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Capture the Learning from Your Company's Experience(This article appeared in Harvard Business Review, September - October Edition, 1997.)Authors: Art Kleiner and George Roth. Experience is the best teacher - or so the saying goes. That is certainly true in our personal life. Why not, then, in corporate life? After a major event - a product failure, a wild business breakthrough, a downsizing crisis or merger - many companies seem to stumble along, oblivious to the lessons which should have been learned. Mistakes get repeated, but smart decisions often do not. Most important, the old ways of thinking that led to the mistakes are never discussed, which often means that they area still in place to spawn new mishaps again and again. Ask individuals about those major events, however, and they will tell you that they know exactly what went wrong (or right). You might hear that the new product fizzled because no one in marketing listened to anyone in manufacturing - or vice versa. Or that the new product soared because the people in R&D or distribution "finally got their act together". Each point of view represents a valid, but limited, piece of the solution to the puzzle. If all these perspectives could be integrated coherently, the organization as a whole might learn what happened, why it happened, and what to do next. Yet those insights are rarely shared openly. And they are analyzed, debated and ultimately internalized by the whole organization even less frequently. In other words, in corporate life, even when experience is a good teacher, it's still only a private tutor. People in organizations act collectively, but they learn individually. The frustration of organizational learning today exists because managers have few tools with which to capture institutional experience and disseminate its lessons. Employee surveys are used to gather information and opinions about major events that have shaken up a business, but the assembled data rarely make it back to the employees in a form they can use meaningfully. "Best-practice" write-ups leave out mistakes that people might learn from, as well as the hidden logic and struggles that have made breakthroughs possible. Sometimes consultants are called in to make sense of the "big something" that has happened, but their reports are rarely endorsed by those who experienced the event firsthand. The reports, after all are aimed at the senior managers who hired the consultants. Once the consultants leave, the lessons of the past slip away with them. How then can organizations reflect collectively on past experience - and do so in a way that people's thoughts and actions become more focused and energized? How can the lessons of the past be "processed" by an organization so that they can be translated into more effective action? In answer to this question, a group of business managers, social scientists and journalists at MIT's Center for Organizational Learning have spent the past four years developing and testing a tool to solve the problem of collective organizational learning. What they came up with is termed a "learning history". In its most basic terms, a learning history is a written narrative of a company's recent set of critical episodes: a corporate change event, a new initiative, a widespread innovation, a successful project launch or even a traumatic event such as a major reduction in the workforce. The document rages in length from 20 to 100 pages. On these pages is included a narrative prologue which sets the stage for the episode that follows, brief transition paragraphs which track the episode from beginning, through major turning points, and finally to the implications of the episode and the resultant learnings for the organization. But the full impact of the document is delivered in the two columns which flank the narrative. In the right-hand column, relevant events are described by the people who took part in them, were affected by them, or observed them close-up. Managers, factory line workers, secretaries and outsiders (such as customers, advertising copywriters or suppliers) tell their part of the story. Each person is quoted directly and identified only by title. The quotes are woven into an emotionally rich, powerful "jointly-told tale", reminiscent of ancient community story-telling which has served for centuries to transmit important information from generation to generation. The left-hand column is a different matter. It contains analysis and commentary by the learning historians. This small team is composed of trained outsiders, who specialize in organizational learning, as well as concerned and knowledgeable insiders, usually drawn from the organization's organizational effectiveness staff. The team sorts through hundreds of hours of interviews to distill the story in the right-hand column. In the process it has come up with the text for the left-hand column, which identifies recurrent themes, poses questions about assumptions and implications and raises "undiscussable" issues that hover just below the surface of the quotes at the right. Once the learning history is complete, it is used as the basis for group discussions - for those involved in the event as well as those who might learn from it. For instance, a learning history about one division's successful rollout may be used to spark conversations in another division that is about to launch its own new product. The members of the second division are asked to read the learning history, meet in small groups holding in-depth conversations about the thought processes that led to the first group's success. The goal of the meetings is to gain a better understanding of the critical choices that the second group faces in planning new actions. Why do learning histories work? First and perhaps most important, they build trust. People who believe their opinions were ignored in the past come to feel that those opinions have been validated when they see them in the document (no matter who expressed them). People who have felt isolated come to believe that they are not alone in their efforts to carve out a better future for themselves and the company. The group discussions that accompany the learning history provide new opportunities for collective reflection. They help people clear the air about their own concerns, fears, and assumptions allowing them to develop a higher level of confidence in one another. As trust grows it creates an environment more conducive to learning - because such learning depends on the candid sharing of ideas. Second, learning histories seem particularly effective at raising issues that people would like to talk about but have not had the courage to discuss openly. The document with its anonymous commentary from participants in the right-hand column and its pointed prompting in the left-hand column, provides the basis for more open conversations about difficult issues. Third, learning histories have proved successful at transferring knowledge from one part of a company to another. Readers of learning histories can discover the reasoning and impulses that led to both mistakes and successes and apply these insights to the way they implement their own initiatives. Finally, learning histories build a body of generalizable knowledge about management - about what works and what doesn't. Learning histories are commissioned to analyze one event, but their lessons transcend it. Learning histories often contain such recurring themes, across companies and across industries, that these documents may someday be included among the textbooks and materials in business schools and libraries, to be used as a source of insight for those engaged in developing the science of management. An age-old tradition, applied to today's business dilemmas can capture and transmit the learning that will move organizational culture forward into the 21st century.
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