Learning more than what is taught

Our readers will remember my blog entry from March 2024 (“Expertise: by Luck or on Purpose”). There are different forms of learnings or better said, what the learner sees and grasps. Now there are some naturally talented people who always take more than they are taught, but this is the minority. It is understandable that there are also people who most probably are not performing their dream job, but just working to make a living, for whom this active learning may not be relevant. From an organization point of view this is one of the challenges, as they might not be the most motivated people in terms of CI. Taichi Ohno said, that their people come to work to think and not to work. The challenge lies in how to activate them to learn more than they experience or being taught as this particularly makes the difference.

Learning is not just what we are taught but moreover it is what every individual takes out of the lesson for him/herself.

We admire people who are with our companies since 20 or 30 years. “They know everything” – well, I would frankly disagree with that. According to this logic, an amateur soccer player who played for 30 years must be much better than a professional player who just played 15 years in his life.

First of all “everything” else changes in that time dramatically, secondly they just know what they have been exposed to. In addition, we consistently and permanently see that those are the first people who resist change and new developments, if they are not naturally open and brave to change. Why is there so much scientific research and knowledge about change management? Because it matters and the vast majority of the people are not open for change. In organizational context, relevant for especially nowadays, they lack of adaptiveness and I don’t have to explain to any business person what this means. Maybe this is even culturally and geographically influenced. In stable European environment with high degree of social security, we are literally taught to stay stable, and somewhere this is understandable. In the Middle East, where I led many projects, the people sometimes even forgot to be surprised by changes, they even don’t wonder anymore if the inflation is double or triple digit, the interest rate skyrockets or the devaluation of their money breaks one record after the other every day. Not to talk about other daily risks and developments there.

I do not agree with the fact that the employees who work the longest have the most knowledge, yes by natural reasons they know a lot about what was in their very specific environment, but they just know what they know given the circumstances. They know what they have deliberately been taught or what they have encountered by coincidence as it may have been disturbing their very comfort zone, so they were forced to find a solution for it. People who like to be in the shopfloor know exactly what those solutions look like, there are microcultures at each line about how to deal with issues and most of the time management doesn’t even know.  And of course they don’t, as long as the process outcome is ok, but at what cost?

With our CI implementation we never promised to our top managers that we will be changing the world for them, in contrary, it’s the seemingly small negligible everyday changes which make the difference. They don’t see yet any bottom line results out of it of course, but after 3 years of our lean implementation, I can already see the effect of the journey when our people share their significant achievements and records which they have achieved out of process improvements and not out of pressure. And of course this needed time. On the other hand we always communicated that we do not prefer “projects” because those jumps can bring something but the mental cost being always on project mode gets significantly higher with the time. Humans are no sprinters; they are marathon runners. They need to be, as the target of a commercial company is “making money now and in the future”. We all know the amount of abrasion when you have peaks of performance all the time, “variation is the enemy” as in average everything might be fine which makes us blind for the truth.

Now what’s the conclusion of everything stated above?

The organization can make a difference in competition only when we learn more than we are taught. For the majority of people who do not have this talent naturally, this is possible with Toyota Kata and the right environment (CI culture). There is no possibility to hire the perfect team – organizational success goes over your ability in developing people which you already employ. Especially now with the changes in the generations, shifting expectations and need for alternative work models, an approach of coaching and a clear culture of organizational learning will deliver the competitive difference. We do not promise changing the world, we do promise a mechanism of changing ourselves in order to improve the last percentages of sustainable efficiency which is ensuring competitiveness.