How Leaders Can Solve the Learning Dilemma

A new MIT SMR Executive Guide explores opportunities for organizations to embrace the future of workplace learning.

Ally MacDonald March 01, 2021

 

In 1991, Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris wrote, “Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn.”1 Fast-forward 30 years and swap in “the 2020s,” and these words likely ring true for many executives today.

To be clear, learning is as high a priority as ever for corporate leaders. Before the pandemic, learning and development (L&D) efforts aimed at reskilling and upskilling workforces ranked among global CEOs’ top concerns. COVID-19 has accelerated existing trends in remote work and automation and shined a spotlight on digital skills gaps in organizations.

Despite concern at the top and significant investments in training each year, many organizations are failing to meet employees’ learning needs.2 Gallup data shows that only 4 in 10 employees strongly agree that they have opportunities at work to learn and grow.3

So where do things go wrong?

For Argyris, the learning dilemma demonstrated that organizations make two critical mistakes: First, they define learning too narrowly, and second, they fail to reflect on how internal behaviors and thought patterns block effective learning.

Over the past year, L&D teams have had to pivot quickly and reshuffle priorities in order to meet the needs of remote workforces, from moving in-person learning models online to thinking beyond a focus on technical skills to the behavioral “human skills” at the core of virtual communication and collaboration. Along the way, companies are finding that some traditional systems of learning must shift to meet new needs.

How Leaders Can Solve the Learning Dilemma

Mike Jackson In Conversation With Jean Boulton

The Complexity in the Social World series of interviews (and YouTube Playlist) follows on from the seminar we organized in March 2021. The aim of this series is to capture some of the foundational thinkers in conversation around how to apply complexity thinking to the social world, the world of managers, economists, change agents, and societies. In this way, some of these foundational thinkers, many starting their work in the 1980s, are represented and their differing perspectives and different foci of application are available in one place.

Mike Jackson In Conversation With Jean Boulton

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Diversity & Universality in Systems Thinking

The field of systems thinking may be in the midst of a sea change event—a 'fourth wave' predicated on the search to identify universal patterns that unify the diversity of frameworks and methods in the field as well as, perhaps, knowledge and disciplines in general. It is critically important that the field of systems thinking resolve what Bateson called a 'double bind' between a diversity of methods and the universality of patterns that underlies them. Furthermore, the best candidate theories, grounded in evidence, must be vetted and reviewed. JoST's Special Issue on Diversity and Unity will frame the debate. Thus, we issue a Call for Papers—an open and invited call for papers responding to the paper:

Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. (2021) The Four Waves of Systems Thinking. In, Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking, (Eds) Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. Routledge. London, UK. 

• We are inviting notable experts on the topic as well as providing an open, general call for response papers.
• Submissions can be of any length up to 8000 words.
• Using this form, you must notify us that you intend to submit a paper by May 30, 2021 (this takes less than one minute).
• Rolling submission closes August 30, 2021. 
• To Submit to our Special Issue access the target paper here and submit your paper here.

Please feel free to share this notice and the image below on social media or with your department, organization, and/or advanced graduate students. 

Information

• For Readers
• For Authors
• For Librarians

Make a Submission

Make a Submission

• 

  Part of the
  PKP Publishing Services Network

 https://journalofsystemsthinking.org/index.php/jost

Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships

The 2021-2022 call for proposals is open!  The deadline to apply is March 22, 2021.

Since 2006, the Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship program of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center has provided grants to University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. students who are pursuing research in decision making under risk and uncertainty.  The research fellowships are named in honor of an endowment provided to the Wharton School by the Anheuser-Busch Charitable Trust.  Professor Emeritus of Management Science, Russell Ackoff’s work was dedicated to furthering our understanding of human behavior in organizations.

For 2021, the program will provide a small number of grants to doctoral students conducting research directly related to the Risk Center’s current research agenda. Potential topics to receive funding should align thematically with one of our five research labs: (1) disaster risk management, (2) business, climate, and the environment, (3) risk communication & decision-making, (4) behavioral science & technology, and (5) political risk.  We encourage students to visit the lab websites to better understand current priority topics.

The fellowship provides up to $4,000 for research support. Proposals can reflect a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.  The funds may be used only for data collection, surveys, and other direct research expenses.

Award recipients are required to write at least one blog post for the Risk Center’s blog, Lab Notes, based on their research. Blog posts should generally be 1,000-2,000 words in length and be written for an educated, lay audience. Award recipients will also be invited to participate in the Center’s junior research seminar, designed to provide early-stage scholars with the opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work.

To apply: Please submit your proposal and the application form to Carol Heller at [email protected].

Recent recipients of the Wharton Risk Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships:

The DIKUW hierarchy

Before we go any further, we want to make one thing clear: this article will not tell you what to do with your data. That would be impossible; we don't know any particulars about your facility or what it is you're trying to achieve. Instead, we'll show you how to use the DIKUW hierarchy: Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom.

The DIKUW is a framework that we've found invaluable for thinking about data and generating useful insights. It isn't a prescriptive guide but an outline of a typical data journey. It will help you see where you are in your data journey and what to expect. It will also help you understand the limitation of data.

Systems theorist Russell Ackoff outlined the DIKUW hierarchy in his paper "From Data to Wisdom" in 1989 and described it as a 5-step process that we all go through as individuals and institutions, transforming data into wisdom.

Cleanroom monitoring: How to make the most of your data

How to clean up the innovation mess

By Urko Wood  –  Contributing Writer

Jan 5, 2021, 4:05am EST

According to the late Wharton Professor Russell Ackoff, attempting to innovate without first validating customer demand is a "mess."

Indeed, any situation that has “arguable issue definition and arguable solutions” is a mess.

If you do not confirm that a customer need is important and unsatisfied before generating ideas, then you are creating a mess. First, identify your customers’ unmet needs and then solve their problems.

Never get bogged down testing ideas again

Many organizations get bogged down testing a lot of bad ideas. I know one organization that abandoned its entire stage-gate new product development process because the frontend seemed hopelessly bogged down. This is totally unnecessary and should never happen.

Yet it happens because organizations mistakenly think that “innovation begins with an idea.” Not true. New product development starts with an idea, but innovation begins with an insight. Every fully formed new product idea is comprised of 1) an insight into the customers’ unmet needs, and 2) a novel way to address that unmet need better.

If you want to turn innovation into a repeatable business process, discover your customers’ unmet needs first and then solve their problems. A well-defined customer need is half-satisfied.

The challenge is that most organizations don’t know how to identify their target customers’ unmet needs. Consequently, they waste time and resources testing a lot of bad ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, any idea that does not address an important unsatisfied need is a “bad” idea. To test ideas that address unimportant needs is to major in the minors. And to test (and focus on) ideas that address needs that are already well-satisfied by the market may give you competitive parity if your customers are unsatisfied with your solution, but it won’t give you a competitive advantage since other competitors are already satisfying the need. Only those needs that your target market deems to be important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth and worthy of pursuit.

 

What if you could identify and rank the biggest opportunities for innovation and growth in your market from the customers’ point of view, independent of any solutions, with statistical validity before generating any ideas? What if you knew where to focus and what to do to address unmet needs in a repeatable manner? Could that change the game for you?

Savvy organizations discover the unmet needs in their markets first and then generate ideas to address them. This changes the brainstorming mantra to, “There is no such thing as a bad idea as long as it addresses a known unmet need.” It also changes innovation from a game of chance into a repeatable business process.

Reveal needs. Create value. Drive growth.

How to clean up the innovation mess

Is it time to return to the original 2020 plan? Or does 2021 need a fundamentally different game plan than envisioned for 2020?

"In this process, Gildersleeve says “take stock of what you were able to accomplish in 2020 and how the business has changed, and then invest in continued digital transformation to support these changes.”

Hinchcliffe finds in his research that “many CIOs are now just getting their arms around 2021, given the constant, ongoing operational issues of this year. It is time in this author's opinion for CIOs to heed the advice of futurist Russell Ackoff who said that “planning should consist of the design of a desirable future and the invention of ways to bring that future about. As well, planning should be continuous.”

2021 CIO Goals: What Forces Will Shape 2021?

Singapore Institute of Management launches centre for systems leadership

THE Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) has launched a Centre for Systems Leadership to train youths, professionals and organisational leaders to lead more successfully through systems thinking.

The centre, to be located in the existing SIM Management House in Namly Avenue, will run an 18-day programme for working professionals, spread over six months. It will also offer bespoke programmes, tailored for leadership teams in organisations and enterprises.

This is in addition to the 30-hour programmes it will run for youth leaders and final-year undergraduates from February. The centre is also planning its first systems leadership conference that same month.

Learning programmes will be run on-site. However, the centre is also working with collaborators to roll out online options from the first quarter of next year, said Seah Chin Siong, SIM's president and chief executive.

Singapore Institute of Management launches centre for systems leadership

An intuitive introduction to systemic thinking

Attention is a resource

What a giant had to say

A long long time ago, when the teachers were still in the custody of young people's character, here is what William James had to tell them about this matter:

In what does a moral act consist? It consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of memory.

Attention has a purpose

Attention, and the emotion of interest which naturally directs it, are there for a purpose. Interest is what might move young people to explore and understand the world. And to exercise their minds and bodies.

William James

 

But our industries have been able to separate this emotion from its purposes. They created games that engage only "other psychological tendencies", so that the effort of attention that sustains a moral act is never experienced; which keep children's attention away from reality; which exercise no more than their thumbs and their rear ends; whose ethical message is that killing is fun; and which are so "immersive" that they make everything else – and school in particular – seem dull in comparison.

What will prevent our young ones from virtually living in the virtual world? Where success is so much easier to experience; and even the ultimate failure can be reversed by pressing the restart button!

It's a complex world

For all we know, we may have created a complex and dangerous world, which will demand of our next generation the presence of a spirit that we ourselves haven't been able to muster.

We say "for all we know", because we don't really know. While some of our colleagues have done the research and concluded that our civilization may just barely make it, provided we make changes promptly, the rest of us continue to live and work just as we did before. Notice that we are not saying that our civilization is in trouble; others have said that. All we need in order to motivate our initiative follows from what we've just said. And it's anyhow obvious – it's that we do not know what our situation is and what we need to do; because the way in which we handle knowledge is keeping us from knowing.

And because also our attention has been mishandled.

An intuitive introduction to systemic thinking