Develop a Constant Learning Capacity by Nido Qubein
An anonymous sage once ventured, “Education is what you have left over after you have forgotten everything you’ve learned.”
In a sense, today’s corporate people are constantly having to forget everything they know.
Think about it. In the office-equipment business, workers had to forget everything they knew about putting together manual typewriters. In the automotive business, suppliers had to forget everything they knew about assembling carburetors.
In the computer industry, according to The Wall Street Journal, product generations often last less than a year and a half. Some entire product lines turn over every year, some in just six months.
So the successful company is not the one that learns a tried-and-true method and sticks with it. It’s the one that develops a constant learning capacity and exploits it.
In an educated organization, learning becomes a renewable resource. An educated individual is like a spring, with its internal sources of water. As a spring replenishes itself when water is withdrawn, so educated individuals replenish their learning when existing knowledge has served its purpose.
An individual who has been trained but not educated is like a dipper. A dipper gets its water from an external source, and when the water’s gone it can’t refill itself. A trained individual acquires skills from an outside source and, when the skills are outdated, can’t replace them without outside help.
Educated people know how to learn.
At the height of the industrial age, this ability was not considered essential. The tasks in the industrial process were broken into smaller subtasks, which individuals were to perform repetitively. Once the worker had learned that mechanical procedure, further learning was considered unnecessary.
The corporation itself was regarded as a machine that ran according to mechanical principles. There was no need to develop new procedures and new methods. These would only throw the machine out of balance.
Today’s business organization is different because:
(1) The marketplace is constantly forcing corporations to change the way they do business.
Matthew Juechter, as chair of the Council of Governors, American Society for Training and Development, put it this way:
We live in an era whose hallmark is change. Particularly in our organizations, change has pushed us to the edges of what we already know. We have discovered that knowledge is a precious resource, but that unless it is developed, it quickly becomes useless. The ability to learn purposefully from our work and the ability to foster others’ learning have become critical new business skills.
(2) The new marketplace demands that businesses be customer-oriented, not product-oriented.
This means that everyone involved in the design, production, sale and delivery of a product or service must have the customer in mind. This requires human-relations skills, not just mechanical skills.
Participative management has replaced the old hierarchical command-and-control system.
Participative management requires a new breed of employee and supervisor. Herbert Hoover once said, “Wisdom ofttimes consists of knowing what to do next.” Under the command-and-control system, the worker looked to the supervisor for explicit instructions on what to do next. In today’s democratic workplace, the workers themselves are expected to plan and execute the next step.
The new learning requirements of our era force us to take new approaches to employee development. We have learned, for instance, that for most people, information is not stored long-term in isolated chunks that can be totally recalled at will. Instead, people remember how bits of information connect with other information they have.
This ability to process new information is the essence of education. Knowledge is like messages passing through the telephone system’s intricate network. Education is the network itself.
Inability to process new information and ideas was not a serious problem so long as learning consisted of mastering mechanical skills that were performed day after day, year after year, without change. If there was no new information, there was no need for connections between new and old information.
But in the modern workplace, the knowledge taken in must be used to generate more knowledge. The connections become vitally important. They allow workers to bridge between what they already know and what they need to know to achieve continuous improvement.
This means that businesses can’t teach workers clear-cut rules for every task and expect them to go on following these rules year after year. Workers need to recognize patterns, fit new information into these patterns, and exercise judgment.
The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) at Palo Alto, California, divides workplace knowledge into two categories: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.
Such things as job skills; design rules, procedures and rules of thumb fall under the category of explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge includes such attributes as intuition, expertise, common sense, and good judgment.
IRL researchers found that conventional training did little to equip people to use their tacit knowledge. They studied people in actual work settings—on shop floors, in business offices, and in classrooms. They discovered that when people encountered barriers—whether physical or social—they formed spontaneous, informal groups that shared knowledge, expertise and methods to overcome the barriers.
The workers, in short, were using their interactive skills to increase their knowledge and develop solutions to problems.
A good corporate educational system will help people develop these interactive skills as well as skills in problem-solving and creative thinking. It will help corporate leadership establish an atmosphere that encourages innovative risk-taking—the kind of atmosphere that characterizes the most successful corporations today.
Your employees should be educated to be many-sided individuals, able to contribute to your profitability in a variety of ways.
The Daichi electronics store in Tokyo provides an example. Just before the warranty expires on a product it sells, the store calls the customer and offers to send a technician to examine the item and make any needed repair under warranty.
While still in the home, the technician offers to inspect any other appliances, regardless of whether they were purchased from Daichi.
The technician returns to the store and reports on the age and condition of every appliance in the house. At the appropriate time, the owners of aging refrigerators or VCRs will receive calls inviting them to visit the Daichi store and inspect the latest models.
Daichi technicians are much more than repair persons. They are well-rounded, educated representatives of the store, with skills in sales, customer service, public relations and many other areas that promote profitability in their business.
That’s the kind of well-rounded workforce you need to prosper in today’s fast-paced environment.
That’s the kind of innovative thinking your company needs if it wants to stay ahead.
That’s the kind of challenge a good corporate education system can meet for you.
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