HBR Special IssueWhen to Put the Brakes
on Learning
J. Stuart Bunderson and
Kathleen M. Sutcliffe | page 112Most executives would assume that companies
and their teams should embrace continual
learning and renewal in order to stay compet-
itive. But more than a decade of research sug-
gests that in fact, paying too much attention to
organizational learning can hurt performance.
An overemphasis on experimentation, for ex-
ample, may distract teams from their goals and
lead them to brush aside satisfactory solutions
to problems in favor of untried approaches.
Sometimes, it seems, staying the course is
the right thing to do.
To investigate this, the authors studied two
teams from a Fortune 100 consumer products
company, assessing each group’s emphasis on
learning and comparing that against the team’s
profi tability relative to its goal. Their research
showed that while too much focus on learning
can actually depress performance, teams that
are already performing poorly will benefi t more
from a prolearning culture than will more
successful ones.
The data shows that companies and their
managers would be best served by identifying
the appropriate level of learning for their teams.
They can do this in several ways. First, while
managers should avoid trying to fi x a team that
isn’t broken, they should never stop tweaking.
Even the best-performing teams benefi t from a
low-to-moderate focus on learning. But for top
teams, too much focus on learning and change
can result in rapidly declining performance.
Second, for poorly performing teams, managers
should put a moderate-to-high focus on
learning. Finally, managers should set the tone
for their teams by balancing the benefi ts of
innovation and experimentation with the need
for stability and effi ciency—and ratchet back
on learning if it could hinder success.
HBR Reprint F0302DMaking Business Personal
Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming,
and Matthew Miller | page 94
Most people expend a lot of energy at work
attempting to hide their inadequacies from
colleagues. The authors believe that this is the
single bigg est cause of wasted resources in
nearly every company today. When they went
in search of fi rms where people see their mis-
takes not as vulnerabilities but as prime oppor-
tunities for growth, they found only a handful.
Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an
East Coast investment fi rm, and the Decurion
Corporation, a West Coast real estate manager,
cinema operator, and senior living center
owner. Both are committed to developing every
one of their people by weaving personal growth
into daily work—and both are highly successful
businesses.
The authors spent hundreds of hours
observing their practices and interviewing em-
ployees at all levels. What they saw was people
working together, in meetings, in one-on-one
sessions, and in the course of their everyday
work, to get at the root causes of problems and
devise more-productive ways of doing things.
Many companies conduct root cause analysis
but stop short of crossing into an employee’s
interior world, where so many problems begin—
in, for example, a tendency to avoid confronta-
tion, to act before thinking things through, to
be overly agg ressive if one’s ideas are criticized,
and other counterproductive thinking and be-
havior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone
from the CEOs on down to the teenage ushers
works on identifying and overcoming these
patterns as part of doing the job well.
HBR Reprint R1404B
Learning in the Thick of It
Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry, and
Joseph Moore | page 102The U.S. Army’s Opposing Force (OPFOR) is
a 2,500-member brigade whose job is to help
prepare soldiers for combat. Created to be the
meanest, toughest foe that soldiers will ever
face, OPFOR engages units-in-training in a
variety of mock campaigns under a wide range
of conditions. Every month, a fresh brigade of
more than 4,000 soldiers takes on this stand-
ing enemy.
OPFOR, which is stationed in the California
desert, always has the home-court advantage.
But the force being trained—called BLUFOR—is
numerically and technologically superior. It
possesses more resources and better, more
available data. It is made up of experienced sol-
diers. And it knows just what to expect, because
OPFOR shares its methods from previous cam-
paigns with BLUFOR’s commanders. In short,
each BLUFOR brigade is given practically
every edge. Yet OPFOR almost always wins.
Underlying OPFOR’s consistent success is
the way it uses the after-action review (AAR), a
method for extracting lessons from one event
or project and applying them to others. AARs
became a popular business tool after Shell Oil
began experimenting with them in 1998. Most
corporate AARs, however, are faint echoes of
the rigorous reviews performed by OPFOR.
Companies tend to treat the process as a pro-
forma wrap-up, drawing lessons from an action
but rarely learning them. OPFOR’s AARs, by
contrast, generate raw material that is fed back
into the execution cycle. And while OPFOR’s
reviews extract numerous lessons, the brigade
does not consider a lesson to be learned until it
is successfully applied and validated.
It might not make sense for companies to
adopt OPFOR’s AAR processes in their entirety,
but four fundamentals are mandatory: Lessons
must benefi t the team that extracts them. The
AAR process must start at the beginning of the
activity. Lessons must link explicitly to future
actions. And leaders must hold everyone, espe-
cially themselves, accountable for learning.
HBR Reprint R0507GExecutive Summaries
The Learning Organization