How to build the (un)Learning organization:

Technology has placed enormous power in the hands of consumers, and with that the customer expectations are evolving rapidly. Organizations are competing to stay ahead on the customer expectations’ curve and also ensuring that their workforce is ready when it comes to rapidly changing technology landscape. Learning new skills becomes an important function of today’s successful organization.  

An organization with learning culture promotes values and practices that encourage individuals and organization as a whole to increase knowledge, competence and performance. Unlearning, relearning and reimagining are important steps to the process of new learning. Every once in a while we need to hit that refresh button in our professional lives. For technical workforce hitting refresh means keeping their existing domain expertise, industry knowledge and combining that with new evolving digital technologies to create a differentiator for themselves and customers. Combining the human intelligence, domain expertise with the right digital technologies to deliver business results is what we call Digital Intelligence, here at EXL.

Of course, building a learning organization will require setting up leadership vision, creating tools, platform and incentives for employees to acquire new digital skills. In reality, however, with the evolving technology landscape it will require a lot more to build a deep rooted learning culture within the organization. Organizations trying to build digital equity will also need to train their workforce in the art of reimagining the process or the product. Employees will need to be taught to transform their customer’s experience using digital journeys, apply their domain expertise within the context of a problem to drive tangible business outcomes. We all need to learn together to deliver the promise of digital for our clients and this will require to unlearn some of the old ways of solving problems. The tools that made us successful so far may not just be inadequate but also become impediments to our success in digital marketplace.

In his case study, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” Author Chris Argyris coined the terms “single loop” and “double loop” for learning methodology. Most highly successful professionals, managers and consultants use “single loop” learning, a simple analogy of single loop learning methodology can be a thermostat that sets the room temperature at 65 degrees and turns on the heating or cooling as the temperature changes. Over time, we as professionals acquire academic credentials, faculties and master the art of applying intellectual discipline into solving problems in a single loop. A “double loop” learning requires asking questions like “why am I setting the temperature at 65 degrees”? or, inquiring deeper into whether some other temperature can achieve the same goal more economically. A double loop learning or problem solving requires deeper interaction with the problem set and questioning preexisting knowledge. 

Business Process Management requires precise knowledge, understanding of domain data and applying the industry best practices in the context of the business process to achieve results. This may appear to be different from working on technology solutions which require working on ambiguous requirements or projects with longer planning cycles and hence, often a lot of emphasis is placed on the learnability of the staff towards technology solutions. However, what is really important here is to emphasize “double loop learning”. The same BPM experts can apply their contextual knowledge and domain skills to ask the right questions and work as teams with technology partners to solve new problems. A Digital organization goes beyond solving a problem, into analyzing ‘why’ a problem occurs. For example, an operations company may solve a problem of Insurance calling process by providing the right support agent staff, while a technology company may enhance it by adding speech recognition or call scheduler software, on the other hand a digital company, will try to address the root cause by asking questions, such as, why a customer needs to call for claim process? Can the information be digitized or provided on demand to even avoid the need of a call. 

As technologies evolve, and market conditions shift, the traditional problem solving techniques will fail. Consultants and managers who were traditionally very successful may find themselves unable to cope with the disruptions in competitive landscape or technology. A learning Organizations builds resilience by not just providing technical knowledge centers but also creating tolerance for open discussions, holistic and systemic introspection and encouraging  employees to share new knowledge while working as teams and thus reinforcing the double loop learning.

It is important to note that organization learning is not a monolithic functions, different departments will have different needs, pace of learning and we must not only provide a framework for that but also measurement metrics.  Various surveys and articles including the one from HBR on learning organizations have indicated Organization Culture, Knowledge Centers and Leadership Focus as the three main pillars for building a successful learning organization. Human beings are naturally curious and like to learn new things. Our drive to explore and learn is as strong a drive as hunger or thirst. Learning organizations that successfully tap into this human potential reap huge innovation dividends.