Why do some organizations which employ so many intelligent people continue with strategies which are obviously not working, or fail to take actions which are clearly called for, or repeat their mistakes, over and over? Why do some organizations put so much time and energy into not changing - into defending the past and avoiding the future? Why is it that large organizations, particularly, have a tendency to bring out the worst in human nature, so that instead of behaving with the collective wisdom of a thousand, management, at various levels, can display a profound commitment to defensiveness and short term self-interest?

The purpose of this paper is not to lampoon organizational life, although it does often lend itself to that, but rather -

• To advance the view that learning is the strategic variable in individual and organizational effectiveness;
• discuss the processes involved in individual and organizational learning; and propose ways by which the organizational culture can be made more supportive of learning.

The significance of learning

Learning can be defined as a change in behaviour resulting from experience. Unlike other animals, almost all of our behaviour is learnt, rather than instinctive, which explains why the human infant takes much longer to attain self-sufficiency than the infant bird or animal. Taking a lot longer to acquire necessary life skills is a small price to pay for our enormous strategic advantage over other forms of life. That is, we can learn to do things within a single generation that could not have been imagined when our genetic blueprint was laid down. So what we learn, how efficiently we learn and indeed, whether we learn anything at all from particular experiences, are strategic variables, the effect of which leads to us being who we are at any given point in time.

Formal educational institutions naturally make a major contribution to the learning of those who use their services. However, the period of time you spend in formal schooling (ten to twelve years) and post-secondary formal learning (three to six years, if at all) represent only a small fraction of the average life span. Moreover, most of these learning experiences occur in the first twenty five years of life. For many, formal learning is completely over before their organizational life even begins. So from an organizational point of view, the amount and type of learning that takes place during the persons working life is of critical importance and most of this will be as a result of experience and informal reflection, rather than arising from the occasional, formally organized learning experience such as a conference, training course or higher degree.

If we ‘learn’ things which are unhelpful or untrue from an experience or fail to learn anything at all, then our effectiveness is diminished and our potential not achieved. In the same way, at the collective level, the process by which the organization allows itself to learn from its experiences or avoids such learning is an important determinant of its capacity to adapt and grow or stagnate and atrophy. So the crucial questions are what form of organizational culture and values is supportive of organizational learning and what mechanisms are needed for the learning actually to take place?

The ultimate goal of action learning is not to have successful change projects or even to be successful in helping the participants acquire some valuable learning and skills, although both these outcomes are valued in their own right. The strategic objective of action learning is to demonstrate a mode of functioning which maximizes learning during the process of taking action in the everyday world and which can become more widely practised in organizational life generally. The context in which action learning takes place is typically an organizational culture quite contrary to the precepts and values of action learning.

So the ultimate outcome desired from action learning is the generalization of the learning methods to the overall organizational culture, so that the organization’s capacity to learn and therefore improve its responses to its changing environment is enhanced. Otherwise action learning is just a better way to run the organization’s formal learning program, rather than a prototype of an alternative and more effective way for organizations to function.

Desired outcome: Enhanced organizational capacity to learn and change.

Group and organizational non-defensiveness: Just as individual defensiveness is destructive of individual learning, so too, when a work group or a number of senior managers collectively behave in a defensive manner, the opportunities for organizational learning are diminished. Helping a group or a committee be less defensive is a delicate task but is a prerequisite to the organization learning from its actions.

Value of learning: Learning is not universally valued in our society and its main competitor, ironically, is action. For those who by nature are impetuous or action oriented, self-examination or reflection seems self-indulgent and narcissistic. There is also the fear that the truth, in some cases, will be unpleasant and painful to face. The reality is that the danger for organizations lies, not in confronting the truth, but in avoiding the truth. It is only by maximizing learning that the organization can face a changing future with a degree of confidence.

Process-oriented leadership: It is an unusual manager who gives an emphasis to process. Managers are so often chosen for their technical skills (content) that it is not surprising that attention to process comes a bad second. Yet the irony is that process is, in some respects, more strategic than content, because it is the process (how a person, group or organization functions) that determines the quality of the content (what they achieve). Managers who have been through an action learning course typically become much more sensitive to and skilful at managing process.

Cultural norms supporting reflective self-examination: How many committees do you know that have a strict rule of devoting the last ten minutes or so of their meeting time to reviewing the degree of satisfaction with the meeting and how it might have been improved? Very few groups have a norm about self-examination, even though it is conducive to learning and improved functioning. Developing such norms is one of the desired outcomes of action learning.

Peer pressure for improvement: Peers exercise great pressure on organizational members, typically having more influence than the boss. Unfortunately this influence is often exercised to support conformity and conservatism, rather than learning and constant improvement. Clearly, if colleagues actively encourage experimentation, innovation and operational review, much more of it will happen than otherwise.

Organizational willingness to change: There is not a lot of point in learning, if you are blocked in putting the learning into use. So an organizational culture which is supportive of change is an important goal. Organizations will never be perfect and there will always be some degree of inertia, complacency and conservatism in large organizations. But a low level of innate resistance to change is a sign of organizational health and something worth working towards achieving.

An earlier research project, involving 144 directors in 41 UK-based companies (Mumford, 1988) emphasized the extent to which their learning and development had been acquired through real work experiences, often unplanned and at least partially unrecognized at the time the experience happened. The work reported here draws on subsequent research funded by the UK Training Agency (Mumford et al , 1989). Together with Peter Honey and Graham Robinson, we found 21 directors in 15 organizations willing to participate in discussion and analysis with us of their real work experiences and how they were learning from them. Only one of the participants was a woman and among the many fascinating possible extensions of the research would be a comparison of responses from larger groups of men and women.

The process we used, after an individual meeting to confirm interest in participation, was to meet with them, in their own office, three or four times over a three-month period. The basis of discussion between us was that we asked them first to talk about the work activities in which they had been involved in the period since we had last met them. Once we had established in this way the kinds of experience they had, they then selected what they wanted to talk about and we helped them to focus on what they had learned and how they had learned it. Over the sequence of interviews some of the directors became more aware of ways in which they could focus on what they had learned and sometimes they arrived at our meetings with notes or with a clear idea in their mind of what they wanted to tell us.

All the interviews were conducted individually and each interviewer wrote detailed notes and shared them with their colleagues in the research. We had meetings to discuss the process we were using, the data which were emerging and possible points to pursue in later discussions. Finally, we drew our analyses together and, after a number of drafts, produced the guidebook already referred to (Mumford et al., 1989). The terms of reference for the project had always been that we should produce a practical working document, not a research report. The aim was not merely to analyze what the directors had learned, or even how they had learned it, but also to develop ideas on how directors could learn more effectively from their normal work experiences.

We started with only one hypothesis to accompany the general objective of producing a guidebook. We approached our interviews initially with the view that managers mainly learn by looking back at experiences. We were sure that we could find ways of helping them to learn more effectively from retrospection. We also knew that learning could be enhanced if people recognized more frequently, and in advance, the kinds of learning opportunities that would occur through their work, and planned to learn from their opportunities. We hoped to find good illustrations of how to carry out learning through thinking ahead, prospectively.

We did not offer a definition of learning to participants, since we wanted to help them to talk through their experiences using their words, not ours. It was interesting, and supportive of this stance, that a few participants did not like the word ‘learning’ and said the process would be much more acceptable if there were a different word. The definition we developed in our own discussions .

People can demonstrate that they know something that they did not know before (insights and realizations as well as facts) and/or when they do something they could not do before (skills).

We have had experiences since writing the guidebook which have added to our knowledge of how directors’ experiences relate to the four approaches. While our original descriptions are based on the drawing together of a variety of experiences from different individuals, which can be summarized under four headings, it is especially interesting to see what happens when different individuals are faced with the same experience. The approaches they adopt to learning from that experience may vary.

Of course the significant aspect of our study, once the different approaches have been taken on board, is to delve further into what kind of learning individuals secured from their experiences. Here we were on relatively more familiar ground. Our first analysis was based on the relatively familiar structure of knowledge, skills and attitudes. (We did not get into the language of competences.) Again, however, analysis of the data caused us to change our own views on what these directors were telling us about the kinds of learning they had secured. While we stayed with the knowledge and skills differentiation, we replaced the concept of attitudes with that of insights. We found the descriptions of what they had learned simply did not relate strongly to the issue of changed attitudes in most cases. What came over much more strongly was something about a greater perception of, or awareness of, the significance of some event. One way of describing this might have been to use the word understanding but in the end we chose insight because it seemed much more descriptive of what seemed to be a deeper and, at the same time, more explosive process, in some sense a combination of emotional and cognitive awareness.

A few examples under each of these three headings should help to identify what we discovered:

Knowledge: This is the acquisition of data or information. Sometimes it is not new knowledge but confirmation of past information:

I thought there was a bright manager working for one of my subordinates. I saw him as intelligent, straightforward and tough. I was astonished to find that his boss saw him as dogmatic, inflexible and doctrinal.

I had the job of setting up a major expansion for my company. It involved identifying a new site on to which we could expand. This meant going into all the issues about best location in terms of price, transport, availability of people, where the customers were and where it should be in relation to our existing business.

Skills:

I was very impressed with the way he chaired the meeting. I tend to take the lead a lot but I saw he was at least as effective as me with a much more subtle approach to drawing out and clarifying views.

I constantly find that I am so busy I do not have time to review what I have done. I know this is a mistake, so I am firmly setting aside 30 minutes every Friday and I have got my secretary to help me stick to my new resolve.

Insights:

I am a creative thinker and I like listening to other people’s ideas, but also throwing in my own. The problem as chief executive is that quite often people do not see them as ideas which I am genuinely interested to have discussed, but as proposals. They either get all defensive about them, or rush away to do them.

People can and do act differently at internal management conferences. Sometimes the jokers become very serious and quite unexpected people pop up with new ideas. It made me think of other situations in which people’s behaviour alters.

When we looked at relationships between the four approaches and these three definitions of learning, we found that the three ‘hindsight’ approaches (intuitive, incidental and retrospective) involved all three types of learning but that the largest proportion fitted the definition of insight. When we looked at the rather smaller number of achieved learning experiences generated through the prospective approach, we found a balance between insight and knowledge as types of learning. Of course, by our definition, it is rather difficult to say in advance what your insights are going to be. In effect the insight learnings were most often, of course, pure retrospective experiences.

The following analysis is based mainly on the analytical work of Peter Honey.

The number of managerial activities which create potential learning is unbounded. In the guidebook, we present a list drawn from the actuality of our interviews. Elsewhere, Honey and Mumford (1989) have presented a series of statements and exercises built around the proposition that learning opportunities can be recognized and converted into effective learning. However, in this study we were also able to assess the nature of the learning experience on some different dimensions from those found elsewhere in the literature. For example, on the ‘hindsight’ experiences there was a 50/50 split between whether the experience was a wholly new activity or one which was familiar. On the prospective approach, however, 64 per cent of the experiences were in the familiar category. Undoubtedly, this was due to the fact that, as with insights, many new experiences are unforecastable.

Another way of looking at the experiences was to distinguish whether the experience was felt to be relatively routine or blockbuster in nature. We found that 70 per cent of the hindsight experiences fitted into the routine category, whereas on the prospective approach, 90 per cent fitted into this. Again, the explanation must lie in the fact that it is very difficult to predict blockbuster experiences!

Finally, we were interested in whether the experiences achieved by these individuals applied only to the particular situation or were capable of being generalized the more desirable learning achievement. Here we found 75 per cent of the ‘hindsight’ experiences had applications beyond the particular, while only a slightly smaller number 67 per cent of the prospective were of this kind.

The philosophy of formal management development, with its policies, systems, extended courses of off -the job activity and supposedly structured selection of work experiences, is built around the idea that managerial performance can be improved through learning. It is extraordinary, given the objective of formal management development as a process for enhancing learning, that so little work has actually been done on the learning process itself. The useful generalizations by Knowles (1984) about adult learning and the absolutely fundamental discovery by KoIb (1984) of individual learning style preferences building on the learning cycle were followed by Honey and Mumford in the UK, who developed David Kolb’s concepts and produced their own diagnostic questionnaire and workbook based on managerial behaviour (Honey and Mumford, 1992). Ten years after the first publication of their manual, it is clear that trainers and managers around the world have found the concept of learning styles to be of major benefit in advancing their understanding of managerial learning; even a few of the UK business schools have now apparently introduced the learning styles questionnaire as part of their resources on MBA courses. Powerful though this process is and, apparently, very positively useful to managers, the concept of learning styles clearly covers only part of the total area of how individuals learn. The work reviewed in this article makes possible further advances in our understanding, preferably, of course, to be multiplied by rather larger research samples.

It is possible to criticize the idea of there being ‘only’ four approaches, as it is to criticize the attribution of learning styles or team role preferences. Apart from issues of reliability and validity, there is the question of whether any generalization is appropriate, given the infinite variability of human beings. My position on this is that appropriate and reliable generalization is a helpful process, provided that it is used as a basis for discussion and development and not as a permanent descriptive straitjacket.

In the UK, the Department of Managerial Learning at Lancaster University stands out not just because it is unique as a department but because apparently, no other business school thinks it worthwhile actually conducting research or even writing anecdotal articles about management learning. They have not yet, however, offered major new models or tools, as conclusions, from their many interesting projects. Important work offering different insights about learning and about learning from experience is also available from the USA and Australia. One of the fundamental questions raised, and not fully answered, by this research is the extent to which these directors were challenging their own activities and transforming their understanding of what they had learned. The concept of double-loop learning advanced by Argyris (1977) and the desirability of critical reflection encouraged by Schon (1993) are clearly very important. In my view a combination of learning styles and four approaches could help to develop understanding of current achieved learning. This would then provide a practical guide to achieve greater reflection and thereby increased likelihood of deeper challenges of the kind advocated by Argyris and Schon. From Australia, I am particularly impressed with the contribution of David Boud to our understanding of learning from reflection on experience. His concepts of preparation and reflection-in-action match closely the kind of model suggested by the four approaches (Boud and Walker, 1991)

As our knowledge stands at the moment, the concept and descriptions of the four approaches could be used in a variety of ways by those responsible for encouraging further and improved development among their managerial clients. One of the most important ways is in the area of what I call the Big ‘0’. Most management development schemes, although they often provide for a great deal of movement between jobs, both horizontally and vertically, pay almost no attention to the learning processes which need to be engaged in if the experience is to be fully successful. As was shown in my own research (Mumford, 1988), and also in the excellent book from the USA on ‘the lessons of experience’ (McCall et al., 1988), the fact is that, what is often presented as a big opportunity, is really a vacuum in terms of developing understanding of the nature of the opportunity and potential use of it as a learning experience.

If we want to increase the productivity of learning from experience we need to enable managers to learn more effectively, at least from those experiences delivered to them through the formal management development system. The idea of learning contracts or learning agreements, admirable in themselves, will still lack real impact unless individuals are helped to identify not just the opportunities for learning that can be identified for and with them, but also the ways in which they learn from them. Thus, the idea of the learning cycle and of the manager’s individual learning style preferences can, this article proposes, be supplemented by a greater situational awareness of what will actually trigger learning which of the four approaches an individual recognizes and can use.

What is not shown in the guidebook is that we actually experienced and carried out the four approaches ourselves in the course of understanding the project. We had some especially dramatic interviews with individuals, in which the learning we acquired from the interview very much fitted the incidental category even before we had invented it! Of course, the process we designed for the project was essentially prospective in nature because it planned ways in which we would go about securing information in order to learn. Even closer to home in terms of findings of the project, we each thought we would learn something about ourselves, about the ways that we conducted the interviews and secured information. In my own case, set particular standards for certain aspects of the interview which I knew from previous experience were likely to be less effective unless I controlled them my prospective learning was reflected in the extent to which I was able actually to manage myself in order to meet those targets.

Finally, of course, it would be correctly assumed that the whole nature of the project was retrospective reviewing the data. In addition, however, we studied the process in which we had involved ourselves and what we had learned from it. We looked at every aspect of how we planned the project, the detailed questions and topics we had prepared and the way in which we had set up the interviews and recorded the information. So, in addition to being struck with the major ‘a-ha’ captured through the incidental approach, we conducted a full and thorough analysis of all possible aspects of learning. This might not be thought at all difficult for us since, after all, all three of us have recommended in print and practised through courses and consultancy the advantages of learning reviews. With all due humility, however, it is possible to observe that not all doctors follow their own prescriptions! I believe that our exchanges and reviews did not so much add to our knowledge and skills as they certainly generated insights. Indeed, the whole concept of insights was in itself the result of a relatively sudden perception about what so many people were telling us in other words an insight about what we came to call insights.

It will be evident that the one approach not used by the team was the intuitive. The reason for this will be clear from the description of what intuitive means and from the statements made earlier in this section about how we went about our learning. To us it was an entirely conscious and deliberate pursuit We may not have learned everything there was to learn through the project but we were never, in the end, faced with the feeling that we learned something but we do not know what it was. This personal review of our own experience is offered not only as illustration of the analysis in action but also as a statement about the desirability of researchers putting in evidence of their own relevant experience.

Another useful exercise for readers is to assess their own experience against the analysis presented here. The reader can do this in two ways. First, look back at some significant experiences you have had over the last two to three weeks and see whether you have learned anything from them. If you believe you have, you might like to assess whether this learning could be described as intuitive, incidental or retrospective. Even more adventurously, the reader could look forward to next week and decide what kind of prospective opportunities lie ahead!