No time to learn ?

I often hear that managers (at any level) are so busy they have no time for organizational learning or learning in general. They are loaded with back-to-back meetings. Or visitors they have to take care of. Urgent events keep them busy. And of course emails, and reports, and more emails. When you talk about learning, they refer to the training program  that was fixed during last year's budget period and which is probably very similar to the one the year before. There really is no time left, not at the end of the day, nor the end of the month. There is simply no time. Someone told me recently that it seemed there were fewer and fewer hours in a day (I checked, there aren't).




Reg Revans curve on learning vs change

Learning does not mean studying or going to a training course in a hotel room. Training is about discovering the solutions or best practices for yesterday's problems. Learning is about using the experience that exists in a team, asking questions about the situation and reflecting on how actions should be taken in the new and changed environment. Learning allows your team to develop solutions for tomorrow's problems. Reg Revans said that if an organization can learn faster than the rate of change in its environment, it will prosper. If the organization learns slower than the rate of change, the organization will eventually collapse.

Everybody is aware that changes are happening faster and more intense than ever. Technology, social media or supply chain models change faster than in the past. In the past, when changes happened more slowly, the way teams learned allowed the organization to stay ahead and develop new business opportunities. When changes accelerate exponentially, these ways of learning no longer work.

The way a team learned in the past, can no longer sustain the organization. If we cannot learn faster and therefore grow with these changes, failure is ahead.

If you don't manage to learn, as an individual, or a team, or an organization, it's only a matter of time until you are overtaken by the changes around you. Maybe it is urgent to think about when you will make time to learn.