Is Bitcoin signalling it’s time to revisit your learning strategy?
If you’ve followed the rise of Bitcoin over the past year, it’s becoming clear that there’s a tension emerging between traditional organizations and those that leverage disruptive technologies to drive change.
Over the past year, companies like Tesla and Square have allocated significant portions of their assets to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum. Does this signal that disruptive technologies like Bitcoin are going mainstream?
Disruptive organizations operate differently and make different decisions from traditional organizations and this often starts with the mindsets of their leaders. It is expected that more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies will turnover in the next decade and research shows that most efforts to offset disruption by traditional organizations are failing.
This is not really about Bitcoin, it’s an understanding of the potential of Blockchain as the underlying technology that disruptive organizations understand and are starting to embrace.
Many organizations invest in leadership and other development programs. The focus of these programs remains largely unchanged and are typically designed around a set of conventional competencies that mimic the careers of their most senior leaders.
Given the pace of change, we believe that established organizations should rethink how they learn, including the development of their leaders.
So where should learning professionals start when rethinking how your organization learns?
Start with the idea that everyone wants to grow, and that the organization achieves success when it aligns with this belief.
Most organizations do recognize this and it’s why they make development planning essential for all employees as part of performance management. However, it’s not always optimal when development is left to most employees to identify their own development gaps and fill out forms with actions that may or may not address gaps.
Managers and leaders get different treatment because they lead people and need focused development. A budget is approved, courses designed but this formula doesn’t always lead to improved performance and solving your customers most pressing problems.
Teaching managers how to delegate, manage their time, and prioritize doesn’t maximize productivity and increase employee engagement.
A better formula is being intentional about the development of ALL people and creating an environment for individuals to overcome their own internal barriers, to take personal inventory of development gaps and to see shortcomings as opportunities.
This also means changing how work is performed and the lens from which you understand customer problems through non-traditional ways of working such as Agile and Design Thinking.
Being intentional about learning means adjusting ways of operating that are different from the principles, practices, and structures for how traditional organizations typically approach learning, including revisiting the following areas:
Learning Principles (norms, values, and competencies)
Learning Practices (reinforce learning)
Learning Communities (peer-based learning)
Without structures, practices, and tools, that allow an organization to embody and orient to these components – organizations are left with development checklists rather than true drivers of how work can be performed more effectively.
1) Learning Principles
Principles shape how people operate (norms, values) and make decisions (competencies) from the smallest decision to the most strategic.
For example, to embrace change and create adaptive organizations, it’s important to reinforce principles and encourage development and that’s it’s ok to fail because we learn from our failures. This is not a typical norm in traditional organizations.
Ark Invests recently launched their Big Ideas Report for 2021. Ark specializes in disruptive technologies and their research shows that five of these are about to go mainstream, including Blockchain, Genome Sequencing, Robotics, Energy Storage and Artificial Intelligence.
To keep pace with disruption, organizations must take on more risk to be successful in adapting to uncertain environments. Experimentation and building prototypes become key learning opportunities as part of solving challenging business problems. This is a main difference in decision making between traditional and disruptive organizations.
2) Learning Practices
The second area is incorporating learning on the job and applying knowledge right away when it is more relevant. This includes practices such as how meetings are structured and led, how performance and productivity is monitored and measured and how practices reinforce a focus on problems that customers are experiencing.
Practices are extensions of leaders who are deliberate about the structures that are needed to be proficient at leveraging a range of disruptive technologies (Analytics, IoT, Cloud) or practices (Agile, Design Thinking) and these practices are deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people and teams.
3) Learning Communities
One of the essential ingredients of being intentional about development is creating the sense of community in promoting a culture of learning. Leaders nurture community and in turn, communities serve as ways of enabling principles that reinforce development. In this way, everyone takes ownership over development opportunities … it’s not just the role of HR.
When learning is everyone’s responsibility, you will abolish ‘checklist mentality’ and turn development into something that is real and meaningful to those who are closest to the work and to your customers. By maximizing the potential of all your employees, the contributions and performance of teams are maximized by default.