obsolete. These are conclusions that threaten self-esteem and thus
they are likely to be resisted. This problem seemed to hobble the
“lessons learned” sessions that one drug company established to
improve its internal decisions concerning when to begin full
clinical testing of new products. When the scientists involved in
past decisions were reluctant to participate in discussion about past
failures, some of the managers concluded that scientists just aren’t
interested in “that type of thing.”
By focusing on the future instead of the past, learning-friendly
organizations can transform learning into welcomed opportunities
for future success. Siemens University provides employees with
opportunities for action learning. Its in-house corporate training
gives responsibility for solving real business problems to analysts
and engineers from around the world, who work together in “stu-
dent” teams. Instead of teaching students about what others already
know, action learning at Siemens encourages teams to develop
new knowledge that can be immediately applied. Management
practices that encourage the transfer of best practices are another
approach to creating new knowledge. At Colgate-Palmolive, best
practices are spread and adapted to new situations by managers
who routinely accept transfers to unfamiliar functions, divisions,
and countries en route to higher-level positions. In both examples,
learning is embedded in nonthreatening social relationships that
are formed to find ways of improving the future. As ideas are tossed
about and considered, participants feel comfortable sharing what
they have learned, even if mistakes were made during the learning
process.
Compare action learning to another common technique, ask-
ing teams to perform postmortems on failed projects or dissecting
recent projects to identify what could have been done better. The
objective of such learning techniques is the same: to improve future
practice. Yet in the latter scenarios, it is much more difficult to
eliminate finger pointing and defensive self-protection. As a result,
few people will confess their mistakes and explain what they have
learned from those mistakes.
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