9

Is Training Organizational Learning?

In the preceding chapter, we presented a case that illustrates how organizational learning looks according to the multi-facet model. In this chapter, we argue why one type of learning activity, training, which is often regarded as organizational learning, should not be regarded as such according to the model.

Training denotes a varied family of practices ranging from basic-skill training for workers to leadership development and executive education for potential COOs, CFOs, and CEOs. The ubiquity of these programs is such that “corporations, world-wide, spend annually billions of dollars” (Liedtke, Weber, & Weber, 1999, p. 404). There is also a growing tendency to bring training in-house, with more than 1,000 companies setting their own internal “universities” (“Extending the Learning Curve,” 1997). Granted that the agents of learning in organizational learning are the organization's members, does any learning by individual members contribute to organizational learning? Alternatively, do extensive training programs constitute organizational learning?

Our answer to this question is that training per se, which aims at improving the performance of individuals or groups, should not be confused with organizational learning, which aims at improving the performance of organizations. There is an important distinction between training, which is learning in the organization, and organizational learning, which is learning by the organization. However, training programs can generate organizational learning when they move beyond the skill development and evolve into organizational learning mechanisms (OLMs).

In this chapter, we clarify this distinction by looking closely at the relationship between training and organizational learning in five organizations. We begin with a negative example by analyzing the case of Computer Chips International (a pseudonym), a company that unsuccessfully used training as the strategy for creating a “learning organization” (Ford et al., 2000). Then we will demonstrate how training evolved into organizational learning in three organizations frequently mentioned as learning organizations: Johnsonville Foods, Motorola, and Dell. Finally, we will look at Bell Laboratories, which offers an instructive example of training design using an organizational learning mind-set in order to capitalize on and add to knowledge available in the organization.

COMPUTER CHIPS INTERNATIONAL

Ford and associates (2000) described and analyzed an organizational learning project carried out in the Data Shaping Division (DSD) of Computer Chips International (a pseudonym), a large manufacturer of computer chips. In the early 1990s, Computer Chips International (CCI) engaged the Organizational Learning Center at MIT to “transform the DSD into a learning organization by implementing organizational learning in a subunit of the DSD” (Ford et al., 2000, p. 74). This division had some 100 engineers working in four units of product development and one support unit. The strategy for accomplishing this transformation was to instill the “five disciplines” of the learning organization (Senge, 1990): personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning, and systems thinking. The project was led by a 10-member, in-house “Implementation Team” within the Data Shaping Division as the site for the breakthrough (our term) project.

The rationale behind the intervention was that, if members of the Implementation Team learned and practiced the five disciplines, effective learning would gradually become an integral part of organizational life and spread throughout the organization. In order to make this happen, the members of the Implementation Team underwent systematic training in each of the five disciplines. In their account of this learning process, Ford and associates (2000) repeatedly described the change process in terms of the acquisition and application of skills:

The Implementation Team held a meeting very early in the project at which they described their personal visions, and members subsequently reported informally on their private attempts to develop personal mastery skills. (p. 76)

The Implementation Team considered developing their own mental model skills to be one of the most important parts of organizational learning…. The Implementation Team frequently and regularly used a variety of tools recommended in the literature to develop mental model skills. (pp. 76–77)

Although espoused as a desired skill by the Implementation Team and… management, little of evidence of a strong awareness of a need or focus on team learning was found. (p. 77)

Systems thinking activities included managing a relatively simple but dynamic system through simulation,… causal loop diagramming sessions, workshops with engineers to elicit and articulate important relationships that link product development processes…. Despite a significant amount of activity and practice for developing systems thinking skills, no infrastructures were put in place for this discipline. (p. 78)

Although developing competence in some of the disciplines appears slow, the speed of skill development and dissemination is consistent with the experience of other organizations. (p. 80)

These quotations all reflect an attempt to move from learning in the organization to learning by the organization. The program's investment in training was fairly successful in improving the skills of members of the Implementation Team. However, attempts to transfer this knowledge beyond this team were largely unsuccessful. As a result, the expected transformation of the DSD to a learning organization never occurred, and the project was eventually abandoned in the wake of reorganization.

This failure was particularly puzzling because the organization provided all of the necessary preconditions for success: ample assistance, leadership, time, and upper management support (Ford et al., 2000). The researchers hypothesized that there was an inherent contradiction between organizational learning and CCI's organizational culture. They concluded that CCI was dominated by an “engineering culture” (Schein, 1996), which focuses on pragmatic problem solving, designing “humans out of systems rather than into them” (Ford et al., 2000, p. 74). In our opinion, however, this hypothesis is highly tenuous because the researchers never actually conducted a systematic study of the organizational culture. Rather they inferred the dominance of an engineering culture based on the fact that the organization's upper management consisted primarily of engineers (Ford et al., 2000).

The researchers also hypothesized that failure stemmed from the lack of formal structural mechanisms for integrating the newly acquired skills into the actual functioning of the organization:

A common weakness across the disciplines was a lack of learning and information infrastructures that could have facilitated the dissemination and utilization of organizational lessons and skills. … Therefore, the Implementation Team was unable to share knowledge significantly beyond their own group. They also had little success in utilizing the knowledge they had acquired…to improve the DSD's operations…. If the DSD had been able to wait for and perceive the benefits of the Implementation Team's learning work, broader commitment might have developed. … Patience is needed before significant improvements due to organizational learning can be recognized. (p. 74)

This second hypothesis is more plausible because the lack of infrastructure was clearly documented in the case.

The case of CCI is particularly informative because training was aimed at imparting skills and ways of thinking considered to be essential for organizational learning. However, the progression from individual to organizational learning never occurred. This case reflects experience with many organizations that fail to make this transition from “learning in” to “learning by.” The fundamental error, as we see it, stems from an assumption that there is a logical progression from individual to organizational learning. This assumption contributes to anthropomorphism, one of the sources of mystification, which sees organizational learning as individual learning writ large (see Chapter 1). It leads to the belief that if everyone in the organization is learning, then the organization is learning. However, this belief confuses two logically distinct types of learning (Bateson, 1979).

Skills and new ways of thinking are extremely important for improving the quality of organizational learning, but they are not the starting point. To the contrary, a large up-front investment in training may be counterproductive. After having put a great deal of valuable time and effort into developing these skills, organization members are often frustrated because they lack the means for using these skills in ways that can have an impact on learning at the organizational level. Although Ford and associates (2000) called for “patience,” there is little evidence in the case to suggest that developing individual and group skills through training would have eventually generated organizational learning.

From the perspective of the multi-facet model, the project at Computer Chips International was fatally flawed because it lacked a well-developed structural facet, which makes learning organizational. The establishment of OLMs that focus on specific work-related problems or issues would have enabled individuals to learn on behalf of the organization and to disseminate this knowledge throughout the company. This case, however, does not mean that training never functions as a means for promoting organizational learning. To the contrary, the following three case examples illustrate how learning in the organization can become learning by the organization when training programs actually evolve into OLMs.

JOHNSONVILLE FOODS

The evolution from learning in to learning by an organization can be observed in the case of Johnsonville Foods, a Wisconsin-based sausage manufacturer. Johnsonville was a financially sound but traditional organization that underwent a transformation into a learning organization (Honold, 1996). This process consisted of four phases: individual learning, group learning, intergroup learning, and ongoing learning (Honold, 1996).

Individual Learning

The goal of Johnsonville Foods CEO-owner Ralph Stayer was to develop “an organization where people took responsibility for their own work, for the product, for the company as a whole” (Stayer, 1990, p. 67). His method for achieving this goal was to “‘get people into a learning mode’… [under the theory] that people who were learning would be more open to change” (Honold, 1996, p. 27). Johnsonville Foods began, accordingly, to offer employees three individually based learning programs. First, they could draw $100 from a Personal Development Fund, provided they spent it on learning any subject that they wanted. Gradually some two thirds of the workforce became involved in some type of formal, often job-related, education (Stayer, 1990). Second, they could learn about themselves in a Personal Development Workshop, for which they could also draw from their own Personal Development Plan. Finally, they could “spend a day with any other employee of the company [in order] to see beyond their own jobs and how their work impacted the product and the customer … and to explore options for personal development planning [and career opportunities]” (Honold, 1996, p. 27).

Group Learning

As people began to apply job-related learning in their work, teams began to form spontaneously to tackle a variety of problems. This led to the formation of cross-departmental “Quality of Working Life Teams” that dealt with companywide issues such as food choice for the vending machines and aligning the company's disciplinary procedures to fit its changing culture.

Intergroup Learning

As line workers began to take responsibility for their work and to organize themselves in work teams, they began to assume responsibilities normally performed by supervisory personnel or staff functions, such as budgeting, scheduling, quality control, and the hiring and training of new workers. To help them perform these tasks, workers were encouraged to take relevant training courses. In order to promote individual learning, the compensation system changed from one based on wage scales for positions and across-the-board pay raises to a “payfor-performance” system. The system specified skill requirements for some 80 positions in the company, and pay was partly based on the number of requirements that line workers showed they had mastered by passing an evaluation.

The process by which the new system was developed illustrates the shift to the intergroup level phase in the evolution of learning at Johnsonville Foods:

Tim Lenz, an employee in Johnsonville's manufacturing facility, was one of many who were frustrated with the company's hourly compensation strategy…. In 1990, he went to the vice president of manufacturing and proposed that a group of employees work together to rethink the hourly compensation system. The vice president not only approved Lenz's suggestion, he also agreed to work with the team as needed throughout the design process.

Lenz hung a note on the plant bulletin board, inviting other employees to help him try to improve the hourly compensation system…. Approximately 12 people signed up to help. After several introductory meetings, eight of these volunteers made the commitment to be members of the hourly compensation design team.

During one of the initial meetings, the team members decided that they needed some assistance from member services. “We invited a member of our company's [HR] department to join the team, because we knew that those skills would be necessary, and knowledge about compensation would help us determine the right system for our company,” says Lenz. Because the team members had little or no expertise in the compensation area, this HR person was able to conduct initial research for the team and gather useful data to assist them in the compensation system's design.

As part of the research process, team members also conducted focus groups of employees at Johnsonville to determine their needs and expectations, benchmarked other companies to evaluate different types of compensation systems, and talked with consultants to generate ideas…. One particularly helpful research project was a site visit and one-day seminar on skill-based pay sponsored by Aid Association for Lutherans, a fraternal benefits society in Appleton, Wisconsin. This seminar helped the team determine what type of compensation structure would work within Johnsonville's culture. (Peters, 1994, p. 129)

The need for a compensation system that promoted learning triggered the transition from individual to organizational learning. In order to accomplish this transition, Lenz created an OLM to work on the issue of compensation. This OLM interfaced with other groups and individuals both inside and outside the company in the process of learning.

Ongoing Learning

The next step in the evolution of Johnsonville Foods seemed almost natural: Cross-functional teams began to form as “sales people started to meet with the accounts receivable department to ensure there was a common understanding on credit… and the information systems people began to include their internal customers on meetings to priori-tize their work” (Honold, 1996, p. 31). Learning became a way of life in Johnsonville Foods, in line with Stayer's vision for the company.

The first stage in Johnsonville Food's process was not, strictly speaking, learning in the organization. Whereas most learning in the organization programs are work related, learning at this phase was neither necessarily work related nor did it necessarily take place in the organization. Beginning with its second phase, the process became a bona fide organizational learning program. The various departmental and interdepartmental teams that were formed dealt with organizational problems and produced changes in Johnsonville Food's work processes and behavioral norms. Although some learning in the organization was still carried on (training workers in new skills), these learning activities were subordinate to the goal of changing work processes.

Johnsonville Food's case demonstrates how learning in the organization and a skill-based reward system motivated organization members to begin and sustain a bottom-up process of OLMs development. Training in Johnsonville Foods was not initially focused on work-related subjects, but it led to the emergence of OLMs. This step set the stage for organizational learning. It also had more enduring effects on the organization than the skills-focused program at Computer Chips International because the latter never developed the essential structural component. It is not entirely clear why this transition took place naturally at Johnsonville but not at Computer Chips International. In this case, it seems likely that the leadership of Stayer played a crucial role. Perhaps the most important thing that Stayer did was to not stand in the way but to allow employees to set up OLMs to address real needs and problems (see Chapter 6).

Whereas Johnsonville Foods had a training program that evolved into a set of OLMs, Motorola institutionalized its program as an in-house “university,” which evolved into a single mega-OLM that centralizes this organization's work- and product-related research.

MOTOROLA UNIVERSITY

“Operating on an annual basis of $200 million,… Motorola University is arguably… the most impressive of the…more than 1,000 corporate universities which have sprung up in the USA since General Motors pioneered the first institution of this kind in 1955” (“Extending the Learning Curve,” 1997). Although individual development has been traditionally used in Motorola as a vehicle for organizational change, how it has been used changed dramatically from traditional training in the 1970s to an in-house university that is a mega-OLM for “exploring beyond the known boundaries of [the company's] business and its industry… [and generating] for itself new models or maps for making sense of the market” (Baldwin, Danielson, & Wiggenhorn, 1997, p. 52).

In 1979, Motorola's CEO Bob Galvin set up Motorola Training and Education Center (MTEC) with two missions: to upgrade the skills of all Motorola's employees and to expand participative management in support of Motorola's Six Sigma method for improving product quality (Baldwin et al., 1997; Wiggenhorn, 1990). MTEC was located outside the Human Resource Department to underscore that its charter was not so much to educate people as to be an agent of change, with an emphasis on retraining and redefining jobs. MTEC developed a 5-year training program that included statistical process control, basic industrial problem solving, effective presentation, effective meetings, and goal setting. An evaluation study conducted in the early 1980s showed that in spite of its apparent success (e.g., MTEC was using 50,000 hours of employee time in a typical plant of 2,500 workers), the program failed to deliver its hoped-for results. Although product-shipping goals were met, quality was not improving (Wiggenhoen, 1990).

Several causes were identified for the failure. Workers were complacent and lacked motivation to learn, complicated by the fact that a high proportion lacked basic reading and arithmetic skills required for the new quality-promoting work processes. Senior mangers did not emphasize quality and did not encourage workers to apply what they learned to their work. Part of the solution for the first problem was to upgrade the status, rewards, and recruiting of production workers. The solution for the second problem was to enlarge the scope of training to management levels. A 2-week program was designed “to send a message to the company about achieving quality through the integration of efforts across functions, a message not just about quality of product but about quality of people, quality of service, quality of the total organization” (Wiggenhorn, 1990, p. 76). To ensure participation, Galvin and 11 senior managers, who constituted MTEC's board, invited themselves and everyone else at the top to participate.

Around the same time, MTEC also started an annual event for senior management during which the CEO picked a topic of interest to be discussed by top executives with the help of experts. Between 1985 and 1987, 200 top executives spent 17 days each in the classroom learning about manufacturing, global competition, and cycle time management. People at lower level, right down to production workers, participated in portions of the same program (Wiggenhorn, 1990).

Concurrently with the changes in training of managers, MTEC changed its operation mode in the training of production workers. As the magnitude of the problem of inadequate reading and arithmetic skills of the (often immigrant) production workers became evident, the charter of the institute changed from providing continuous training to every employee to providing remedial math and language instruction to a large portion of the workforce as well. Realizing that this task was not within its area of expertise, MTEC turned to community colleges and similar institutions for help. This move eventually led to the formation of Motorola University, which replaced MTEC in 1989. The university is essentially a strategic alliance between Motorola and institutions of higher education that cooperate in the development of curriculum and training of instructors to meet the specific needs of Motorola employees and support the achievement of its strategic objectives.

The university's leadership development program, Vice President Institute (VPI), demonstrates how it applies action learning to promote participation, increase the relevance of learning, and fuse educational activities with the pursuit of strategic objectives (Eller, 1995). The 2-year program opens with a 5-day seminar in which VPs are presented with issues and problems that span the business units to which they are responsible. They then form teams that are responsible for developing and implementing solutions to these issues and problems (e.g., what will Motorola's structure look like in 2005?). Following the seminar, the VPs meet regularly to work on their programs, acquire additional knowledge and skills, and continue the process of networking begun in the seminar. The goals of the program are to (a) teach the VPs about Motorola's unique heritage so that they understand why the company has outstripped its competition and is uniquely positioned to grow, (b) help VPs explore ways to invent new technologies and businesses, (c) expand VPs’ social networks in the organization, and (d) provide VPs with opportunities for personal growth.

More recently, Motorola has evolved from an institution resembling teaching-oriented colleges to full-blown research universities, underscoring its analogy to an OLM that produces knowledge that is directly relevant to its parent organization. For example, the university's College of Learning Technologies (CLT) is responsible for providing “learning solutions through the use of CD-ROMS, Web-based systems, instructor-led training, on-line communities of practice, video and satellite conferencing to Motorola world-wide” (Rucker, 1999, p. 3) so that “MU will continue to provide the ‘right knowledge, right now’ for Motorola and its customers” (Rucker, 1999, p. 6). E-learning is naturally particularly suitable for this mission. A specific example of this activity is the development, in cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University, of an architecture of “Just-in-Time Lectures” that enables users worldwide to access educational material of various types (text, video, virtual reality) as the need arises on the job.

Next we turn to Dell, the successful computer manufacturer that has learned to use e-learning to an even greater extent than Motorola, employing it as a vehicle for institutionalizing on-line learning.

DELL LEARNING

Dell Computer Corporation is a producer of computer system products with offices in 37 countries and distribution in more than 170 (Coné, 2000). Until the crash of NASDAQ, the company enjoyed a phenomenal rate of growth that translated into 500% employee growth between 1996 and 2000. Such blessings, however, are not problem free:

Massive expansion means between 200–300 new employees a week. How do you keep new staff up to date with dozens of new products and dozen more skills? As important, how do you maintain a corporate culture when the majority of your workforce has been with the company for less than two years?” (“Dell Takes a Stroll in the Park,” 2001, p. 23).

Like Motorola, Dell traditionally emphasized training. It too developed its own university with a mission to “ensure that people had the knowledge and skills to keep pace with the firm's hyper growth” (Coné, 2000, p. 59). However, in 1995, the company changed its emphasis on class learning to a delivery approach that relies on e-learning. The mission of the new entity, Dell Learning, was to (a) align learning with key business initiatives, (b) make learning directly available to everyone who needs it, (c) create clarity around competencies required for continued success, and (d) provide consistency, where needed, through global curricula (Coné, 2000, p. 59).

The basic idea was to provide Dell's employees, from line workers to top executives, with exactly the knowledge they needed just when they needed it on the job. Furthermore, it put the workers themselves in charge of accessing and utilizing this knowledge. Learning materials were accessible through Dell's internal Web site. They included materials that ranged from tools designed to support routine managerial tasks (e.g., hiring, assimilating new employees, and compensation planning) to background materials like case notes and key note transcripts. In Dell's terminology, the traditional paradigm of class learning was replaced by “stealth learning,” in which the boundaries between working and learning are intentionally blurred. In our terms, Dell University, as an in-house provider of training, was replaced by Dell Learning, an in-house institution that promotes and supports on-line/external OLMs. The reliance on e-learning “makes learning ubiquitous and a natural part of the job” (Coné, 2000, p. 60).

The e-learning format has some noteworthy advantages. It increases the control of learners, allowing them to tailor learning to their needs and schedules and to pace it according to their needs or abilities. It increases the scope of access compared with the time and space limitations of classroom learning. Evaluation modules that are attached to instructional units allow the organization to track and measure both the time spent and progress made in learning.

At the same time, e-learning is not free of limitations. It is expensive, requiring considerable investment in design expertise and IT infrastructure. It is limited to technology-based skills, which excludes, for example, interpersonal skills or team relationship building. It is interesting that even at a computer company like Dell, experience demonstrated that people were actually more comfortable with classroom learning, which explains the basic rationale underlying “stealth learning”: Keep the act of learning out of learners’ awareness. Consistent with this insight, “self-paced online courses [in Dell Learning] were supplemented by instructor-led workshops and seminars” (Murray, 2000, p. 17).

Studies evaluating Dell's return on its investment in Dell Learning show that Dell Learning paid off in some $75 million in reduced costs, increased sales, improved productivity, better customer service, faster new-hire orientation and training, and reduced turnover (Coné, 2000; “Dell Takes a Stroll in the Park,” 2001).

Dell's experience is one of the clearest illustrations that we can cite of the importance of leadership support for the success of organizational learning. It is the belief of Dell's founder and CEO Michael Dell (who was involved in Dell Learning in a variety of roles) that “when learning is this important to the business, it's everybody's job—especially mine—to get behind it” (Coné, 2000, p. 65). As a visionary, he defined Dell Learning's unique character, which “makes every intermediary in the learning process (e.g., instructors) a target for elimination” (Coné, 2000, p. 63) and dedicated its missions and targets to those of the business. As a sponsor, he funded and commissioned new programs, which he then launched personally. As a governor, he chaired the Board of Regents of Dell Learning, “which sets policy, supports, directs, and reviews the operation of education within Dell” (Coné, 2000, p. 66). As a subject matter expert, he reviewed and wrote several sections of a training program on the Dell business model. As a faculty member, he taught in a program on strategic leadership at Dell (in which the faculty consists exclusively of Dell top executives). As a learner, he stressed his own learning—from employees, outsiders, and particularly customers—in his speeches and presentations. Finally, as a marketing officer, Michael Dell “sent personal e-mails to his team to let them know that he expected 100% participation” in a program on ethics, values, and the legal aspects of management, which the company mandated for all managers (Coné, 2000, p. 70).

Whereas Johnsonville Foods illustrates the emergence of OLMs as an outcome of training, and Motorola illustrates how centralized in-house training evolved into a mega off-line OLM, Dell illustrates how learning in the organization became an online/external agency OLM. The knowledge was provided by an external agent, a computerized knowledge dissemination system that functioned as a consultant or coach, which was immediately available to organization members whenever they needed it on the job.

BELL LABS

We conclude our discussion of learning in organizations by examining training at Bell Labs’ Switching Systems Business Unit (SSBU; Kelley, 1993). Two assumptions underlie Bell Lab's program for enhancing the productivity of the SSBU engineers: (1) The best way to improve performance is to change the ways professionals work rather than install new computers, and (2) in organizations that attract top people (like Bell Labs), the real difference between stars and medium-low performers lies in the strategies that their members use, not their innate abilities (Kelley, 1993). Consistent with these assumptions, the first step in developing the program was the identification of star performers. Members of this group were nominated by both their managers and their peers. Peer opinion was important because experience showed that managers tended to overlook behaviors like coming up with new ideas and helping others. According to colleagues, these were the behaviors that distinguished real stars.

Next, members of the star and middle performers groups were asked individually about their definitions of productivity, how they knew they were productive, and what exactly they did to be productive. Based on the answers to these questions, an “expert model” of engineers was constructed consisting of nine work strategies: taking initiative, networking, self-management, teamwork effectiveness, leadership, followership, perspective, show and tell, and organizational savvy (see Kelley, 1993, for exact descriptions of these strategies). Although the two groups agreed on these broad strategies, they disagreed about their relative importance and on the detailed tactics of which they are comprised.

The next phase was the development and pilot testing of a curriculum by 16 engineers who were selected from the two original groups that participated in the previous phases of the program. The primary task of the program was “to make the critical work strategies concrete, accessible, and learnable” (Kelley, 1993, p. 135). The curriculum included nine modules for each of the work strategies that, in turn, included discussion groups, work-related exercises, rating scales for evaluating strategy performance, and homework practice exercises. The final version was a 6-week program administered by members of the development team and later on by engineers who participated in the program. The use of peer instructors was based on recognition of the fact that “knowledge professionals value the real experts on productivity in their laboratory or law firm, not trainers who breeze in, teach a day-long workshop, and then breeze out” (Kelley, 1993, p. 134).

Between 1989 and 1993, more than 600 of SSBU's engineers participated in the program. Self-evaluations of the program's effectiveness showed 10%, 20%, and 25% improvement immediately after the program, 6, and 12 months later. More impressively, a survey of graduates’ superiors using behavioral rating scales showed that participants improved more in terms of skills relevant to the program than members of a control group.

The relationship between learning in and learning by was reversed at Bell Labs. It created an off-line/internal OLM for the purpose of improving the effectiveness of its training program. The output of an intensive and systematic process of organizational learning was a new training paradigm uniquely fitted to the organization's needs.

DISCUSSION AND LESSONS LEARNED

What lessons can be drawn from the five case studies of learning in the organization discussed in this chapter?

1. Training is not equivalent to organizational learning. The goal of training is improving individual performance. The defining characteristic of organizational learning is organizational level changes in practices, procedures, norms, and routines. This is not a mere conceptual quibble. The case of Computer Chips International shows that training does not necessarily add up to organizational learning, either in theory or in practice.

2. Properly managed, training (and learning in the organization in general) can and should lead to organizational learning. We chose Johnsonville Foods, Motorola, and Dell for analysis, not because they illustrate this conclusion but based on the reputation of their programs for learning in the organization. The evolution of these programs into mega OLMs was a finding of our analysis.

3. Make learning relevant to core tasks of the organization. Consistent with the multi-facet model's proposition that organizational learning is more likely to succeed if it is related to the organization's vision, business strategy, or core activities, all four exemplars can be related to one of these entities. At Johnsonville Foods, learning was a central element of Stayer's vision of an organization in which managers and employees take full responsibility for their work. Engaging in learning was essential to support the constant need for new skills and to carry out independent initiatives. For Motorola, learning was essential for enabling workers to implement its Six Sigma program, which was the key to maintaining competitive advantage. At Dell, learning was indispensable for sustaining its phenomenal growth. Finally, for Bell Labs, an R & D institution, learning was essential for improving the productivity of the engineers whose performance was the absolute determinate of the organization's success.

4. The process is the product. This adage intends to capture the fact that once an organization begins to experiment with the institution of OLMs and compatible change in its culture and policies, it is already engaged, however modestly, in organizational learning. All four organizations learned that training alone failed to meet their requirements for know-how. Their learning in programs took shape through processes of trial and error that were deliberate to varying degrees. Motorola University emerged from a series of transformations that began with the failures of organizationwide training programs. The program at Bell Labs was based on a study comparing star and middle performers (the quintessential form of learning) and continued to evolve in response to the changing need of the institution. Based on his own experience, Stayer summed up this process of learning to learn as follows:

First, just start. Don't wait until you have all the answers. When I set out to make these changes, I had no clear picture of how these new systems would interact with one another or with other company systems and procedures, but if I had waited until I had all the answers, I'd still be waiting. A grand plan was impossible; there were too many variables. I wasn't certain which systems to change; I just knew I had to change something in order to alter expectations and begin moving toward my goal. (Stayer, 1990, pp. 74–75)

5. The leader's commitment is crucial. At Johnsonville Foods, Motorola, and most notably Dell, leaders played a critical role by instituting OLMs, placing learning high on the organization's agenda, devoting the necessary time and resources, and setting a personal example.

In conclusion, properly developed and supported, training can be used as a foundation or entry point for the introduction of organizational learning into organizations. At the same time, the four best practice cases analyzed in this chapter show that learning in the organization should not be confused with learning by organization.

8

Inside an OLM

Postflight Reviews in the Israeli Air Force

In this chapter, we present an in-depth analysis of after-action reviews, the most frequently discussed type of organzational learning mechanism (OLM) in the literature on organizational learning. The literature on this OLM describes after-action reviews in numerous settings, including high-hazard plants (Carrol, 1995, 1998), Microsoft (Cusumano & Selby, 1995), British Petroleum (Gulliver, 1987), and the U.S. Army (Baird et al., 1997). These descriptions focus on the procedural aspects of the after-action reviews and the stages that are followed. They also focus on how to conduct after-action reviews that produce lessons learned that are valid and have an impact. Our objective in this chapter is to further demystify organizational learning by examining the learning dynamics in after-action reviews: What goes on beneath the surface of the procedure- following activities? How do participants think and feel? How do they learn from the review process? How does the Israel Defense Force Air Force (IDFAF) actually learn?

We chose to study postflight reviews owing to their reputation as a “best practice” in the Israel Defense Force and in Israel in general. Air Force officers are in high demand in executive courses as lecturers on postflight reviews.

The importance of postflight reviews in the working life of the air-crews is evident from their integration into the working routine of the squadron. Training days begin with a 30-minute briefing for the aircrews that are scheduled to fly. Occasionally, the briefing includes a review of relevant lessons learned from past missions. Next, the aircrews who fly in the same formation (fighting units of two to eight planes) attend short formation briefings facilitated by the formation leaders (“number ones”). Assignments to the number one position are not based on seniority, a unique practice of the IDFAF that is designed to accelerate the development of junior officers. This means that relatively junior pilots may lead and later debrief pilots who are their senior in rank and experience, a practice that has direct implications for the postflight reviews culture.

A typical mission lasts between 30 and 60 minutes and is followed by a 45-minute formation postflight review, facilitated by the formation leader. Typical training days consist of the cycle of formation briefing– mission–formation postflight review, repeated two or three times, with occasionally an additional nighttime cycle. Each day concludes with a 60-minute squadron level postflight review attended by all formation aircrews and representatives of the relevant support units. This review session is facilitated by the squadron commander, one of the two deputies, or a veteran formation leader.

Formation postflight reviews are conducted in various designated locations in the squadron. These are equipped with VCR and TV screens for reviewing flight films recorded by cockpit-mounted VCRs. Morning briefings and daily squadron postflight reviews are conducted in a central briefing room equipped with maps, VCRs, and overhanging TV screens. Postflight reviews account for 40% to 50% of training and operational time on flying days, a proportion that is reduced in wartime owing to heavier workload and the requirement for longer rest periods. Aircrews spend more time on reviewing their missions than in executing them. This time allocation explains one pilot's assertion that in regard to skill improvement, “flying without reviewing is equivalent to not flying.”

Formation and daily squadron postflight reviews focus on different issues. Formation postflight reviews focus on what happened during the mission and how each pilot flew in combat exercise. The entire group reviews each pilot's video record meticulously. Particular attention is paid to errors, rule infractions, inappropriate actions that resulted in suboptimal outcomes, causes of error, potential remedies, and alternative actions that should have been taken. Daily squadron level post-flight reviews deal more with output: mission accomplishment and the functioning of the formations as units. They focus on errors that are generally relevant due to their pervasiveness, excessive risk, or rule infractions that require disciplinary action. Based on these criteria, pilots select their own film segments for review in the daily postflight reviews. In practice, formation postflight reviews focus on learning, and daily postflight reviews focus on knowledge dissemination and social control functions, as will be elaborated later in this chapter.

The chapter is based on observations of debriefings and on in-depth interviews with 13 pilots and navigators, a representative sample of the aircrews of a squadron of F-16 two-seat combat airplane. All the interviews began with the open-ended question, “How would you describe the postflight reviews to a person who has not seen one?” The answers to this question provided a wealth of information on the nature of the postflight reviews and the functions that they fulfill. Ostensibly, the function of postflight reviews is to improve pilots’ and navigators’ performance by learning from their experience. To our surprise and the surprise of officers who read the final report, the reviews fulfill a variety of additional functions or purposes. These additional functions of the postflight review mean that learning went beyond the detection and correction of error by individual pilots.  Table 8.1  presents verbatim quotes from the interview protocols that illustrate how the functions were expressed by the pilots and navigators.

 LEARNING FUNCTIONS

Postflight reviews fulfill three basic functions: learning functions, social control functions, and psychological functions. Altogether there are seven specific learning functions that we divided into three process and four output functions. The four output functions are improving individual performance, improving formation performance, improving training methods, and developing the doctrine and standard operating procedures of the squadron and of the IDFAF.

The three process functions are the construction of a valid mental model of the pilots’ actions during the mission, learning from others, and learning from failure. We labeled them “process functions” because they facilitate the accomplishment of the output functions. They form the core of the learning process in the postflight review, so understanding how they operate can shed considerable light on how this OLM works.

Table 8.1 Postflight Review Functions

Several researchers (Kim, 1993; Senge, 1990; Wack, 1985) suggest that organizational learning is concerned with changing managers’ shared mental models. Lessons learned based on distorted mental models are not likely to be valid. Owing to the speed with which events take place in air combat, aircrews sometimes form distorted mental models of what happened in the air. The postflight reviews help to improve mental models by three means: the removal of time and other distracting pressures, the VCR records, and the input from other participants, who help to correct misinterpretations of the meaning of the objective events.

Because postflight reviews are carried out in group settings, it is possible to benefit both from the input of informed colleagues, as was noted before, and from reviews of their performance. Some researchers have defined learning in general and organizational learning in particular as the detection and correction of error (Argyris & Schön, 1996). Other researchers dispute this definition as too narrow and suggest that learning from success is as important as learning from failure (Ellis et al., 1999). Echoing the facilitative effect of the costs of error on organizational learning (see  Chapter 5 ), virtually every pilot described the essence of the postflight reviews by a triple mantra-like slogan: “What happened? What went wrong? How can we do better next time?” Thus, although postflight reviews are held after every mission irrespective of its success or failure, the attention of participants is still focused on failure.

 SOCIAL AND CONTROL FUNCTIONS

Like all OLMs, postflight reviews are social activities that take place within formal organizations. Therefore, they fulfill social and control functions that go beyond learning itself. These functions include disciplining and culpability fixing, socialization, monitoring performance, and communicating commander's intent. The daily postflight review offers the squadron's commanders an opportunity to monitor the performance of individual pilots and navigators—including their behavior in the postflight review itself. It enables commanders to note repeated performance problems, breaches of safety regulations, and other impediments to the squadron's functioning.

When pilots break a rule, particularly safety regulations, they are reprimanded, or worse, by the squadron commander in the daily post-flight reviews. Errors of judgment are not punished, but public disclosure of error is difficult for two reasons. On the emotional level, there is loss of face. On the cognitive level, there is the requirement to supply a plausible explanation. Pilots are expected to identify their errors, try to explain them in a reasonable fashion, and suggest alternative courses of action. “Owning up to an error,” said one pilot, “and coming up with a satisfactory explanation for 40 other people is a considerable intellectual effort.”

Disciplining and culpability fixing involve the inherent conflict between punishing subpar performance and tolerating error for the purpose of learning. This function has to be fulfilled with tact: Overdoing the control function can cause irreparable damage to the psychological safety essential to learning. Strict monitoring and holding people accountable may entail a punitive stance that is inconsistent with a nonevaluative and safe atmosphere that promotes learning (Edmondson, 1999; Schein, 1993). The squadron's commander recognized this conflict:

If I charge a fine for every error, people will stop disclosing their errors—it's as simple as that. And if I avoid disciplining altogether, they will get the message that “everything goes.” That's why the postflight review is an intricate business that must be handled with judgment and care.

The commander's dilemma is partly mitigated by the fact that the pilots recognize the legitimacy of disciplinary action. As one pilot said, “Flying is hazardous, and without a disciplining framework, there are bound to be crashes.”

An interesting by-product of the disciplining and culpability-fixing function is that pilots learn to “fly the postflight review.” In other words, they learn to fly in a manner that will pass the scrutiny of others. Another interesting effect is that it raises the vigilance of participants in the formation postflight reviews. No one wants to gloss over bad performance in the supportive surrounding of the formation review, only to be caught in front of the entire squadron in the more formal daily review.

The postflight review is an arena for socializing pilots to the learning norms that contribute to its effectiveness. This process begins in flight school and continues throughout active service until it becomes second nature to the pilots. Interestingly, this intense socialization influences the pilots’ behavior in all spheres of life. For example, one pilot noted that

I, and in my opinion every pilot, learned to debrief everything that I do and goes wrong. If I put the baby to sleep and he keeps crying or if I fall from the surfboard, I automatically ask myself: What happened? What went wrong? How can I do better next time?

We believe that control, disciplining, and culpability fixing can be carried out simultaneously with learning only because the learning norms and the practice of debriefing are so deeply ingrained among the pilots and navigators. We return to this point when we discuss how psychological safety is achieved in the highly critical milieu of the post-flight review.

Daily postflight reviews engage the squadron's command with groups of pilots and navigators, including those who are only part-time in the squadron. This provides the commanders with an opportunity to exercise leadership and to communicate their intents. The postflight reviews provide a forum in which they can explicitly make their agenda known by pronouncing their policies and objectives. It also offers opportunities for making this agenda known implicitly through their behavior and reactions to the information revealed by the VCRs and to the behavior of the other participants during the post-flight reviews.

 PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS

Psychological functions concern the effects on the participants of participating in postflight reviews. They include resilience building, bonding, involving, recognition and reward, and social comparison. Participation in postflight reviews helps build resilience by teaching participants to endure the intense stress experienced when their errors are exposed in public. Participation in the postflight review also strengthens the emotional ties of pilots and navigators to the squadron and to their colleagues. One interviewee referred to them as “the gathering of the tribe around the campfire.” Because of their reputation as a best practice and their importance in the Air Force, postflight reviews have become a kind of bonding ritual. In addition to sharing their errors with each other, participants affirm their membership in an elite group, in an elite unit, and in a unique process at the vanguard of the defense of the State of Israel. The postflight reviews are also a conduit through which participants can be directly involved in changing routines and procedures of the squadron and the Air Force at large.

Postflight reviews involve the two most important activities of the flight squadrons: flying and debriefing. Behavior in the postflight review, not just performance in combat, is a source of social recognition and reward—or the opposite. Pilots and navigators are expected to behave nondefensively and to make apt comments and suggestions. These behaviors influence the position of participants in the formal and informal social order in the squadron. Similar to every group of people who engage in comparable tasks or occupy comparable roles in organizations, participants in postflight reviews compare their performance to those of other participants (Festinger, 1954).

The various functions of the postflight reviews reveal the dynamics of learning in them. Learning is principally driven by the high costs of error: injury, death, or capture. In general, postflight reviews are designed to produce improvements in four areas: personal performance, squadron performance, doctrine, and training methods. To achieve these improvements, participants are concerned with three issues: What happened (the construction of a valid mental model of the mission); what went wrong (the detection of error); and what should be done to prevent or correct the error in the future (drawing of lessons learned).

The VCRs provide objective input for answering the first two questions. Input of fellow navigators and pilots contributes to the validity and utility of the answers to the last two questions. Monitoring and disciplining provide additional motivation for learning. Communicating the commander's intent sets specific goals for learning. Socialization helps to internalize norms of behavior that facilitate learning (see below).

The psychological functions support learning in two ways. Resilience building, as well as recognition and reward, helps participants struggle with the threat and loss of face generated by the public exposure of failure, social comparison, and culpability fixing. Bonding supports socialization and generates organizational commitment and involvement, which motivate pilots to draw lessons regarding doctrine and training methods, and not just in regard to themselves.

 PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AND LEARNING CULTURE IN A HIGH-THREAT ENVIRONMENT

Socialization and bonding point to the cultural aspects of the postflight reviews that, together with the psychological aspects of participation, are key for a full understanding of the dynamics of learning in the review process. In Chapter 4 , we noted that psychological safety is essential for productive learning. The high degree of transparency produced by the VCR records, the rigorous search for errors, and the requirement for accounting for one's own errors in a plausible fashion seemingly create an environment that is highly threatening, particularly in the daily reviews. Indeed, interviewees referred to the difficulty of participating in the postflight review:

Every pilot will tell you that as soon as we make a bad mistake, the humiliation of this being seen by everybody at the daily postflight review jumps right up in front of our eyes.

Occasionally the postflight review simply kills you: “Why did you make this error? Here you were shot down. Here you screwed up the formation. Here you flew below some limit. There you broke some safety rule. Here I was shot down because of you.”

Sometimes nothing goes your way, just as on other occasions everything does go your way. That is why postflight reviews often require you to be strong.

How do pilots and navigators learn productively in the postflight reviews in spite of this difficulty?

The answer lies in three factors: the postflight review culture, the psychological safety that it engenders, and the participants’ long process of socialization into the postflight review culture. Pilots and navigators refer to a unique “debriefing culture” that is essential for rigorous inquiry. Analysis of the interview protocols and observation of formation and daily reviews showed that this culture consists of the five norms specified by the cultural facet of the multi-facet model: inquiry, integrity, issue orientation, transparency, and accountability (see Table 8.2 ).

Ed Schein, who studied organizational cultures (Schein, 1985), suggested that in addition to norms and values, organizational cultures consist of basic assumptions that are taken for granted by the organization members. The postflight reviews are based on a number of such deeply and commonly held assumptions:

· Personal experience, particularly if it is publicly reconstructed, provides an opportunity to learn and improve.

· Errors of judgment, but not rule infractions, are inevitable and represent opportunities for learning.

· Learning from experience is best accomplished by those who have participated in the experience.

· Learning is best done in group settings because individuals can benefit from sharing their knowledge with one another.

· Individual and group learning should be shared by other member units in the organization.

The cultural norm of issue orientation, coupled with a belief that errors are inevitable, reduces the loss of face generated by public exposure of error. All participants in the review make errors, and each one in turn is critiqued and has errors exposed. Furthermore, because the norms of inquiry, integrity, issue orientation, transparency, and accountability are so deeply ingrained, the loss of face generated by breaking them is greater than that which is generated by the public exposure of error. Finally, the VCRs ensure that criticism is based on hard evidence, thereby protecting participants from arbitrary criticism and enabling them to refute unjust criticisms.

Table 8.2 Postflight Review Values

Trust is an important component of psychological safety ( Chapter 4 ). Two types of trust that contribute to psychological safety are present in the postflight reviews. The first is trust in other people. Owing to the norm of issue orientation, participants can trust that the criticism of their colleagues is not motivated by blame seeking or malice. The second is trust in the system. The postflight review process is trustworthy because it is fair (all participants are subjected to the same treatment), issue oriented, and evidence based.

The psychological safety present in the postflight reviews differs from the sense of security engendered by the ability to cover up one's errors and by the presence of colleagues who are willing to collude in this venture. The latter is dysfunctional for learning and likely to produce a lingering apprehension of having to pay for both the original error and the subsequent cover-up.

Pilots and navigators undergo a long process of socialization in which they internalize the assumptions and behavioral norms of the postflight review culture. This process begins right from flight school:

When a cadet begins to tell stories during debriefing, the instructor cuts him short: “Stop the stories and come to the ‘match point.’ Why did you fail?”

This long process of socialization selects out those individuals who cannot withstand the criticism. Those who survive acquire the resilience to withstand failure and to accept criticism in the service of learning.

 WHAT CAN MANAGERS LEARN FROM POSTFLIGHT REVIEWS?

According to conventional wisdom, it is impossible to draw general lessons from unique cases. The uniqueness of the postflight reviews is salient on many dimensions. Looking just at the most prominent ones, the fact that the squadron is an elite military unit sets it apart, not just from non-Israeli military and civilian organizations but from most units in the Israel Defense Force. Pilots and navigators are a highly selective professional population who undergo a long process of deliberate socialization to the postflight review learning culture. The task structure of the squadron is unusually conducive to learning, first because of the feasibility of VCRs to collect high-quality data and second because learning (training and, more generally, preparing for the next operation or war) is a major task of the military. Finally, both cost of error and proximity to the core task of the organization are high.

Nevertheless, the case of the postflight reviews offers some lessons for managers and consultants who wish to improve processes of learning in a certain organization:

1. Similar to all best practice examples, the case sets a standard for high-quality learning. Managers of any system can use these standards to evaluate the frankness of the interchanges among participants and the rigor in which the detection and correction of error is pursued in their own OLMs.

2. It pays to invest in collecting good data for learning through technical means and by instituting the proper culture and policies. The Israeli Air Force places enormous effort and resources in obtaining such data. Culture and psychological safety are all the more important for obtaining good data when technical means such as VCRs are not feasible, as is the case in most situations. Good data can also be collected by instituting policies that require careful documentation and retention of data throughout the duration of projects or in conjunction with task performance.

3. It is important to explicitly set precise performance objectives and clear standards for satisfactory performance. In the post-flight reviews, performance standards are set by the mission's objectives. Thus, pilots said that preflight briefings, in which objectives are stated, are actually part of the postflight debriefing.

4. Learning questions are important. Even with all of the technical tools for creating transparency, learning is stimulated by good thought-provoking questions. In the postflight reviews, there are always four questions. The first three are posed explicitly by participants: What happened? What went wrong? How can we do better next time? The first question leads to a better mental model of the reality. The second question frames the learning. The third question generates “actionable” knowledge to be put into practice. The fourth question is, why did the situation go wrong? This question leads to a satisfactory explanation, or theory, that constitutes new knowledge.

5. After-action reviews provide an opportunity to exercise leadership, announce objectives, and bolster policies that are designed to achieve them.

6. The psychological safety necessary for productive learning can be fostered, even in a highly exposed and threatening environment. This kind of safety is not based on mutual protection from criticism but rather on fairness, trust in the system, and trust in others.

Finally, the most important lesson is that introducing or improving learning processes is challenging—but doable. On one hand, it requires much more than developing a vision or pronouncing a mission that includes organizational learning. On the other hand, it does not require the transformation of the organization to a “learning organization.” The postflight reviews are cultural islands in which pilots and navigators work on improving the core task of their organization. The Air Force has tried but never succeeded in disseminating this process to support units and noncombat flight squadrons. However, the Air Force never puts resources into these dissemination efforts that are comparable to those invested in postflight reviews in the combat squadrons.

Everyone with whom we spoke—pilots, navigators, and high-ranking commanders—all agreed that the Air Force reaps great benefit from the postflight reviews. It continually generates and applies cutting-edge knowledge and skill that make the Israel Air Force a top performer in its field. It has done this by sharply focusing efforts on developing an appropriate OLM and a learning culture in the area that is most important to the organization's success. This is a lesson that is certainly applicable to any organization.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This chapter is based on Ron, Lipshitz, and Popper (in press).