On Organizational Learning for YCN

Last year while in London helping Joe set up August's London office – and to help celebrate Joe's wedding, hence the gravelly tone and greasy appearance – I stopped by YCN to do a quick interview about how we help organizations learn.

Transcript

August is a consultancy focusing on helping large established organizations become open learning networks, and we try to build movements within organizations toward these new ways of working. The average size of the largest organizations in the world is going up. The pace of those organizations is going down.

That seems bad, of course, but it has this happy side effect of having hundreds of thousands of people that you can learn from. The problem is we don't have effective methods, simple methods for learning from everybody's insights, their knowledge, what they're seeing out there in the world. Mostly because our systems are broken.

We just need to make our work searchable and lean into platforms that encourage people to work in public. Things like Slack, things like Google Drive. These are things that enterprises are practicing; we see it with our own eyes. IT departments in the largest organizations in the world are leaning into this.

It is safe to try. We are obsessed with these new ways of working at August. So we've collected hundreds of practices that organizations can pick up. Not a big system where you must do all of these things in a perfect order in order to become the future of work. This is way too hard. Instead, what we do is we break these practices down, these big systems down like Agile or Lean or Holacracy or any of these fashionable methodologies.

We break them down into bite-sized chunks and we work to identify the practices that are gonna be most effective for these organizations to adopt. One of the ones that comes up very frequently is rounds. So rounds is a practice of running discussions in a new way. It's an upgrade, a network upgrade, let's say, on traditional ways of talking in a meeting.

Usually in a meeting it's haphazard; we build upon each other. You say something in one way, I say it a little bit differently. And we go on from there, and we never really get to a decision. Instead, what we should do is proceed in order in the room, and get perspectives from each person on a given prompt in a round.

Very straightforward, very simple, easy for everyone to adopt and changes the way that we get information into the meeting room. Just proceeding in order and giving everyone space. Letting everyone react to a common prompt brings all these amazing new perspectives into the team and allows us to make better decisions.

Another practice might be a team retrospective. So most teams, most people, most organizations, they focus on individual improvement. No one ever really thinks about helping the team learn from what they've been doing. And what we do in, in the team retrospective practice is we ask teams to stop once every two weeks, once every four weeks, and ask themselves three questions.

What's working? Where are you getting stuck? And what might we do differently next time? Asking those questions in that order, we found helps teams create sticky change within that team.