This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe & Mail. Today I am delighted to speak to Michele Rigolizzo from the Harvard Business School.
Michele you have been looking at how organizational learning has changed over the last five to 10 years. What is your key finding at this point?
MICHELE RIGOLIZZO - So at this point what we are really looking at is the individual within the organization and the individual learning process, and the key finding is probably two-fold. One is that expertise development is now a continual process. It no longer happens once and then you rely on that for the rest of your career.
The other is if you are thinking about individual learning within organizations, it's really not one thing, but it's a series of distinct behaviours. So if you want to motivate learning, you don't really ask 'How do I motivate learning?' you ask 'How do I motivate a given behaviour and when is that most important?'
MOORE – What are some of the kinds of different learning that you mention?
RIGOLIZZO - Yes the different types of learning behaviours. So, I will take a step back and say what we are really doing is defining learning and differentiating it from short-term performance, and that is a really key piece because it is very hard to differentiate learning from short-term performance. So I learn something today, I can do it tonight, but if you ask me in a week I have no idea. So really learning is the ability to do something on demand and continually do it well. So what we are looking at is what are the behaviours that make that more likely. Some of these learning behaviours are things like taking on a challenge, or pushing yourself beyond your current capacity.
Another one is to build knowledge; to go find out what is already known about this but go beyond that and say what else in the world relates to this. The idea is that the more you build context about it, the more you are likely to remember it over time. Another one would be persisting after failure. Learning is very much a trial and error process and so the idea is not that you just try and you fail, but that you try again after that and you keep trying until you succeed. The final one would be that, after the short trial and error process, you failed, you failed, you failed, you succeeded, is to really reflect back on why did I fail and why did I succeed. Once you are really able to answer that question, and the underlying principles, then you develop expertise in that area.