Learning Histories

Abstract

How can we gauge the successes and failures of collective learning? How can the rest of the organization benefit from the experience? Learning histories surface the thinking, experiments, and arguments of actors who engaged in organizational change.

In a Word How can we gauge the successes and failures of collective learning? How can the rest of the organization benefit from the experience? Learning histories surface the thinking, experiments, and arguments of actors who engaged in organizational change.

All Aboard

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

—George Bernard Shaw

In the corporate world, the precedence ascribed to individual learning can run counter to organizational learning , the process by which an organization and its people develop their capabilities to create a desired future. Without doubt, developing capabilities is a precondition of a desired future; however, if the essence of a learning organization is that it actively identifies, creates, stores, shares, and uses knowledge ¹ to anticipate, adapt to, and maybe even shape a changing environment, the driving concern must be reflection , communication, and collective sense making for action across its personnel.² (Proponents of organizational learning grumble that people in organizations perform collectively yet still learn individually from incomplete, heterogeneous information to which they ascribe different meaning.)³ Intra-organizational interaction for learning cannot depend on serendipity:⁴ it must be encouraged, facilitated, recognized, and rewarded. Increasingly, narration is deemed a good vessel for bridging knowledge and action in the workplace.

Storytelling in Organizations

A story is a narrative of events or circumstances, or a series of them, designed to draw attention, amuse, or instruct. Organizations have a renewed interest in this ancient yet powerful form of sense making to exchange and consolidate sometimes complex knowledge:⁵ potentially, storytelling can, for example, convey values and associated norms; prompt emotional connection; share the tacit knowledge in peoples’ heads; build trust, engagement, and collaboration; facilitate unlearning; and spark action. Individually and collectively, by opening perspective, stories help us fathom times past and understand possible futures.⁶

Stimulating Reflection in Action

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

—Winston Churchill

Too often, slip-ups happen again: the intellect, relationships, and routines that set them in motion have not been examined––if they have been discussed––and spawn further mishap. Basically, many efforts to foster organizational learning fall short because reflective practice is not easy to master; neither––in the rare cases when senior management introduces and backs tools, methods, and approaches for that––is it seen to provide immediate solutions to pressing business problems. Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return, thought W.H. Auden. In the meantime, surely, the continuing development of research methods and measures of knowledge management and learning remains a priority. The questions that should direct investigations in actionable knowledge transfer are: What types of organizational learning work effectively and what types do not? Why?

Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.

—Steve Jobs

Of some cheer is that a relatively recent, qualitative action research ⁷ methodology, the learning history ,⁸ can help an organization become more collectively aware of learning and change efforts within its boundaries––even when these have not been adequately documented in advance. The fresh, new medium is a document (or series of documents)⁹ presented in a two-column format 25–100 pages long that captures retrospectively perceptions of critical events or circumstances, insights of actors¹⁰ regarding notable hard and soft¹¹ results from these, and objective analyses to build capacity for reflection and communication. Hence, it can be employed to deliberate, assess, and evaluate any learning opportunity. (That might be an organizational change, initiative, innovation, product launch, etc.) Of course, the value of a learning history does not lie in the document produced: it stems from the consultation process that engendered it.

Noteworthy characteristics of a learning history are that: (i) it takes a systems view of organizations; (ii) it makes extensive use of narrative and cuts back and forth between different recollections to generate multiple stories; (iii) it brings assumptions, reactions, and implications to light; (iv) it helps people tell stories without fear of being judged, measured, and evaluated––assessment is not emotionally neutral territory; (v) it dissolves hierarchical privileges and makes for conversations among equals; (vi) it does not directly explicit the knowledge embodied, unlike “lessons learned” and good practices : rather, the actors must construct and surface tacit knowledge from the events or circumstances and their own experiences and discussions of them; (vii) it helps learn from both the good and the not-so-good;¹² and (viii) it catalyzes double-loop thinking and reconsideration of values, reasoning, impulses, or practices to achieve a desired future.

The audiences of a learning history are the actors, looking for perspective on what they accomplished so they may move forward without having to reinvent what has already discovered; newcomers, who might need to be informed; the organization they belong to, which usually knows what it wants to hear but may lack the capacity to listen to what it is trying to tell itself; and, possibly, interested parties outside the organization.

Documenting Organizational Learning

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

—Peter Drucker

The two-column format of a learning history keeps the commentaries of the research team separate from the reminiscences of the actors. The right-hand column is a jointly told tale that presents a deliberately emotional story of events or circumstances through interwoven quotations¹³ of actors; the individual, free-flowing, audio-recorded and transcribed retrospective interviews that generate them last about 1 hour.¹⁴ The left-hand column contains analytical comments by a research team,¹⁵ which distill key recurring themes in the narrative; query assumptions, reactions, and implications; raise undiscussable subjects; and make recommendations. Full column text at the top sets the context and background of each thematic section. Once it has been written, the learning history is validated by the actors and disseminated for group discussion in workshops seeking shared understanding and responses to two questions: So what? What’s next?¹⁶ Re-experiencing the event or circumstance, the group learns collectively and its members make meaning together.