As a result of this column you and your organization will: Understand how learning could have prevented the Fort Hood tragedy and would have prevented Intel from shipping a flawed Pentium chip, resulting in a $475 million write-off. Know learning cannot take place in an environment that is hostile or unreceptive to new or contradictory information. Eliminate “Information hoarding” which is a common learning disability in business. Information must be shared, or it’s useless. Motorola discovered that every dollar spent on training its workers produced a staggering return of $33. It is hard to find a business today that does not give at least lip service to the importance of building a learning organization. Despite this apparent acceptance, progress has been painfully slow. The problem is not a lack of resources. U.S. corporate spending on learning totals nearly $60 billion annually. Intel and Anderson Consulting require two weeks of class time per year for every employee. Motorola, General Electric, McDonald’s and dozens of other major corporations have established their own “universities.” Organizations must realize that learning is not a luxury. In 1994, Intel began shipping a flawed Pentium chip. Intel’s chairperson, Andy Grove, admitted that the engineers knew about the problem, but it seemed “small enough” to ignore.

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Meanwhile, a highly successful advertising campaign, “Intel Inside,” was raising its visibility to the consumer. As a result, to save its reputation for quality, Intel was forced to replace the chip. Timely learning would have prevented the problem and the resulting $475 million write-off.

An organization that learns is one that creates, acquires, and interprets knowledge… and modifies its behavior to reflect the new insights. The ideas must be interpreted, or they won’t be utilized. Intel possessed all the information to comprehend the problem, but it wasn’t interpreted.

The marketing department was raising consumers’ expectations, yet they were not communicating with engineering who made decisions about what constituted “adequate software.”

• Correctly interpreted and disseminated information must be embedded in all organizations and appear as policies, procedures, and norms.

• This ensures actual changes in the way work gets done. In other words, true learning requires action.

Neither action by itself, nor knowledge alone, is sufficient to create a learning organization. For example, newspapers missed the threat of cable TV and the Internet for a long time. Despite a declining readership, they did not see themselves as competing in those seemingly unrelated markets. Now, newspapers, which were once the dominant vehicle for information, are struggling to maintain readership rates.

Does your organization actively pursue future knowledge? Learning cannot take place in an environment that is hostile to new and even contradictory information. Does your company tend to kill the bearer of bad news? Part of learning involves viewing failures as a natural part of the process of progress.

Does your organization lose critical knowledge when key people leave? If knowledge is not shared, then the company has not learned. “Information hoarding” is a common learning disability in business, where knowledge is power. Critical information must be shared, or it is useless.

All organizations are awash in information, most of it irrelevant.

• Acquiring the information you need involves filtering out the noise and hearing the signal.

• Even when you acquire clear information, you still have to interpret it correctly.

• Errors occur because people rely on old mental models and theories.

The problem comes when the world changes and theories do not. IBM’s failure to recognize the importance of PCs in the 1980’s is one example. Its long success with large computers built such a strong system of beliefs that the company was incapable of seeing the world clearly.

The “war on terror” involving the timely use, proper interpretation and action taken on information illustrate the complexity of this challenge. Despite the seeming simplicity of the process of acquiring information, interpreting it and applying it…learning, in real life, can be a slow and frustrating experience.

Questions for discussion:

How can our team, organization, business, strategic partners, outside suppliers and vendors more efficiently share information for the benefit of everyone?

What are the potential cost savings that could be passed on to our customer and make us more competitive as a result of better use of training and information?

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