Iterative Design of Learning Infrastructures

ITERATIVE DESIGN AND LEARNING INFRASTRUCTURES

Learning infrastructures that effectively integrate working and learning do not emerge wholly formed. Rather, they develop over time in ways that depend on leaders who appreciate and are comfortable with an open, iterative design process.

New infrastructures start with the willingness to experiment. In 2003, the engineering and operations services business line of Saudi Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia, decided to try a method called “the world café” for organizing large business meetings. For several years, the leadership group and small working teams within the organization had been using systems thinking and related learning tools to improve problem solving and for clarifying business strategy, but they had not managed to effectively engage the larger organization. Now their innovations were beginning to make them feel “that we were alone,” says then Senior VP Salim Al-Aydh. “What we were doing was not linked with the rest of the corporation. We were not in rhythm and couldn’t take our new thinking to different levels.”

In the spring of 2002, when Al-Aydh participated in the SoL Executive Champions Workshop in Egypt, he saw firsthand the world café method and began to think about how it could be used for larger-scale learning. Developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, long-time members of the SoL network, the process provides a simple but powerful structure for larger group dialogue. It starts by having people sit at small café tables, focused on a common question or topic that has important meaning for them. As people rotate to different tables, these small, intimate conversations begin to get connected to one another. Over a few hours, people participate in multiple small conversations and simultaneously gain a sense of how the larger group as a whole is thinking. “The café process helped me a lot,” says Al-Aydh. “In the ECW, we found that all these different people from different backgrounds and different businesses were facing very similar issues. The café process helped improve understanding by exposing multiple points of view.”

At the same time, Saudi Aramco’s senior management was rethinking its business strategy in response to conditions in the Saudi economy at the time: a large demographic bubble of teenagers and young adults entering the work force; unemployment rates hovering around 30 percent; a declining per capita GDP (it had fallen 50 percent in real terms since the mid-1970s); and an unsustainable dependency on oil. “For the first time in our history, we developed a strategic direction as a team, and the dialogue expanded our perspective. Like every business, we have to please our shareholders, but in order to thrive we also have to promote the local economy. I asked myself, ‘How do we communicate these issues with our work force, take this thinking to different levels in the organization?’ Most people will tell you that one of our weaknesses as an organization is how to communicate with people. I had been looking around for a tool that would overcome this weakness, and the session in Egypt really sparked my imagination.”

In 2003, Al-Aydh and his colleagues held “Café ‘03,” bringing together supervisors, managers, general managers, executive directors, and executive management in one room, about six hundred people all together. Using the café process, they attempted to communicate these larger issues about why change was needed in the company’s strategy. “We gave people a chance to talk all together, to raise questions and to help us surface and understand alternative viewpoints.”

Café ‘03 was a step in a new direction, but it was just a first step. “We did a survey afterwards, to find out how much of this had really influenced people’s thinking and behavior. Although the results were much better than with more traditional attempts to communicate, we were still not satisfied with the level of engagement. Unless you spend enough time to answer the question ‘What does this mean to me?’—at the end of the day, people don’t really see how it affects them.”

Al-Aydh and his colleagues then designed “line of sight” meetings, bringing different organizations together to talk about how these issues were linked to their day-to-day businesses and activities. Then came “clarity of sight,” a series of small group sessions involving fifteen to twenty-five participants. Through these efforts, Al-Aydh personally met and engaged over one thousand employees in conversations around the need for change.

“Those sessions were very helpful. At one point, we talked about our GDP falling to $735 per capita, or $2 per day. People would then ask, ‘Is it true that we will be living on $2 per day if we don’t change?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and explained to them why I think that is possible. That phrase, ‘$2 per day,’ became famous in our company. People started saying, ‘If we don’t help the local economy, if we don’t develop businesses [other] than oil, if we don’t outsource more to local contractors, create more jobs, and train and hire more local people, then we will end up living on $2 per day. Our kids will have no jobs. We will be poor.”

As this questioning and rethinking started to build momentum, the café process evolved. “Over time we developed a better understanding and learned how to engage people, how to connect stakeholder’s concerns and their work. We also saw that communicating differently internally was great, but what about the other people around us, inside and outside the company?” This question led to Café ‘04, which brought together internal and external customers. With Line of Sight ‘04 and Clarity of Sight ‘04, Aramco people were no longer just talking among themselves. In Café ‘05, they extended the process to include contractors and service providers, bringing more than a thousand people together in a café format in a huge airplane hangar. “We conducted the café in early January, so we could talk about these major issues in the context of our operating plan for the coming year. Before this, most employees had never participated in the planning process. But we recognized that if we are going to work together on these major issues, people need to know how we as a company are planning on moving forward.”

The new learning infrastructure involved only Al-Aydh’s engineering and operations services business unit and its network of business partners, but others started to notice. A 2004 survey showed that people in Al-Aydh’s business unit were well ahead of others in their understanding of the corporate strategy and how it related to their own work. “I think the bottom line is that our efforts worked. The corporation identified that there is a need to do more to improve communication in other business areas. Now the cafés are starting to spread around the company.”

The world café is a useful method, but it is not a magic bullet. Just as important is what the story of Saudi Aramco’s cafés illustrates in regard to what it means to be a “designer” of learning infrastructures. First, one must recognize that an important need for communication and learning is not being met. Then, have the courage and imagination to break the mold, to do something very different to meet that need. That is followed by being open to look critically at what is being achieved and to modify and adjust the approach, using patience and determination to persevere, and not expecting to get it all right the first time. Finally, in the role of designer, a leader must be willing to allow others to continue to evolve the infrastructures to suit their own situations and not to feel the need to control the process.