How to Increase Performance Through Learning
What does the World of Warcraft have to do with retaining your star employees and recruiting the best of the best for your organization?
If you keep up in the blogosphere, you may have seen research about the countless negative effects of video games, as well as scattered positive impacts that these virtual environments provide. Jason Gots interviewed John Seely Brown, author of a A New Culture of Learning and discovered that the organizational catch phrases we hear all the time, like innovation and creativity, all have one thing in common – learning.
Learning involves constant adaptation. When learning, you test a hypothesis often. If you have to reject your hypothesis, then perhaps you tweak it and try again. That in essence is creativity and innovation.
Our society is pumped with new facts every day and every hour. However, we mostly focus only on facts or details that matter to us and are relevant to our agenda. The problem, Brown describes, is the current top-down model in place not only within institutions but even in schools. Given facts, employees and students aren’t being given the freedom to use these facts to create a hypothesis and “self-direct” their own agendas and projects.
What does this mean for your organization, team or employees? According to a Harvard Business School working paper, learning promotes performance, so your organization should encourage mistakes, or at least not penalize when mistakes are made in the context of innovation and experimentation. This HBS research paper highlights the “visibility problem”, where most mistakes go unreported. However, that doesn’t mean mistakes aren’t happening. Yet when an atmosphere of trust exists and mistakes are allowed and reported freely, perceived performance is actually higher.
In addition, making visible mistakes and implementing a “systems” thinking attitude to encourage cross-sector learning, has the potential to lower the bars that previously may have prevented some from fully engaging at work. IDEO is highlighted within this Harvard Business School paper as an example of an organization embracing and promoting learning, even through some of the company slogans. Check it out and see what ideas you can use for your team.
What will you do to promote a culture of learning within your organization? Host a series of thought-provoking lectures or reward creative ideas with creative rewards? Let me know in a comment below.
