Why build a culture of continuous learning?

Today, companies are being buffeted by forces that create uncertainty and opportunity while the pace of technological innovation increases exponentially. Some startups challenge the status quo by changing, disrupting, and making entire markets obsolete. Giants like Amazon and Google extend their tentacles into markets like banking and health care.

Keep in mind that political, economic, and environmental upheavals can change the rules of the market at any time. The expectations of a new generation of employees, customers, and society are all challenging how companies think and act. Despite all the other factors of change, one thing remains constant: organizations must be able to adapt quickly and consistently in the digital age or face decline and, ultimately, extinction.

Organizations can begin a culture of continuous learning by focusing on three dimensions:

• Learning organization——Employees at all levels are learning and growing so that organizations can transform and adapt to a changing world.
• Innovation culture——Encourage and empower employees to explore and implement creative ideas to achieve future value delivery.
• Continuous improvement——Every part of the enterprise is focused on continuous improvement of its solutions, products, and processes.

1. Learning organization

Learning organizations invest in and actively promote the continuous growth of their employees. When everyone in an organization is constantly learning, it stimulates the ability of the business to transform itself as needed to anticipate and take advantage of opportunities to create a competitive advantage. Learning organizations excel at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge while integrating new insights through continuous improvement of practices.

The learning organization is different from the scientific management method advocated by Frederick Taylor. In Taylor's model, learning is limited to those at the top, and everyone else follows the policies and practices they create. On the other hand, learning organizations promote innovation through learning, bring about more information sharing, enhance problem-solving skills, enhance the sense of community, and provide opportunities for efficiency.

As Senge describes, transforming into a learning organization requires five different directions. Best practices that drive these directions include:

• Personal mastery——Employees grow into "T-shaped" talents. "T-shaped" people have accumulated a wide range of knowledge in multiple fields and have a deep expertise that matches their interests and skills. T-workers are an essential foundation for agile teams.
• Shared vision——Forward-looking leaders envision and articulate future possibilities. They then invite others to share a common vision of the future and motivate employees to contribute to making it happen.
• Team learning——Teams achieve common goals by sharing knowledge, suspending assumptions, and thinking together.
• Mental models——The team is about creating new models with an open mind, based on a shared understanding of lean and Agile ways of working and customer domains while presenting their existing assumptions and generalizations. These models make complex concepts easy to understand and apply.
• Systems thinking——Realizing that optimizing individual components does not optimize systems, organizations take a holistic approach to learning, solving problems, and providing solutions. This systems thinking also extends to business practices later, such as Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), which ensures that companies invest in experimentation while learning how to move systems forward.

2. Innovation culture

Innovation is one of the four pillars of Lean House. However, the creation required to compete in the digital age is not rare or random, so there needs to be a fusion of innovation cultures within organizations. A culture of innovation exists when leaders create an environment that supports creative thinking, curiosity, and challenging the status quo. When an organization has a culture of innovation, employees can:

• Explore ideas for upgrading existing products;
• Try new product ideas;
• Seek fixes for long-standing bugs;
• Improve processes to reduce waste;
• Remove barriers to productivity.

2.1 Creative people

The foundation of an innovative culture is the recognition that institutions and cultures do not innovate: people do. Taking innovation as the core competence of an organization requires cultivating employees' courage and ability to innovate and encouraging them to take risks. This may need coaching, mentoring, and formal training in entrepreneurship and innovation skills and behaviors for existing organization members.

2.2 Time and space for innovation

Creating time and space for innovation includes providing work areas conducive to creative activity and setting aside dedicated time for exploration and experimentation from your daily routine. The innovation space may also include:

• Extensive cross-domain interaction, including customer, supply chain, and even professional communities connected to the organization;
• Suspend norms, policies, and systems (within legal, ethical, and safety boundaries) to challenge existing assumptions and explore possible approaches;
• Systematic activities (IP iterations, hackathons, etc.) and opportunistic innovation activities (continuous, accidental, unplanned).

2.3 Experimentation and feedback

The culture of innovation subscribes to the idea that conducting well-designed experiments and constantly moving toward goals is the most effective way to learn to achieve successful breakthroughs. Thomas Edison said of his many unsuccessful experiments in creating the incandescent light bulb, "I didn't fail, I just found 10,000 ways that won't work." In the scientific method, experiments do not fail; They produce the data needed to accept or reject a hypothesis. Many companies don't innovate enough because of a culture of fear of failure, which undermines innovation.

3. Continuous improvement

Since the birth of the Toyota production system, "the relentless pursuit of perfection" has been one of Toyota's core principles of "Lean".

The pursuit of perfection leads to continuous improvement of products and services. Organizations create more and better outcomes for more users with less money, all of which lead to higher revenues and greater profitability. Taiichi Ono, the founder of Lean, stresses that the only way to achieve an improvement is to have every employee in the mindset of continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Organizations often fall into the trap of thinking that the culture, processes, and products that lead to success today will also guarantee success in the future. This mindset dramatically increases the risk of failure. The enterprises that dominate the market in the future will be adaptive learning organizations, which need to have the ability to learn and innovate and improve more effectively and faster than their competitors.

At the same time, there is no definite guarantee that an organization will survive. Everyone in the organization will be challenged to discover and make incremental improvements and assign priority and visibility to this effort.

A culture of continuous learning may be the most effective approach for a new generation of employees and companies.