For use: Sunday, July 11, 2000 and thereafter

 
"Business Bestiary: Learning from the Woolly Mammoth"

by Michael Finley
Copyright © 2000 by Michael Finley

Are you a fan of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons? Then you'll remember this one. A group of cavemen stand around a woolly mammoth they have just killed. The creature is staggeringly bigger and more powerful than their little band armed with sticks and stones. But a single wound from a single stick felled the monster. One of the cavemen points to the wound and says to the others, "Let's remember that spot."

You sense the dawning of a new age -- of institutional learning. No longer would it be sufficient to stab at random, hoping to keep re-finding the mammoth's vulnerability. To save time, and minimize the danger of  getting trampled, knowledge now had to be written down and passed around.

Learning from your successes means learning from your mistakes. But most organizations are still locked n Neanderthal mode -- squelching bad news, denying error, engaging in "CYA" ("Cover Your Anterior") behavior that has stood the test of time, all the way back to the Stone Age. We never remember the spot because we aren’t encouraged to learn anything. Learning isn’t our job -- doing our job is our job.

Three breakthrough thinkers helped us permanently locate the mammoth's point of vulnerability:

• Peter Drucker was the first to identify learning as a business function, coining the phrase "knowledge worker" in the 1960s. The phrase meant much more than just having knowledge or a degree -- it meant being able and disposed to create knowledge. Drucker's insights about knowledge led to today's concept of "intellectual capital," on which human brainpower is considered a more valuable asset than access to money.

• Quality patriarch Joseph Juran sounded a new note in the 1970s when he proclaimed that failures of execution were "gold in the mine" provided that you learn from them, and not sweep them under the carpet, in time-honored CYA ("Cover Your Anterior") fashion. His method for writing down the mammoth's spot was a process he called "lessons learned" -- a formal review following every project to determine what new information was uncovered in the process that a business or team would have to be stupid to forget.

• Ten years ago, Peter Senge blew the lid off the Neanderthal mindset with perhaps the most influential business book ever, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Senge combined "systems thinking" (seeing every business event in the largest possible context) with "mental models" (the paradigms or unconscious attitudes that frame and limit our ability to think freshly). Fifth Discipline transformed the idea of quality from a product-and-process concept to an intellectual virtue.

It sounds so simple -- learn from your successes and mistakes. But it represents an evolutionary change for most businesses. It requires that learning, not chain of command ("Don’t think, obey!") become the primary value in your operations.

The attractive notion is that the days of the knuckle-dragging businesses are frozen in ancient ice and gone forever. But you only have to look around -- perhaps not very far around -- to see that the old ways of stab and thrust still dominate.

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