So, one of the questions I ask of the week was how do organizations remember what works, what are some concrete means you can help an organization remember and access this knowledge on core practices? And a lot of you kind of responded to this and had a lot of great concrete suggestions. That was the idea behind it, it's often hard to think of the variety of possible strategies of applying or garnering organizational memory in a lot of institutions and your responses were wonderful in that regard that I could compile them and I'm going to relate them. I think it was similar to Tammy Quinn Had a question, which was what organization structures promote organization [INAUDIBLE] I think the responses on that thread were quite similar. So I'm just going to talk through some of things people said, and my sense of what struck me as most relevant to answering that question. And it was clear that, we had a series of things that would fit. And a lot of you contributed to this, so I'm not going to be able to rattle off every person's name. But I mean, obviously the first thing is, you want to codify, practice, and denote what works and what fails. To write it down. You want to collect feedback. Here you have 360 reviews is something that a lot of firms do these days. As well as maybe, if people are worried about affording feedback to give them anonymous means of doing that, to encourage it, you would like to keep all that feedback and information in a shared area, where everybody can kind of access it clearly. And you'd like to have summary guidelines or documents in terms of the repetitive tasks that a firm has, and you want to update those. So you've codified in particular the typical kinds of procedures and to continually update those. Another thing that would be useful is to continually analyze yourself to measure and track what works and does not work so you have some kind of record, an assessment going on. Another thing that people talked about was training. Training people and it's preferable to train an entire group as opposed to only part of it and moreover, it's preferable that that training not be didactic. And a lot of you expressed how a lot of training sessions were quite painful. And I think that's mostly because of the kind of way in which people experience it, so for example here we take sexual harassment training and initially when we took those years back, it was quite didactic, you don't have to go through these painful meetings where you have to take exams and what have you. But now, over time they have integrated more of a discussion, more of a, kind of a dialogue where people come to understand different viewpoints and come into an understanding of why those kind of behaviors can be problematic in a firm and what situations would mean. So they even have role play, and kinds of simulations, and enactments where actors play out parts for the harassment scenarios and where the faculty can kind of discuss them in safe environments. So even that has changed in terms of training sessions that were initially painful now of becoming kind of a dialogue and something where people come to understand them. Another thing that you could do to keep memory going is to retain your experts. At least the experts that you find most valuable, really invest in them. Other things you could institute mentoring and shadowing kinds of experiences for the members of your firm. You could also perform simulations and role play, and I just spoke of that with regard to the sexual harassment training but the reason role play and simulation are useful because it's not a learning about, it's learning by doing or at least closer to learning by doing the kind of practice, the knowledge that Brown and talk about. So those kind of efforts are helpful. And I use those in my class with students here in person. A lot of the activities we use are ones where they simulate, or engage in kind of roleplay. Or take on the identity of certain actors, and do certain collaborative tasks. Other things you can do is have mini-meetings. [LAUGH] You guys obviously read that a big part of organizational learning is to have incessant meetings perhaps, where you review performance, the lessons learned model where people talk about not only within their teams, what worked and didn't work and record them, but also at each phase of a project. As well as across teams where lead managers that span or consultants that span projects get together and talk about what they have learned across them. So it is kind of a combination of reporting out and reporting back in and a variety of these kinds of experiences or choice arenas were people can actually discuss. Notice it's kind of a reference to garbage can, you're going to have to experience quite a few garbage can scenarios where people make sense of their experiences as part of kind of an organizational learning model. The other thing is that a key part is that you don't want to just have a community of practice or a network of practice. You really need to integrate the two because they're suboptimal without both. That you won't, you'll reach a local optima and the things you remember locally won't necessarily be at the local lot. Or you can transfer if you have this wonderful idea, it doesn't go to other individuals in the firm or outside your community. So another thing to also develop that would facilitate remembering is culture. Evaluation of improvisation. A culture where reflection and remembering is important. Where continual improvement and discussion of it and the willingness to expose your mistakes to your colleagues like Yvonne said that's kind of key. That's kind of an important feature. It's a little harder to understand how to instill that kind of culture and it's something we'll talk about more next week. Jessica Agouti said one of the things that's really interesting about organizational learning that I do want to highlight is the conversation about, you've compiled all of this information, all of these kinds of best practices, and failures, and reflections on it. And the hardest thing about it is not only how to access that information well, but reminders in place on where that information is and the means by which you access it. So, Jessica was right in mentioning that. And surely Barahona had a lot of nice ideas there as well, particularly on how to organized the process knowledge and make it accessible. Adding index terms like a, or tags. Subject headings, cross referencing links. Metadata, you have to disseminate the knowledge that people know it's there. You have to design and manage the overall information architecture. And arguably, for our course in particular, it's not ideal and we're kind of limited to what Coursera can offer at this time. But we're trying out different things of organizing it weekly and what have you. But the idea is that, once we get to know better and better how to use this form and search it and categorize it and tag it, that perhaps the kinds of knowledge that's useful will be more readily accessible. And then I think Rena had a really nice summary of all the features or least most of them and a summary format that I wanted to relate to you. And she talked about well planned onboarding. So ensuring that new members of the organization have enough learning opportunities or can bring things to the table from their other experiences. She talked about internal and external training. So giving a chance for the members of an organization to share their knowledge and to train others. But to offer the, at same time, external training where they can improve themselves from other experts beyond the firm. The third thing was, she mentioned structured and coordinated platforms for collaboration like networking and experience sharing. And here she suggested networking lunches, mentoring, work shadowing, job rotation, team meetings and team building. So a lot of these things are in all the readings and in the lecture but she succinctly kind of summarized it. Thank you Rena. Rewarding systems is another one. Motivating members to learn, develop, and also record and share their learnings. So here, it's kind of affording people visibility as a reward or praise or even titles and promotions, perhaps, for performing these kind of tasks of organizational learning would be useful. A fifth feature would be comprehensive communication, she called it, and that's all the meetings, emails, newsletters, virtual platforms like our forum, and basically ways to share best practices and learn stories. And another one that she mentions is conscious focus on process, on work improvements are dedicated or assigned members or teams that are committed to driving work improvement. So, in a lot of cases, workers are too busy with their own tasks to focus upon kind of organizational learning and improvements and having a designated group for those who are assigned members that work on it. Probably will facilitate and encourage that culture, it's a culture generator of sorts. Another feature is a conscious focus on organizational development. And again, it's the same idea that you have these individuals and teams that are committed to ensuring that those practices and channels for promoting organizational learning exist. And having those champions of it, headhunting experts, benchmarking yourself, and performing those activities and making sure people are responsible for having them occur is probably a very useful way to encourage organizational remembering. Another feature she said is the development of organizational culture. And this is something that's going to come up again and again in my screenside chats, which is, there's a big assumption in organizational learning that you have an integrated kind of organizational culture. Where there's everybody buys in. It's not like in that video I sent out on World of Warcraft where I think it's Jeremiah runs off by himself into the quest after all that planning. It's not a unified culture there. He's now on the same page. You need to have that. It seems to be a presumption of the theory that in order to work and have these kind of learning and feedback loops that people buy into the process. The final thing that I do want to mention was something Albert brought up, which is the physical space is probably also crucial and important to facilitating kinds of dialog in organizational learning. So, if everybody's divided off in their own offices and have their own cubicles, it's feasible that perhaps they won't have as great as meetings or kind of collaborative experiences. So I thought these were tremendously helpful, concrete suggestions that I feel like for a lot of you out there who would like to utilize organizational learning in your own firms, that you now have a clearer kind of path to doing so.
