Organizational Learning and Fading Memories

Warning: Learning doesn't last.

Lessons learned can be slowly forgotten over time. Memories fade. When something is "learned", is it permanently imprinted in our memories? No. We become complacent again. We forget. We may not forget everything but we forget the details, the how and the why. Lessons may be institutionalized through new rules and processes as a result of an accident -- to ensure it doesn't happen again -- but with the passage of time, it's just another rule, soon disassociated from the original incident or accident. As soon as people no longer understand the "why" associated with a rule or process, it can be dismissed as bureaucratic red tape and soon ignored or frequently bypassed.

Remember Chernobyl? Remember Bhopal? Remember the Tenerife double aircraft disaster?
What do you remember about them?

Everyone remembers the Titanic, but what exactly do we remember about it? Do we need to be reminded of the details of why and how it happened on a regular basis?

We pay most attention to the why and how just after an accident happens because everyone is focused on "how could it possibly happen?" and "who is responsible?" What we really need is a process for reminding people of the why and how when they think they least need it, when everything is going well and they start thinking it could never happen to them.

I'm also wondering about other factors:
1) Proximity: What's the relationship between an individual's "proximity" or level of involvement with an accident or related lessons on the one hand, and the declining memory curve? Does first hand "learning" last longer?

2) Intensity: What's the relationship between the intensity of the failure (i.e. human lives lost vs. a failed project that didn't achieve its objectives), the extent to which the causes of failure are investigated, and the speed with which memories of the failure fade and lessons are unlearned.

3) Dynamic nature of Lessons: Lessons need to be "updated" regularly based on most recent history and discoveries. Even if you've learned something based on first hand experience, you still need to "update" that knowledge.

Rules and mandated processes need to remain linked to their original rationale. When someone is told that they need to follow rule x, y, z, they should be able to ask "why" and to get a straight answer other than 1) that's how we've always done it, or 2) that's the rule. If you understand the why and the rationale makes sense, you're much more likely to follow the rule.

Learning at the Speed of Change

Sometimes there's a word or a phrase that catches my attention. Perhaps it's just a few words that appear to perfectly encapsulate a thought or a feeling. "Learning at the speed of change" is one of those. We rejoice about our increased ability to communicate. We can communicate more often, with more people, with more tools. Most of that seems to be about quantity (How many twitter followers do you have?). Are we communicating better or just "more"?

At the same time, we complain about information overload. In fact, just as the quantity of information we have access to doesn't guarantee anything about the decisions we make, the fact that we can and we do communicate more doesn't guarantee that we're communicating better. The overload (of information and communication) might become a distraction if we're not able to increase our ability to focus.

"Learning at the speed of change" is a reference to the fact that change is the only constant and the speed of change is increasing. Information overload is only going to get worse and it would be nice if were collectively able to focus our attention on two things:

1) the quality of our communications; and
2) our ability to extract value from massive amounts of information.

We need to learn faster. We probably need to become better lifelong learners as well. If the pace of change is increasing, our ability to learn continuously and faster is going to be critical. Yes, the vast amounts of information now at our fingertips and the many, many tools we now have at our disposal to communicate and learn from each other are wonderful. They will really provide value if and when we learn to collectively harness their potential.

Some possible implications for Knowledge Management:

• Pay more attention to meta-learning (learning about learning)
  Very little attention is paid to the connection between personal learning styles, group learning and organizational learning. The connection between personal learning styles, personal learning strategies (& personal knowledge management) on the one hand, and organizational learning and traditional knowledge management initiatives on the other, is missing.
  
  
• Treat knowledge as a very dynamic thing
  If you are going to try to capture and store knowledge, it will need to be in formats that are easy to edit so that it doesn't quickly become outdated. The types of knowledge that you should be focused on will also change rapidly.
  
  
• Accompany the introduction of new tools
  Don't just demo new tools to show people how to start using them. Accompany the new users in figuring out how to handle those tools strategically from an information overload perspective. Accompany the users in climbing the learning curve and learn with them.
  
  
• Keep an eye on the trade-offs between speed and depth of learning
  You can use Cliff Notes or Spark Notes to make sure you've really understood a difficult piece of literature and to facilitate your learning and preparation for a test or you can use them as a cheat sheet to pretend you've read the book and try to pass a test with minimal time investment on your part.

All of this is assuming that we all need to catch up or keep up with change. Does this also imply that if you want to make change happen, you need to be learning even faster, you need to be the one ahead of the crowd, making all the mistakes that followers will learn from and avoid? Does it mean that in order to lead change rather than react to it, we need to learn FASTER than the speed of change?

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• Zen and the art of (dis)connecting (nationalpost.com)
• Downsizing the Verbal Economy (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Personal Knowledge Management Plan (knowledgefordevelopment.com)
• Clay Shirky About Filter Failure (awkwardconnections.org)
• The Science of Lifelong Learning (curiouslypersistent.wordpress.com)

Moving on....

Yesterday was my last day working at AED. I worked with AED for a little less than four years.

* rewarding -- most of the time :)-- as in "Wow... I can see how that has an impact on development."

* a great learning experience -- as in "That worked well, let's make sure to do it again this way," or "That flopped... let's not do it again," and "How did I not see that before...".

* challenging -- as in "that really pushed me to learn or do something I didn't know I could do" and "What on earth are we doing? This doesn't make any sense to me....".

In the process of reflecting on these past few years and looking ahead, I want to be able to remember as much as possible of the work I did, the relationships, the people. Below is a little collage representing the last few years at AED. Some of it would have meaning only to me but that's the idea.... The next time I have to go to an interview and I have to explain what I did at AED, I'd rather look at this collage to bring up memories than look at a few lines on my CV.

Multimedia Case Studies - NASA

NASA's APPEL (Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership) project develops case studies that "illustrate the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers face every day, and as such provide an effective learning tool for project management. Due to the dynamic and complex environment of projects, a great deal of project management knowledge is tacit and hard to formalize. A case study captures the complex nature of a project and identifies key decision points, allowing the reader an inside look at the project from a practitioner's point of view."

This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to create case studies based on projects, case studies that capture the complexity of real-life projects.

You don't truly learn project lessons unless you've lived through the project (and paid attention to what was going on). Alternatively, you can "re-live" the project through a well-documented case study. That's what case teaching tries to achieve in business schools, laws schools and many other places of learning. So, why are we not using this approach as much in international development?

The most powerful training I have ever attended was scenario-based. Training scenarios based in real-life situations allow you to internalize what you may have learned in a lecture setting or a manual. The most powerful job interview I have ever had the pleasure of participating in was scenario-based. Is there any better way to test someone's ability to perform the job than to ask them how they would handle some of the job's most demanding tasks? Why don't we train project managers with case studies? The answer is that we don't have that many good case studies. We write success stories to demonstrate that we've done well, not case studies to learn and share what we've learned.

Part of the challenge is that we are not comfortable discussing ongoing or completed projects in anything other than the "success story" mode. We're not comfortable talking about what went wrong and what could have been done better.

Another challenge is that completed projects are in the past. We've moved on to other projects and we're not that interested in retrospective analysis. At best, we've perhaps integrated some lessons learned from a project into the design of the next project. The lessons learned essentially stay within the team and are not shared more broadly within the organization or externally.

Try the NEAR Case Study.

Accountability Myopia Can Impede NGO Learning and Mission
From Monday Developments, November 28, 2005.
Alnoor Ebrahim

This is an article that won't age -- unfortunately.