It is comparatively easy to help organisations to learn when they are facing a crisis. What is less easy is to enable them to learn continually. This requires moving learning from being perceived as a mandatory requirement to being embraced as a requirement for individual and collective growth, a requirement for life.
We tend to think of organisations as being more like machines than living systems. We speak of “running the organisation”, “owners of the business” and leaders who “drive change”. The language is appropriate for a car.
Leaders who feel they must come up with the perfect plan endure huge pressure. In playing the role of the heroic leader they become the organisational bottle neck. In telling everyone that they know the way forward; they disempower everyone around them. This mind set is the main obstacle to agility.
As Jim Collins discovered in his research for the book Good to Great, “Productive change begins when you confront the brutal facts.