Harvard Business Review ON Knowledge Management Articles 4-6

1
Harvard Business ReviewONKnowledge Management
Articles 4-6

• Presented by Laila Haidar
• Undergraduate in Management Information Systems

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Overview

• Teaching Smart People How to Learn
• Chris Argyris (Published May-June 1995)
• Putting Your Companys Whole Brain to Work
• Dorothy Leonard and Susan Straus (Published
  July-August 1997)
• How to Make Experience Your Companys Best
  Teacher
• Art Kleiner and George Roth (Published
  September-October 1997)
• Occurring Themes
• My Critique
• Additional Information
• References

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Teaching Smart People How to Learn

• Human behavior patterns block learning in an
  organization
• Why well-educated professionals are prone to
  these patterns
• How companies can improve the ability of their
  managers and employees to learn

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Teaching Smart People How to Learn

• Success in the market place increasingly depends
  on learning, yet most people dont know how to
  learn
• Learning Dilemma
• Companies have difficulty addressing this issue
• Some companies are not aware this issue exists.

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Misunderstanding Learning

• Two mistakes made in the effort of becoming a
  learning organization
• People define learning too narrowly as mere
  Problem Solving
• The common assumption that getting people to
  learn is largely a matter of motivation

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Types of Learning
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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How Professionals Avoid Learning
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Behavior Theory

• Espoused Theory How people think they behave
• Theory-in-use How people actually behave

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Theory-in-use

• Governing Values of theory-in-use
• To remain in control
• To maximize winning and minimize losing
• To be as rational as possible

The purpose of all these values is to avoid
embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or
incompetent
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Defensive Reasoning and the Doom Loop

• Encourages individuals to keep private the
  premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape
  their behavior and to avoid testing them in a
  truly independent, objective fashion
• Performance evaluations are tailor-made to push
  professionals into the doom loop

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Your Fired
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Learning How to Reason Productively

• Managers must become aware of their defensive
  reasoning and its results otherwise any change
  will just be a fad
• Change must start at the top
• Connect the program to real business problems
• Learning to reason productively can be emotional,
  but the payoff is great

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Conclusion

• Effective learning is the product of the way
  people reason about their own behavior
• Companies need to make the ways managers and
  employees reason about their behavior a key focus
  of organizational learning and continuous
  improvement programs

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Putting Your Companies Whole Brain to Work

• Managers can successfully foster innovation using
  different approaches of creative abrasion
  Productive Process
• Different people have different thinking styles
• Rules for working together to discipline the
  creative process

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Innovate or Fall Behind

• How managers avoid personal disputes resulting
  from the creative process
• Comfortable Clone Syndrome Coworkers share
  similar interest and training, everyone thinks
  alike
• Unable to manage employees with a variety of
  thinking styles

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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How we think

• Cognitive Differences
• Varying approaches to perceiving and assimilating
  data, making decisions, solving problems, and
  relating to other people, these approaches are
  preferences
• Every one has a preferred habit of thought that
  influences how they make decisions and interact
  with others

Putting Companys Brain to Work
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Left Brain vs. Right Brain
Analytical Logical Sequential
Intuitive Values-Based Nonlinear
Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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Assessment Tools/ Diagnostic Instruments

• All instruments agree on the following points
• Preferences are neither inherently good nor
  inherently bad
• Distinguishing preferences emerge early in our
  lives, and strongly held ones tend to remain
  relatively stable through the years
• We can learn to act outside our preferred styles
• Understanding others preferences helps people
  communicate and collaborate

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
I Introvert E Extravert S Sensing N
Intuitive T Think F Feeling P
Perceiving J Judging
Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument
Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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How We Act

• Understand Yourself
• When you identify your style you will gain
  insight of your preferences in thinking and
  communication
• Your style can repress the very creativity you
  seek from you employees
• Forget the Golden Rule
• Dont treat people the way you want to be treated
• Tailor the communication to the receiver instead
  of the sender
• Create Whole-Brained Teams

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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How We Act Continued

• Look for the Ugly Duckling
• Successful managers spend time getting members of
  divers groups acknowledge their differences
• Manage the Creative Process
• Set common goals
• Make operation guide lines explicit
• Set up agendas ahead of time
• Depersonalize Conflict
• People who do not understand cognitive
  preferences tend to personalize conflict, avoid
  it, or both

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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Caveat Emptor Buyer Beware

• Diagnostic instrument only measure one aspect of
  personality preferences in thinking styles and
  communication
• Preferences tend to be stable but life experience
  can affect them
• Only trained individuals should administer
  diagnostic instruments

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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Conclusion

• Todays complex products demand integrating
  expertise of individuals who do not naturally
  understand one another
• The intersection of different thought processes
  will drive innovation

Putting the Companys Brain to Work
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How to Make Experience Your Company's Best
Teacher

• Discusses a tool called learning history

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Learning History

• A written narrative of a companys recent set of
  critical episodes Presented in two columns

Experience is The Best Teacher
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Why Learning History Works

• They Build Trust
• It raises issues people would like to talk about
  but have not had the courage to discuses openly
• Transfers knowledge from one part of the company
  to another
• Builds a body of general knowledge about
  management

Experience is The Best Teacher
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Conclusion

• Learning history is often commissioned to analyze
  one event, but their lessons often supersede it
• Experience is the best teacher in both individual
  and organizational lives

Experience is The Best Teacher
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Occurring Themes

• Managers and employees must learn to reason
  productively
• Create a whole brain company
• Experience is the best teacher

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My Critique
Pros
Cons

• The Publications are outdated
• There has not been any experiments done on the
  learning history tool
• No guarantee that these methods work

• Easy to Read
• Many Examples

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Additional Information

• An Interview with Chris Arygris
• Article about MBTI
• Creating a Learning History

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An Interview with Chris Arygris May 1999
1
Where are organizations now. And where are they
headed with respect to learning? In all
fairness, there are Hr and training people who
understand the difference between single and
double loop learning. They say they havent been
able to concentrate much on double loop learning
and that they didnt they had permission and
enthusiasm from top management.
Additional Information
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Article about MBTI February 2005
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Additional Information
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Creating a Learning History March 1995
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• A new philosophy and approach to assessment is
  embodied in learning history work. At the
  Learning Center, we are very careful in using the
  word "assessment." We now write learning
  histories.
• We include a learning historian as part of the
  team. The learning historian's job is to capture
  and tell the story. That is the language we use.
  It is amazing how this approach resolves a lot of
  psychological and emotional problems associated
  with assessment.
• People don't want to be assessed. They want to
  share. They want others to know what they've done
  - not in a self-serving fashion, but so others
  know what worked, and what didn't work. They want
  their story told.

Additional Information
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References

• A chat with Chris Argyris. By Abernathy, Donna
  J.. Training Development, May99, Vol. 53 Issue
  5, p80, 5p (Using the Universities Academic
  Search Premier)
• AMA Adds Myers-Briggs Qualification Program To
  Portfolio, Will Launch New Conference. Lifelong
  Learning Market Report, 2/4/2005, Vol. 10 Issue
  3, p1-2, 2p (Using the Universities Academic
  Search Premier)
• http//scholar.google.com/scholar?hlenlrqcach
  eQxhvNSQSV0EJhttps//dspace.mit.edu/retrieve/228
  5/SWP-3966-37617962.pdfartkleinergeorgeroth