The boy is learning from experience. First, he apprehends the facts: his cycling technique leads to cuts and bruises. Such self-generated intrinsic feedback may be reinforced by explicit advice from parents: "You ride too fast and don't watch where you're going." Second, the child comes to understand consciously or otherwise the meaning and implications of his experience. He appreciates (mostly through trial and error) that it is possible to cycle round the garden without incident. Finally, this knowledge gives rise to new behaviours: he relaxes in the saddle, keeps an eye out for obstacles, and resolves to win the Tour de France when he grows up.
Learning from experience is also crucial when it comes to culture change. As explored in a previous article Beyond rhetoric: dynamics of anxiety and change, culture resists the attempts of managers to manipulate its development. New cultural assumptions about what are appropriate ways of working evolve when groups of individuals discover successful solutions to their latest shared problems. In other words, whilst a vision of the future is important (enshrined in values that reflect the kind of organisation the firm wants to build) it is unhelpful to be overly prescriptive about the assumptions that ultimately drive employees' behaviour.
With culture change, then, experimentation is crucial. As people try out new solutions, they discover what works and what does not. Organisations where experimentation is encouraged are less likely to find themselves crippled by moribund culture. One way managers can embed widespread experimentation is to encourage learning from experience, a practice similar to that through which the boy learned to ride his bicycle.
To learn from our own experience of what we do is crucial to culture change and, more broadly, career and business success. Unfortunately, we either do not question culture and performance at all; or we spend excessive time on strategic planning and formal training. We fail to experiment with, and learn from, new ideas for resolving our latest problems. The risk here is that we continue with our old ways of working: organisation culture then stagnates, change is obstructed, and performance lags behind the demands of a fast-moving marketplace.
As we try out new ways of working, there are countless sources of feedback on how successful our efforts are. Some are more obvious than others: business results; staff satisfaction and turn-over; our subordinates' productivity; energy levels at meetings; whether and how people respond to our e-mails and calls; the length and nature of our task-list; how we feel after a client call; how peers or shareholders interact with us; what keeps us awake at night; and, even our enthusiasm on the journey to work.
Only by acting upon feedback inherent in such everyday experiences can we discover the better ways of working that enable shifts in organisation culture. Fortunately, this is not the burden it sounds. Professor Gary Rolfe of Swansea University argued that three simple questions - What? So what? And Now what? - enabled us to reflect on and learn from practice.
What? encourages us to describe the facts of the situation and any good or bad outcomes. So what? is a call to examine what the situation reveals about how we think and feel, our relationships with others, and our actions and their consequences. In addressing What now?, we determine the steps that may to be taken to improve future outcomes and secure better performance. A continuous learning cycle is established as we subsequently reflect on new experiences.
The power of the three questions may be illustrated with an everyday work situation. 'What?' - I cannot finish my presentation because Jane has not replied to my request for head-count projections. 'So what?' - she believes other tasks and people to be more important. 'Now what?' - I shall meet Jane tomorrow, obtain the forecasts I need, and start developing a better relationship with her. By asking these questions a person can improve performance on specific activities and behaviours. The case here of poor relationship building may be an individual concern or widespread cultural challenge.
The same approach may also be used to explore more complex experiences. What? - Client satisfaction levels are dropping. So what? - There are numerous possible interpretations. For example, account managers may be spending insufficient time with clients; or they may be offering products that suit their aims more than those of their clients; or, prices may not reflect current market demand. What now? - Responses to these issues will involve improvements to products and systems. These changes in turn may require shifts in the underlying cultural assumptions that account managers and sales executives hold about the business, clients and work.
When people fail to learn from experience it can have for both culture change and organisational performance consequences far more disastrous than a novice cyclist's bruised knee. However, if employees are encouraged to act upon what they see, hear, think, and feel at work, performance will improve and cultural assumptions will evolve to satisfy the ever-changing needs of a competitive marketplace.
Quentin Millington (pictured) FinstLM, helps multinationals to harness the potential of national and corporate cultures to enable executive and organisation performance. He is part-time specialist in cross-cultural leadership at Cambridge's Judge Business School.
