Learning Organizations Webinar

I just listened to my first webinar, presented by Paul Levy, the former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  Paul turned around a failing institution, obviously he is a strong leader and probably knows a little bit of what he's talking about. 

The webinar was about creating a Learning Organization and he presented it weaving his experiences as a girls soccer coach and how those same principles apply to any organization. It was very motivating and fascinating talk…and of course is the subject this, of my first blog post.

A learning organization is one that has the capacity to learn as time goes by…fairly straight forward, no "aha" moments about that.  

He presented several principles to create a learning organization:

·      Think of how you will handing something before it gets to you.

·      Benchmark performances against you own performance (not against industry standards or other companies).

·      Empathy (this we have learned a lot about in class).  Be sufficiently empathetic  to the learner and where they are at in their learning cycle.  Empathy is the most important aspect of a leader.

·      You never know when a kind word will have a huge impact.

·      Learning from your mistakes.

·      Leadership takes ownership of errors.  When something is defined as saying “it could have happened to anyone”, this indicates a system error.  

·      Let the stars shine and excel.  You must work as a team and have a team approach, but know when to let the bright excel.

·      Allow for problems to be called out on the front lines (must empower employees to do this without repercussions.

·      Thus, leaders must serve those people and help fix the problems and find process improvements.

·      Admit your own mistakes.

And finally

·      Learning something means you need to change the context of your present mindset.  This causes distress, but distress is needed for learning. 

Another concept he mentioned was the “normalization of deviants”, where errors and mistakes become the norm, thus they are not fixed until they become a big problem.  Paul gave the example of the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion.  The breaking off of heat tiles was observed well before the accident, but nothing had resulted from it. It became the norm and then tragedy struck.

I think about this lecture and my own experiences.  We see this at work everyday when our medications have not been removed from the medical record.  It has become the norm, nothing has happened and we hear nothing of it.  Finally we get word that a doctor has complained that one (or two) of her patients had no treatments given to them over the night shift.  This normalization of deviants, which has resulted in no issues, has finally become an problem.  The question I have is, what are we doing about it and has our leadership assumed the responsibility and taken ownership of it?  Additionally, where is the accountability?  Who should assume it?  

I’m not about to criticize my managers, but I think this opens up a learning opportunity. Additionally, what from this will I take forward into my career?  What I take from this is that you can apply the learning organization concepts to more than just the greater organization.  It can be applied to your individual departments, to your family to ourselves. 

I find it fascinating that these concepts, which worked so well while coaching a recreational soccer team can be applied to an organization making up thousands of individuals.  This to me, is where leadership is so powerful, defining basic concepts (which I have a terrible time doing) and knowing how and where to apply them. 

What I have found in my own limited leadership experiences is that you don’t always know how to apply these concepts, but you attempt to put them in effect to the best of your ability.  I’m starting early in my career, when there is little risk for trying and making mistakes.  Hopefully this "training" will pay off when the accountability is high, the stakes are higher and there is more on the line then figuring out where to store intubation boxes.