Speed of learning limits speed of change!

290 Words | ~1.5min read

The Challenge:
Feedback is critical to learning at all levels. The longer between action and feedback, the harder it is to learn! This is why it feels like organizations and their leaders learn slowly.

Organization need their leaders to learn. The leaders themselves must learn the new work systems and patterns of interaction! For example, if you make a change to one of the team’s monthly processes. It will take at least a month before the first impact of the change can even appears. It’ll be 2-3 months before you know that result is a pattern rather than a growing-pain. Which means you only get 4 full iterations per year on that process. Four attempts to tinker with and learn how that monthly process behaves! That doesn’t even account for the systemic interactions yet!

How to Proceed:
So what’s a leader to do? Freeze in place?! Certainly not! The only way forward is incremental change. But we must do this with the sure knowledge that for each repetition of some action, all things are not equal. We must work to characterize our work-systems, knowing we won’t get it perfectly right. We don’t have the clarity of feedback cycles to get it perfect! Instead of all-at-once transformation, we should work backwards from a perfect state. We need to make the changes fewer, and smaller at each step!

Work backwards to what 1-step-better from today might look like.
Implement that step.
Monitor it.
Inspect the results.
Inspect the new system.
Adapt a new 1-step-better .
Build it from your new experience and your current goal.

The best way to change fast, is to change slow.
Work on improving your feedback clarity, and frequency. Good Clarity, and greater frequency will enable more rapid learning and development.

Dive Deeper:
On Learning and Feedback: Make It Stick
On Designing Work Systems: Wiring the Winning Organization
On Descaling work: Sooner Safer Happier