Amping Up Learning

CEOs, boards and executive teams all need to learn; preferably, together

There are few demands more important in today’s business world than that of engaging in continuous learning. Keeping up with everything CEOs, boards and executive teams are supposed to know is a daunting task. The penalty for failure is to fall behind, perhaps not recognizing that there is something you should have known before making a critical decision. To quote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.”

Despite its importance, most leaders don’t have a plan or process for how to go about learning. Some individuals may engage in dedicated routines but not much thought is given to collective learning. Good thinking requires the ability to access common knowledge and to make decisions about what information is relevant in a given situation. If each member of the executive team or board is operating from a different knowledge base, with unique views of what matters, chaos or paralysis can be the result.

The first step toward a more robust approach to joint learning is to own up to the fact that learning is a necessary part of leading and the way it is done matters. The prevailing assumption that must be challenged is that when confronted with a situation that requires new knowledge or a different way of thinking, the knowledge will appear and whatever process is used will be adequate. A related belief is that if a decision is not made correctly the first time, there will be opportunities to make adjustments. Many decisions are “safe” in this regard, but a few are downright dangerous. It’s important to be able to tell the difference, and to kick into a different mode of knowledge processing when faced with high stakes matters. If you haven’t developed the “knowledge muscle” your team or board needs during these times, it is unlikely that you will under pressure.

Adult learning experts differentiate between everyday learning and transformational learning. Jack Mezirow has written extensively about the type of learning that results in transformation for adults. Adapting his work to senior teams and boards would look something like this.

First, the group needs to experience a “disorienting event” that casts doubt on the current way things are done and provokes consideration of alternatives. The disorienting event can be a sudden drop in sales, a lawsuit that calls into question a core practice that has been essential to success, the unexpected departure of a key executive, or the failure of a carefully designed strategy to produce the outcomes intended. Whatever the disruption, it has to be significant. A minor setback or disturbance won’t do. The event has to call into question deeply held shared beliefs and assumptions about how the business works. If it does this, it will trigger conversations. How those conversations are conducted will determine whether learning takes place or the opportunity will be missed.

At first, all efforts will be directed toward righting the ship. The group will be invested in reducing the potential impact of the event by handling it as the group has successfully handled similar events in the past. Only when those remedies fail will the “Oh S…!” moment occur that marks embarkation on finding a new way to operate.

Who is involved in the search for new solutions matters, as fresh perspectives are probably needed. Making certain that new voices are heard is challenging and calls on the leader to set the stage for open and candid conversation where all voices, regardless of their tenure or position, can be heard. It is also up to the leader to open the door to new knowledge and information entering the conversation by planning who should be consulted as the discussion evolves. This could include voices from outside the group or even outside the organization.

If the conversation is headed in the right direction, members of the group will begin to develop new perspectives that replace their former beliefs. They will push one another until new ideas emerge that excite the imagination and begin to gain traction in the form of actions that could be taken. Rather than looking to the past or to what others have done to search for solutions, pride grows in the ability of the group to do its own independent thinking. Energy and excitement grows as the feeling of being stuck or trapped is finally shrugged off and autonomous momentum builds. Actions produce evidence that change is possible and further investment is then placed behind the plan to transform the business in fundamental ways. External recognition reinforces the new way of doing things until those new ways of doing things become the new normal.

Here’s the important thing. You don’t have to wait for an unplanned disorienting event to occur for learning to take place. You can make learning intentional by thinking about the events most likely to disrupt your business and disrupting yourself before others can. You’ve heard that advice before, no doubt. What may be new is pairing that advice with an intentional, planned approach to learning before taking action. Rather than just tasking people with coming up with a new way of doing things, plan the learning they should engage in before doing so. Formalize learning processes so that they are continuous and collaborative. Set forth your curriculum of major concerns to be addressed and put real effort into the best way to accumulate greater knowledge on those subjects. Bring new voices into the conversation and make certain they are permitted to influence key decisions. Set criteria by which you will assess real progress in innovation so that you don’t settle for the same old approaches being reprised. When you achieve breakthroughs, remind people how you did it, so they don’t think that magic or luck was involved.

You can really amp up the power of learning by creating opportunities for the executive team and board to learn together on a regular basis. The format of learning can vary; from in person to online to site visits or other creative ways to make learning meaningful and enjoyable. Experiment with different approaches so that you keep things fresh. Most importantly, build in adequate time for post-learning discussions so that leadership and the board have an opportunity to align on the important takeaways. That will help build a solid base of support for moving beyond current operating limitations to explore new strategies and business models.

Learning is more important to leadership than ever. Tomorrows are arriving faster than they ever have and the pace of change will only continue to accelerate. As much as we might have been glad to finish our formal education and get to work, we should rethink how we should continue to learn now that someone else isn’t doing all of the curating of courses and programs for us. The ultimate goal of education is to teach us to think for ourselves; now, we have to take responsibility for our continued joint learning.