Strategic Architecture for Learning Organizations

THINKING AND ACTING STRATEGICALLY

What does it mean to think and act strategically in building learning organizations? For The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, my colleagues and I developed a simple picture of a framework that helped readers understand strategic leadership at any level in building learning organizations. The framework addressed two sets of questions. One, what are our aims? What are the fundamental areas of growth and innovation that define a learning culture and make it robust? How would we know it if we saw it? Two, where do leaders focus their attention and efforts to create such a culture? How can we do it? The former we called the “deep learning cycle.” The latter we called the “strategic architecture.” The circle-triangle figure provides an overall perspective for appreciating the strategies that diverse leaders employ.[1]

(The framework diagram is not included here.)

While this framework has several elements, the primary distinctions arise from basic insights about learning. Learning always has two levels. At one level, all learning is judged by what the learner can do, the results he or she produces, as shown at the bottom of the figure. But we wouldn’t say we had learned to ride a bicycle if we succeeded in riding only once. On the deeper level, learning is about developing a capacity to reliably produce a certain quality of results. It is about becoming a “bicycle rider” not just riding one time, and this capacity is what grows as a result of the deep learning cycle. The learning environment needed to sustain this deep learning cycle is the focus of the strategic architecture.[2]

The deep learning cycle encompasses five elements, each of which skillful leaders pay attention to in building a healthy learning culture: beliefs and assumptions, established practices, skills and capabilities, networks of relationships, and awareness and sensibilities. These five cultural elements are always influencing one another. Start with beliefs and assumptions (you could start anywhere in the cycle).[3] While these taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world are often invisible to those who hold them, they shape organizational practices, guide how people do things, and, in turn, determine what skills and capabilities people develop based on those organizational practices.[4] For example, if people believe real listening matters, they establish practices like “check-ins” in daily work that encourage reflecting on our ways of listening.[5] Similarly, our practices and skills and capabilities influence networks of relationships and shape awareness. For example, when people develop skillful practices of dialogue, they become more appreciative of who they depend on and who depends on them, and this strengthens social networks. Or, when people become skillful in systems languages like systems archetypes, they start to see patterns of interdependencies that were previously invisible to them. In turn, “seeing is believing”—our experience is the most direct source of reinforcement for our beliefs and assumptions.

It is common to talk of an organization’s culture as if it is simply “the way things are.” But no culture is static. It is continually reinforced by how we live with one another day to day. By connecting these elements as part of a deep learning cycle, this framework expresses the important assumption that all these elements can and do change (albeit slowly)—and when they do, they tend to evolve together. The deep learning cycle can either reinforce the culture as it exists now or reinforce what is emerging. When we operate differently with one another, we also set in motion possibilities for changing all of these elements.

People naturally want to know where to intervene in order to influence this deep learning cycle. Many approaches are possible, but coherent strategies have three elements: (1) guiding ideas; (2) theory, tools, and methods; and (3) innovations in organizational infrastructure. Guiding ideas constitute the governing concepts and principles that define why an organization exists, what we seek to accomplish, and how we intend to operate. It is the domain of purpose, vision, and values. Theory, tools, and methods refers to explicit ideas about how things work (for example, a systems map of the procurement process or a simulation model of why “fire fighting” characterizes new product launches), and the practical means by which people apply those theories, solve problems, negotiate differences, and monitor progress. Tools are crucial to any deep learning process. Buckminster Fuller used to say that “you cannot change how someone thinks,” but you can give them a tool “the use of which leads them to think differently.” Organizational infrastructures such as formal roles and management structures, like their physical counterparts, shape how energy and resources flow. New learning infrastructures work alongside clear guiding ideas and appropriate tools and methods.

The overarching viewpoint behind this framework is known in social theory as “structuration,” or the theory of “enacted systems.” The central principle of systems thinking, discussed in Chapter 3, is that structure influences behavior and that the leverage for change increases as we learn to focus on underlying structures, rather than events or behaviors. These structures are made up of beliefs and assumptions, established practices, skills and capabilities, networks of relationships, and awareness and sensibilities—in other words, the elements of the deep learning cycle. The second key element of the systems view is that the structures that govern social systems arise through the cumulative effects of the actions taken by the participants in those systems. In other words, as Winston Churchill put it, we shape our structures and then they shape us.

How do these systemic structures change? We have created the structures that currently dominate by virtue of how we have operated in the past, and they can change if we see them and start to operate differently. This claim needs evidence from how people actually change their practices, but a physical analogy helps make the proposed relationship clear.

The streets of a city constitute a physical structure that shapes how traffic flows. It is very hard to drive your car where there are no streets. In Boston, the streets in the oldest part of the city follow no pattern whatsoever, and the joke is that it is the fault of the seventeenth-century cows. The paved streets of the twentieth century were laid on top of cart paths that had developed in the two preceding centuries, which sensible cart drivers had established by following the well-worn trails their cows had been making for a century before that. Now, presumably the cows had little ability to see the patterns of their trails, nor did they likely care. But people might look at this structure and decide there could be a better way, something that Bostonians’ love of the past apparently precluded.

When the story of Boston’s cows and streets is transposed onto our organizations, it raises two questions. What does it take to see the structural patterns we are enacting? And are we operating more like cows or people—like cows, doing what we have been doing because we have been doing it, or, like people, stepping back and attempting to see the deeper patterns and then choosing to do things differently? Obviously, any conceptual framework of this sort is abstract, and real understanding of how it all works must be gained through concrete experience, for which no book is a substitute. The framework becomes useful when people test it against their own practices and the results they produce.