DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE A LEARNING DISABILITY?

Few large organizations live even half as long as a person.

In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble.  
The organization as a whole cannot recognize impending threats, understand the implications
of those threats or come up with alternatives.

Under the laws of “survival of the fittest” this continual death of firms if fine for society.  What if
the high mortality rate is only a symptom of deeper problems that afflict all companies, not just
the ones that die?

Most organizations learn poorly: the way they are designed and managed; the way people’s
jobs are defined; and most importantly, the way we have been taught to think and interact
create fundamental disabilities and what learning does occur takes place despite these learning
disabilities:

I am my position  Most people see themselves within a “system” over which they have little or
no influence.  They do their job, put in their time and try to cope with the forces outside of their
control.  Hence they see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position.  
When that happens, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all
positions interact.  When results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why.  All you
can do is, assume that “someone screwed up”.

The enemy is out there There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something
outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong.  “Out there” and “in here” are usually part of
a single system.  When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our actions extend
beyond the boundary of that position.  When those actions have consequences that come back
to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused.  This learning disability
makes it impossible to detect the leverage which we can use “in here” on problems that straddle
the boundary between us and “out there”.

The illusion of taking charge  Being proactive is frequently seen as an antidote to being
“reactive”.  All too often, “proactiveness” is reactiveness in disguise.  If we simply become more
aggressive fighting the “enemy is out there”, we are reacting – regardless of what we call it.  
True proactiveness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems.  It is a product
of our way of thinking, not our emotional state.

The fixation on events  We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every
event, we think there is one obvious cause.  Conversations in organizations are dominated by
concern with events: last month’s sales, new budget cuts, the new product our competitors just
announced, and so on.  Such explanations may be true as far as they go, but they distract us
from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from
understanding the causes of those patterns.  Our fixation on events is actually part of our
evolutionary programming.  Today, however, the primary threats to our survival, both of our
organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual
processes.  If we focus on events, the best we can do is predict an event before it happens so
that we can react optimally.  But we cannot learn to create.

The parable of the boiled frogs  The frog’s internal apparatus is geared to sudden changes
in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.  Learning to see slow, gradual processes
requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the
dramatic.  The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it’s as if we can only see at
78 rpm; we can’t see anything at 331/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to
slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threat.

The delusion of learning from experience  The most powerful learning comes from direct
experience.  What happens if the primary consequences of our actions or of our most important
decisions are in the distant future or in the distant part of the larger system within which we
operate?  When that happens it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.  Cycles
are particularly hard to see, and thus learn from, if they last longer than a year or two.  
Traditionally, organizations surmount the difficulty of coping with the breath of impact from
decisions by breaking themselves up into components. However soon convenient divisions of
labour cuts of contact between functions.  The result: analysis of the most important problems
in a company, the complex issues that cross functional lines becomes a perilous or non-existent
exercise.

The myth of the management team  Schools train us never to admit that we do not know the
answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in
advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues.  Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant,
we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant.  That very
process blocks out any new understandings which might threaten us.  The consequence is
what Argyris calls "skilled incompetence" - teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at
keeping themselves from learning.  All too often teams end spending their time fighting for turf,
avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally and pretending that everyone is
behind the team's collective strategy - maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team.  To
keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid
stating them publicly and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what
everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person's views foisted on the group.  If there is
blame, it's usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion and fails to reveal
the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole
could learn.

The five disciplines can act as antidotes to these learning disabilities.  But first, we must see the
disabilities more clearly – for they are often lost amid the bluster of day-to-day events.