Streamline Training & Documentation: The Cultural Dimension of Organizational Learning

Thursday, July 13, 2006

The Cultural Dimension of Organizational Learning

When an organization has trouble taking lessons learned and incorporating them into its strategies, processes, and practices, it may be that cultural barriers are to blame.¹

In an important 1996 article in the Sloan Management Review, Edgar H. Schein, an emeritus professor at the Sloan School, argues that operators, engineers, and executives have divergent assumptions concerning the job of learning, with the result that

... when oreganizations attempt to learn in a generative way, when they attempt to reinvent themselves because the technologies and environmental conditions have changed drastically, these three cultures collide, and we see frustration, low productivity, and the failure of innovations to survive and diffuse.

Schein summarizes the guiding assumptions and considerations each of the three groups bring to their view of how the organization functions. For operators, Schein identifies four items:

Because the action of any organization is ultimately the action of people, the success of the enterprise depends on people's knowledge, skill, learning ability, and commitment.

The required knowledge and skill are "local" and based on the organization's core technology.

No matter how carefully engineered the production process is, or how carefully rules and routines are specified, operators must have the capacity to learn and to deal with surprises.

Most operations involve interdependencies between separate elements of the process; hence, operators must be able to work as a collaborative team in which communication, openness, mutual trust, and commitment are highly valued.

For engineers, Schein enumerates five considerations underlying how they approach their work:

Engineers are proactively optimistic that they can and should master nature.

Engineers are stimulated by puzzles and problems and are pragmatic perfectionists who prefer "people-free" solutions.

The ideal world is one of elegant machines and processes working in perfect precision and harmony without human intervention.

Engineers are safety-oriented and overdesign for safety.

Engineers prefer linear, simple cause-and-effect, quantitative thinking.

Finally, Schein lays out an extended list of factors that executives tend to base their thinking and decisions on:

Financial focus

Executives focus on financial survival and growth to ensure returns to shareholders and to society.

Financial survival is equivalent to perpetual war with one's competitors.

Self-image: The embattled lone hero

The economic environment is perpetually competitive and potentially hostile, so the CEO is isolated and alone, yet appears omniscient, in total control, and feels indispensable.

Executives cannot get reliable data from subordinates so they must trust their own judgment.

Hierarchical and individual focus

Organization and management are intrinsically hierarchical; the hierarchy is the measure of status and success and the primary means of maintaining control.

The organization must be a team, but accountability has to be individual.

The willingness to experiment and take risks extends only to those things that permit the executive to stay in control.

Task and control focus

Because the organization is very large, it becomes depersonalized and abstract and, therefore, has to be run by rules, routines (systems), and rituals.

The inherent value of relationships and community is lost as an executive rises in the hierarchy.

The attraction of the job is the challenge, the high level of responsibility, and the sense of accomplishment (not the relationships).

The ideal world is one in which the organization performs like a well-oiled machine, needing only occasional maintenance and repair.

People are a necessary evil, not an intrinsic value.

The well-oiled organization does not need people, only activities that are contracted for.

To overcome the brake on learning — and the resulting below-potential efficiency and effectiveness — these cultural mismatches cause, Schein prescribes three steps:

Recognize the concept of culture. Each culture needs to learn how to learn, how to analyze its own culture, and how to evolve its culture around its strengths.

Acknowledge that engineers or executives alone cannot solve problems, but must work together. "Until executives, engineers, and operators discover that they use different languages and make different assumptions about what is important, and until they learn to treat the other cultures as valid and normal, organizational learning efforts will continue to fail."

Conduct cross-cultural dialogues. The purpose of these dialogues is to achieve alignment among the three cultures by "creating enough mutual understanding among them to evolve solutions that will be understood and implemented."

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¹ Schein defines culture as "a set of basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and ought to be that a group of people share and that determines their perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and, to some degree, their overt behavior." The assumptions underlying a culture arise out of shared experiences of success.

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Labels: Learning organization, Organizational culture

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