The torrential flow of learning is disorientating, confusing and renders us less capable of informed action. An effective learning infrastructure enables organisations to balance learning flows with a stock of learning. All flow and no stock makes organisations stupid!
Organisations and teams are similar. Being able to stop is essential for moving ahead. Stopping enables learning. Lots of busy action is not the same as movement. Movement only starts from stillness.
The primary reason for our repressive attitude towards emotions in organisations is a pervasive lack of skill in handling intense emotional communications. Daniel Goleman called the ability to recognise, manage and learn from feelings as “emotional intelligence”.
Or perhaps you may fear that by going deeper everything could change including how you define yourself, your opponent, and the issues. It is dangerous to be honest because that gives the other person the right to be equally honest with you.
Right now, the capacity to pay attention, make sense, act and change ahead of the curve is the holy grail of most organisations and if it is not, it should be.
In addition to our ability to analyse and predict we need to learn to engage directly with what is happening now so that we can learn faster from what just happened. Organisational strategy becomes “just-in-time” and “just-in-case” supported by more investment in general knowledge, diversity, the ability to do a quick study and the capacity to respond to intuition.