic principles, or the guiding visions on which founders operate, there is little question that they become major elements of the emerging culture of the organization.

In a rapidly changing world, the learning leader-founder must not only have vision, but also be able both to impose it and to evolve it as external circumstances change. Inasmuch as the new members of an organization arrive with prior organizational and cultural experiences, a common set of assumptions can be forged only by clear and consistent messages as the group encounters and survives its own crises. The culture creation leader therefore needs persistence and patience: to be simultaneously clear and strong in articulating a vision and open to change if that very vision becomes maladaptive.

Once an organization develops a substantial history of its own, however, its culture becomes more of a cause than an effect. The culture now influences the strategy, the structure, the procedures, and the ways in which the group members will relate to each other. Culture becomes a powerful influence on members’ perceiving, thinking, and feeling, and these predispositions, along with situational factors, will influence the members’ behavior. Because it serves an important anxiety-reducing function, culture at this stage of organizational evolution will be clung to even if it becomes dysfunctional. Leaders at this stage need, above all, the insight and skill to help the organizational culture evolve into whatever will be most effective for the organization’s future.

In the mature organization, if it has developed a strong unifying culture, that culture now defines even what is to be thought of as leadership, what is heroic or sinful behavior, and how authority and power are to be allocated and managed. Thus, what leadership has created now either blindly perpetuates itself or creates new definitions of leadership, which may not even include the kinds of entrepreneurial assumptions that started the organization in the first place. The first problem of the mature and possibly declining organization, then, is to find a process to empower a potential leader who may have enough insight and influence to overcome some of the constraining cultural assumptions. Conceived of in this way, leadership is the capacity to surmount the very organizational culture that the leader him- or herself helped to create: to be able to perceive and think about ways of doing things that are different from what the current organizational assumptions imply.

To fulfill this role adequately, learning leaders must be well connected to those parts of the organization that are themselves well connected to the external environment—the sales organization, purchasing, marketing, public relations, legal, finance, and R&D. Learning leaders must also be able to listen to disconfirming information coming from these sources and to assess the implications for the future of the organization. Only when they truly understand what is happening and what will be required in the way of organizational change can they begin to take action in starting a learning process. Much has been said of the need for vision in leaders, but too little has been said of their need to listen, to absorb, to search the environment for trends, and to build the organization’s capacity to learn.

BECOMING A LEARNING LEADER

A learning culture assumes that the world is intrinsically a complex field of interconnected forces in which multiple causations are more likely than linear or simple causes. The fundamental function of learning-oriented leadership in a turbulent world, then, is to promote these kinds of assumptions. Leaders themselves, however, must first hold such assumptions, become learners themselves, and then learn to recognize and systematically reward behavior based on those assumptions in others.

An analysis of organizational culture makes it clear that leadership is intertwined with culture formation, evolution, transformation, and destruction. Culture is created in the first instance by the actions of leaders; culture is also embedded and strengthened by leaders. When culture becomes dysfunctional, leadership is needed to help the group unlearn some of its cultural assumptions and learn new assumptions. Such transformations sometimes require what amounts to conscious and deliberate destruction of cultural elements, which in turn requires the ability to surmount one’s own taken-for-granted assumptions, see what is needed, and enable the group to evolve toward acceptance of new cultural assumptions. Without this leadership, groups would not be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions. What, then, is really needed to be a leader in this sense?

It seems clear that the leader of the future must be a perpetual learner. This will require:

New levels of perception and insight into the realities of the world and into him- or herself
Extraordinary levels of motivation to go through the inevitable pain of learning and change, especially in a world with looser boundaries in which one’s own loyalties become more and more difficult to define
The emotional strength to manage one’s own and others’ anxiety as learning and change become more and more a way of life
New skills in analyzing and changing cultural assumptions
The willingness and ability to involve others and elicit their participation

Learning and change cannot be imposed on people. Their involvement and participation are needed in diagnosing what is going on, in figuring out what to do, and in actually bringing about learning and change. The more turbulent, ambiguous, and out of control the world becomes, the more the learning process must be shared by all members of the social unit doing the learning.

In the end, we must give organizational culture its due. Can we recognize—as individual members of organizations and occupations, as managers, as teachers and researchers, and sometimes as leaders—how deeply our own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are culturally determined? Ultimately, we cannot achieve the cultural humility that is required to live in a turbulent and culturally diverse world unless we can see cultural assumptions within ourselves. In the end, cultural understanding and cultural learning starts with self-insight.

Edgar H. Schein is Sloan Fellows Professor of Management emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has authored fourteen books on organizational culture and management.

REFERENCES

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