HBR Special IssueIs Yours a Learning
Organization?
David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson,
and Francesca Gino | page 86An organization with a strong learning culture
faces the unpredictable deftly. However, a con-
crete method for understanding precisely how
an institution learns and for identifying specifi c
steps to help it learn better has remained
elusive. A survey instrument designed by
Harvard Business School professors Garvin,
Edmondson, and Gino allows you to ground your
efforts in becoming a learning organization.
The tool’s conceptual foundation is what
the authors call the three building blocks of
a learning organization. The fi rst, a supportive
learning environment, comprises psychological
safety, appreciation of differences, openness
to new ideas, and time for refl ection. The
second, concrete learning processes and
practices, includes experimentation, informa-
tion collection and analysis, and education and
training. These two complementary elements
are fortifi ed by the fi nal building block: leader-
ship that reinforces learning.
The survey instrument enables a granular
examination of all these particulars, scores
each of them, and provides a framework for
detailed, comparative analysis. You can make
comparisons within and among your institu-
tion’s functional areas, between your organiza-
tion and others, and against benchmarks that
the authors have derived from their surveys of
hundreds of executives in many industries.
After discussing how to use their tool, the
authors share the insights they acquired as
they developed it. Above all, they emphasize
the importance of dialogue and diagnosis as
you nurture your company and its processes
with the aim of becoming a learning organi-
zation. The authors’ goal—and the purpose
of their tool—is to help you paint an honest
picture of your fi rm’s learning culture and of
the leaders who set its tone.
HBR Reprint R0803HWhy Organizations
Don’t Learn
Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats
page 78For any enterprise to be competitive, contin-
uous learning and improvement are key—but
not always easy to achieve. After a decade of
research, the authors have concluded that four
biases stand in the way: We focus too heavily
on success, are too quick to act, try too hard
to fi t in, and rely too much on experts. Each of
these biases raises challenges, but each can
be curbed with particular strategies.
A preoccupation with success, for example,
leads to an unreasonable fear of failure, a
mindset that inhibits risk taking, a focus on
past performance rather than potential, and
blindness to the role of luck in successes and
failures. Managers therefore need to treat
mistakes as learning opportunities, recognize
and foster workers’ capacity for growth, and
conduct data-based project reviews.
To counter the bias toward action—and the
unthinking perpetual motion and exhaustion
that ensue—leaders can schedule more work
breaks and make time for refl ection. They can
redress the tendency to conform, which stifl es
innovation, by encouraging workers to cultivate
their individual strengths and to speak up
when they have ideas for improvements. And
they can develop and empower their em-
ployees to solve problems instead of turning
automatically to outside experts.
HBR Reprint R1511GExecutive Summaries
The Learning Organization
Teaching Smart People
How to Learn
Chris Argyris | page 60
Failure forces you to refl ect on your as-
sumptions and inferences—which is why an
organization’s smartest and most successful
employees are often such poor learners: They
haven’t had the opportunity for introspection
that failure affords. So when they do fail—or
merely underperform—they can be surprisingly
defensive. Instead of critically examining their
own behavior, they cast blame outward, on
anyone or anything they can.
In this classic article from 1991, Chris Argyris
of Harvard University, known as a thought-
leader in organizational development, explains
why well-educated, high-achieving profession-
als often strugg le with learning, adding that if
learning is to occur, managers and employees
must refl ect critically on their own behavior,
identify how they might inadvertently contrib-
ute to the organization’s problems, and then
change how they act.
This mode of thinking is distinct from simple
problem solving, and it takes practice. Problem
solving is an example of single-loop learning:
You identify an error and apply a particular
remedy to correct it. But genuine learning
involves an extra step, in which you refl ect on
your assumptions and test the validity of your
hypotheses. Achieving this double-loop learn-
ing is more than a matter of motivation—you
have to refl ect on the way you think.
The key to teaching senior managers how
to reason productively is connecting the
educational process to real business problems.
One way is to have participants produce a
rudimentary case study, which becomes the
focal point of extended analysis. As the group
analyzes and refl ects on their approaches to
the problem, the exercise legitimizes talking
about issues they’ve never been able to ad-
dress before. And when senior managers
are trained in new reasoning skills, they can
have a big impact on the performance of the
entire organization.
HBR Reprint 91301