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Blending Cultural Transformation and Groupware to Create a Learning Organization

Richard C. Eppel, President, Strategic Momentum
E. Jeffrey Conklin, Principal, Group Decision Support Systems

Corporate America is struggling to build and maintain sustainable competitive advantages in today's global marketplace. Organizations today are confronted with increasing environmental turbulence arising from global competition coupled with frequent changes in competitive dynamics, the introduction of new technologies, shortened product lifecycles, and political and social pressures. Organizations must learn to anticipate changes and respond rapidly and decisively if they are going to prosper over the long-term.

Figure1 provides a conceptual framework for systematically examining the elements required to adapt to changing environments. This framework offers a practical way of looking at the key elements (strategy and capability) that an organization must continually bring into alignment with environmental shifts.





Figure 1 Managing Adaptation

In a changing environment, companies have to be capable of discerning environmental shifts and rapidly realigning their strategies and internal capabilities consistent with the environmental changes. This requires companies to learn to continually re-interpret and respond effectively to shifts in the marketplace. Each relevant shift in the environment requires a corresponding real-time strategic response and a corresponding transformation of the company's capability. The scope of this transformation includes changes in competency, structures, processes, practices and tools in order to support the strategic change. Flexibility, velocity and adaptability are essential to survival, and the strength and profitability of a company will be proportional to its strategic effectiveness and its operational responsiveness. Organizations that do not learn to respond effectively to environmental shifts run the risk of losing market share and ultimately their existence. At I-Bus, we believe that our on-going viability and prosperity are directly proportional to our ability to increase our learning and to change effectively. We are using the framework in Figure 1 as the context to strategically manage our business. This framework was adapted from "Implanting Strategic Management" by H. Igor Ansoff and Edward J. McDonnell.

The notion of a learning organization needs to be qualified. By definition, every company surviving in business is a learning organization. However, there are two questions to be asked: First, is the rate of learning and knowledge creation consistent with the turbulence of the marketplace? Second, is the company strategically and operationally responding to environmental shifts in an effective manner? If the answers to these questions are no, then the company is at risk.

We propose that building a learning organization is a critical way of gaining a significant competitive advantage in a highly turbulent, global marketplace. In I-Bus' case, we have seen both domestic and international competition increase 10 times over the last five years. With the increase in competition we have seen margins erode. We have seen technology life cycles shorten dramatically. In spite of these changes, we have grown over 26% per year by learning to change our strategies and capabilities as an organization. This presentation addresses some of the social and technological structures I-Bus is using for building and enhancing a learning organization and briefly describes what we have learned, to date, in our journey toward organizational transformation.

We have learned, given a world of accelerating change, neither individuals or individual groups can intellectually grasp the implications of all the changes, nor can they respond effectively in isolation. To be successful in a rapidly changing environment, companies have to undergo continual transformation by creating social and technological structures that both facilitate this transformation, and support corporate learning in all organizational domains. With increasing competition, we see the need for alignment and commitment among all functions within I-Bus to be greater than ever.

We have also learned there are two distinct approaches to transforming an organization's culture toward becoming a learning organization. The traditional social approach is to work with people on changing their understandings and practices. The technological approach is to provide an infrastructure for communication and collaboration: networked computers, plus the software for sharing information, called groupware. We understood that each of these approaches, taken separately, would have critical shortcomings.

We started with the social approach using education and consulting interventions to introduce powerful, new distinctions and practices. We followed up the education by installing a coaching paradigm within I-Bus to reinforce the skills and tools we were taught. After a time, we looked into installing tools that could support our new practices. We were also concerned that, without technological support to reinforce our new practices, the hard work of our cultural change would erode. We were concerned that, without the technological infrastructure, people would revert to old practices and old ways of understanding, especially in the face of breakdowns.

However, we understood that introducing technology without the proper cultural shift would be dangerous. The technology approach says, "Here is some neat new technology for collaboration. Try it and see if it works..." This approach seems to have a very high failure rate. Without considerable work and energy focused on changing the organizational culture, people find little use for technology that reflects new and different cultural assumptions. For example, in a culture that says, "Information is power -- dole it out sparingly for maximum personal benefit", --tools for information sharing and collaboration will not gain much acceptance.

We recognized that the most powerful way to overcome the inherent social and technological inertia is to blend the two approaches so they yield synergism with each other, creating new practices and new infrastructure in an environment oriented toward learning. In this combined approach (figure 2), the impact of the social changes is boosted through the use of tools that reflect the values and distinctions of the new culture. The adoption of the tools is reinforced by the personal and cultural changes that people are making as part of becoming a learning organization.




Figure 2 Combining Social and Technological Structures

In designing our transformational process, we utilized several distinctions that complement and enrich each other. These distinctions include "learning organization", "community" and "learning community".

All learning occurs first on an individual basis, but the real power of learning is doubly enhanced when the learning is communally based. This only occurs when individuals interact on an on-going basis and collectively reflect on the results of their action.

Initially, our learning process at I-Bus occurs at the executive staff level. We then involve the entire organization in learning and practicing key distinctions. One of the key distinctions we employ is the distinction, "breakdown". We distinguish breakdowns as an interruption in the action. Breakdowns reveal our automatic and basically transparent practices. We hold breakdowns as opportunities to "see" where we were "blind" (i.e. Are we missing something we need to consider? Do we have a blind spot?). Reflecting on breakdowns as a community allows for powerful insights to occur. Also, in this way, people learn as a community, are able to quickly design new practices, and are able to embody these practices with greater ease.

For the distinction "learning organization", I-Bus adopted the definition created by Peter Senge in the "Fifth Discipline", paraphrased as follows:

A learning organization continually increases its capacity to design and bring forth the future it wants in a rapidly changing world.

We are evolving the distinction of community. I-Bus distinguishes our organization as a community of people, cooperating and coordinating action together out of a shared concern for the future. Our shared future is embodied in our vision which includes our purpose, mission and core values. We created this vision as a collective process. The primary values that drive I-Bus are community-based values such as trust, and support for each other's success.

Distinguishing business as a creation by people, to take care of the concerns of people, we see the I-Bus community as a body of people sharing a common identity and purpose, acting in alignment to take care of ourselves, our customers, our suppliers and others having a stake in our success. To bring forth our vision, we have to become a community of learners, a "learning community". We believe that creating a learning organization by building a "community of commitment", a community committed to learning and building its knowledge base, will be a significant source of competitive advantage in a highly turbulent, global marketplace.

The concept of developing a community flowed from the recognition that people want purpose and meaning in their companies and their lives. Aligning business strategies and organizational strategies through a community framework seems to offer significant promise to build strong, viable businesses that become a source of significant meaning and enrichment. People thrive when they have the opportunity to participate and co-create their future. From my experience, I believe companies like I-Bus must focus on building and retaining intellectual capital to remain competitive. This convergence of concerns creates an opening for a community framework to evolve. We see the community framework more closely aligning the social and technical domains of a business with the business itself in a way that strengthens and aligns the concerns of the people with the concerns of the business. For us, a community framework allows our people to build their commitment in support of their corporate community because of their special relationships with each other. The community framework provides a source of meaning and enrichment to their working environment. A community framework fosters an emotional commitment, as well as, an intellectual one to the organization's goals and to one another. This kind of connection brings forth the kind of vision and energy that have been the hallmark of great human achievements.

I-Bus sees building a core competency in community building as a business imperative to create long-term viability. It encompasses creating a strong sense of interconnectedness, developing a collective intelligence and building learning structures that support our sense of community. We see the benefits to a community-based environment in lower turnover, individual growth and empowerment, committed action to bring forth our vision, a strong growth rate and a greater sense of well-being.

Including our customers and suppliers within our community opens the possibility for creating powerful, long-term partnerships, giving us a sustainable, competitive advantage in our marketplace. A spirit of community opens the possibility for highly aligned actions responding to the opportunities and threats of our marketplace, as well as nurturing the well-being of each of us. Building the spirit of community opens the possibility to provide a deep sense of purpose and meaning to our work life, which can carry over to our personal life.

At the same time, we are struggling with making these distinctions operational. Deeper inquiries have to occur to establish what constitutes a learning organization, a learning community and the creation of a corporate knowledge base. Key questions have to be answered, such as: What values must leaders promulgate to create the opportunity for deep, substantive learning to occur? How do you create a sense of community in business? What transformational processes are required? How does a business reconnect with the people that constitute the business in a way that will produce the coordinated action required in a turbulent marketplace? How is knowledge created and disseminated? How is corporate memory created? What tools and technologies best support building and sustaining a learning community?

When you look at an organization from a systemic point of view, the results achieved by an organization are always consistent with the design of the organization. In other words, an organization is always perfectly designed to produce the results that it is achieving. When the status quo is no longer good enough, a new design and a new way of looking at an organization is required as portrayed in Figure 3. The CEO has to take the leadership role to look for and assess new organizational paradigms powerful enough to bring about the organizational transformation required. This is true for a company or a department or a project team. Finding new paradigms (new models or frameworks) is a very difficult process. The scope of the paradigm has to be comprehensive and systemic to allow for fundamental shifts in how the organization thinks and functions. The paradigm has to provide new lenses for viewing organizations and new distinctions to allow the organization to think, see, and act differently. Unfortunately, in most cases the paradigms offered are limited in scope or only attack one specific aspect of the system.



Figure 3: Transformation Through A New Paradigm

For example, education in conducting effective meetings, improve communication, or generic team- building will affect some aspects of the system, but not all aspects.

The CEO has to take a leadership position to create the social and technological structures that facilitate the creation of a learning organization. To bring about the required organizational transformation, the CEO has to take on the mantle of the Chief Learning Officer. However, the CEO cannot effect the process alone. An organization embarking on an organizational transformation process has to have strong leadership from the executive level, as well as, all managerial and leadership positions within the company. This requires the executives, management and the leadership core within a company to assume responsibility for their own learning, to create a learning environment and to educate everyone in powerful frameworks, principles and practices.

At I-Bus, we accomplished this by using an outside consultant to educate and coach the executive staff. The consultants we chose offered profoundly comprehensive and effective ways of looking at an organization, that could be taught to everyone within the organization. These distinctions and frameworks created the foundation for learning and producing powerful action. Then using additional consultants we educated a critical mass of our people. Finally, we created internal education programs to educate the entire company on an on-going basis. We found that bringing into alignment a committed 20% to 25% of the organization created sufficient social coupling to diffuse the education and distinctions throughout our organization. Then, as we evolved, we began looking for structures and tools to facilitate and institutionalize the process.

What is Learning?

As stated earlier, learning has to occur individually before it can occur organizationally. By learning, we mean that an individual has gained new knowledge and can effectively put that knowledge to use. We distinguish knowledge as experience or "effective action" as defined by the standards of the community. Knowledge is always domain specific. When one knows, one can act effectively in a specific domain of action. For example, one may understand the concepts of strategic planning, but one does not "know" strategic planning until he/she can produce a comprehensive strategic plan. As another example, one can learn the principles of sailing from reading a book. However, one does not "know" how to sail until they practice sailing in a variety of weather conditions. Again, understanding differs from knowledge. Knowledge is always concerned with effective action as assessed by the standards of the community. Learning, then, is an assessment made at two points in time. We can assess that learning has occurred when someone who could not perform an effective action in a specific domain can now perform that action. Individuals demonstrate learning by demonstrating new knowledge in terms of producing new actions effectively such as strategic planning, project planning and project leadership. The same holds true for a team, a department or an organization. A learning organization must have the structures to learn, enhance its knowledge base and disseminate knowledge throughout the organization. In this way, one can assess whether individuals and the organization are learning based on the scope and effectiveness of their on-going actions. We found that learning occurs largely as a function of our commitment to take care of our concerns. Create a game worth playing, powerfully enroll people into the game and one will find that learning to win occurs somewhat as a natural process. At I-Bus we created the game called "creating community", coupled with the game called "being a leader in our marketplace" .

Another dimension of learning was to recognize that learning can be distinguished in three domains show in Figure 4:



Figure 4: Domains of Learning

That which we know, we use to take care of the concerns we have. That which we don't know, we can learn if it's required to take care of new concerns. As such, when we know we don't know, constitutes a form of knowledge. If we need to know, we can take the necessary steps to learn. Cognitive blindness exists when you don't know you don't know. This domain provides the richest access to creativity and breakthrough. However, that access is frequently blocked due to a lack of full functionality within organizations, as well as, a lack of skill in the area of dialogue and inquiry. By promoting dialogue and inquiry, we have benefited from several breakthroughs that have significantly improved our performance and market standing. This occurred from allowing the space for powerful conversations to occur producing insight into critical business areas.

Another aspect of our learning was the recognition that organizations and individuals tend to operate systematically within the context of their environment. The organization, as a social organism, functions to maintain balance with an ever-changing environment. Individuals, as social beings, function to remain balanced within the organization, and their environment. Organizational transformations have to take into account the systemic nature, as well as, the social construction of the organization. The organization's social nature has to be aligned with its technological nature in a manner that fits not only the human concerns but also the business concerns. In a volatile environment, this alignment process cannot be static - it has to be dynamic and flexible enough to respond to the level of turbulence within the environment.

One of the major paradigm shifts made at I-Bus was to view language not as informative or descriptive but, rather, as generative. This means that language has the power to create reality. Through language we have the ability to bring forth a different future. As linguistic beings, we individually create our reality in language. We dwell in, and live out of, our public and private conversations. It is through language that we interpret events and it is through language that we build shared interpretations and understanding among community members. Therefore, as people living within a workplace community, our workplace reality is constructed by our social conversations. It is also through language that we are able to shift the reality of the community.

Recognizing the generative nature of language and that conversations create reality provided a major shift in our organizational thought processes. Conversations, both public and private, provide the access to both assess organizational mind sets, mental models and belief systems, and to intervene by reshaping the existing conversations. Viewing an organization as a network of conversations and commitments that bring about a set of results provides a powerful basis by which organizational interventions can be achieved. Key questions of inquiry within the organization can now be identified, such as, which conversations are opening up possibilities and which conversations are shutting down possibilities? Which conversations are creating the results we are achieving and which conversations create barriers to changing those results? These become key questions of inquiry within the organization and necessary to capture.

For communities to build shared interpretations and understanding, community members must give voice to their unspoken ideas and beliefs. For this to occur, community members must build trust, intimacy and create a safe place for full expression to occur. True dialogue requires the disclosure of mental models and a wider expression of private conversations. Here again, groupware technology and tools can create valuable communicative support structures. Groupware plays a significant role in supporting community-wide dialogue, advocacy and participative decision-making. Groupware also allows us to communicate outside the bounds of time and space.

Learning situations often involve "opening up" and putting yourself at risk (e.g., admitting that you "don't know"); therefore, relationship and trust are critical elements, as mentioned above. We believe that the foundation of a learning organization lies in: (1) the relatedness of each community member to each other, to the company and to the external environment; (2) the trust between community members; (3) the level of intimacy between community members; (4) the shared set of distinctions held by the community; and (5) the structure of communications that exists within the community. All of this supports building shared understanding, participative decision making and creating a collective intelligence. At the same time, we found technology and tools, congruent with the culture of our learning community, are essential to support and sustain our learning community.

These elements - relationship, trust, intimacy, distinctions and communications - became design considerations for the transformation and creation of our learning community. We recognized that individuals come to a community with different backgrounds, world views, language, and values. The list can go on, but, in short, we recognized that we are all different observers of the world and we all have different structures of interpretation. This diversity, if properly managed, can be a source of creativity and competitive advantage. In addition, a community structure has to honor diversity by creating a generosity for individual differences and a capacity for generous listening. All of this has to occur within an emotional atmosphere of acceptance of each other. Only in this way can we hope to create a learning community with the capacity for building shared interpretation and understanding, as well as, the capacity to express full cooperation and effective coordination of action needed to take care of the concerns of the community and the community members.

The results have been better than expected. We have created an organization capable of successfully competing in an extremely competitive marketplace. We have grown 26% per year compounded over the last five years. This is five to ten percent faster than the market has grown. We have been able to retain our key people and recruit highly competent people as we have grown. Many employees have begun formal education programs outside of I-Bus to improve themselves and become more effective competitors in the marketplace.

I-Bus began its cultural change towards a learning organization over a period of 5 years. During that time, we looked for and found technology and tools to support information sharing and participative decision-making on a community-wide basis. Since the foundation of our change was to 1) relate each member of our community to the other, 2) develop and nurture trust, 3) increase the level of intimacy, 4) share common distinctions, and 5) create a structure for communications -- we needed a technology which enhanced all these elements. We selected two software tools: QuestMap™ and Lotus Notes™. Lotus Notes is not fully implemented yet, but our intent is to use this tool for e-mail, on-line data base, and procedure data base. The technology that we have implemented however is QuestMap. With the help of QuestMap we created an "electronic town hall" capable of giving access and voice to each person in the community.

It was apparent that groupware, interconnectedness on a common network, was the type of computer tool we required. We explored various software options and determined that for on-line communications, QuestMap, from Group Decision Support Systems in Washington, D.C., was the tool which could meet our needs. QuestMap supports the conceptual frameworks which have grown within I-Bus.

We needed an infrastructure which promotes collaboration and shared understanding. Any discussion tool can provide a framework for conversation, but, except for QuestMap, all groupware tools accommodate linear, chronological conversations. At I-Bus, a linear, textual conversation did not promote collaboration and shared understanding -- with these tools, the reader was left to much interpretation and possibilities for misunderstanding.

To promote shared understanding, the context of a conversation becomes as important an element as who said it and when it was said. A linear, or an outline, format for a conversation omits context. The value of this is reflected in the chart (Figure 5) below:

Figure 5 Comparing Conversation Maps

The letters denote the chronology of the comments. As you can see, the best understanding of the context of the conversation is gained in the QuestMap version. Graphically mapping the conversation is necessary to show context (how one comment relates to the other). QuestMap provides us a "whiteboard" with which to explore ideas.
Let me show how this format for on-line discussions is unique for enhancing the social change we undertook as a learning organization. Also, let me repeat that social change must be supplemented with the proper infrastructure before organizational change can truly evolve.

The precursor to shared understanding is shared display. This can be as simple as using a whiteboard or flip chart during face-to-face meetings to map out conversations. Mapping conversations often shifts the group's attention from debate to a context of information gathering and sharing. In more high-tech environments, groupware tools, for us QuestMap exclusively, can put a shared display on each person's desktop. Sharing questions, ideas and arguments for and against ideas outside the meeting room has infinite advantages over trying to schedule a face-to-face meeting for every topical discussion and decision. Meanings can be made explicit and shared for all to see. Moreover, we have found that goals and meanings evolve over time, the new understandings can be explored and shared together.

Key to an organizational shift from command and control hierarchies to team collaboration is participative decision making where management empowers the people who are closest to the action to make operational and strategic decisions. As many of us know, shifting to team decision making often adds complexity -- i.e. team consensus without individual buy-in is ineffectual. With QuestMap, we have been nurturing the on-line communication process, allowing rationale, including all options and all opinions to evolve. As this map of the process expands, the group buy-in follows. We all know that when stakeholders have access to all of the thinking and learning behind a decision, they are more likely to own the decision personally and implement it effectively. We have found this to be true at I-Bus.

In the I-Bus learning environment, we have had to repress old habits of being self-serving and close-minded. We focus on collective intelligence. We use the QuestMap tool to provide us a means of inquiry. An example of an inquiry initiated by Human Resources is shown in Figure 6.



Figure 6 QuestMap Sample

In this example, all employees who receive the inquiry can add comments: questions, ideas, support, non-support. By viewing the map, any participant can see how the thinking of the group is evolving and can also continue to ask new questions, further defining the actual context of the question.

To summarize, the key distinctions that we have found powerful are: creating a sustained sense of community; tapping the power of linguistic distinctions, especially distinctions that nurture dialogue and conversations for action; promoting the principles of organizational learning, both by explicit education and by example (e.g. the CEO as the Chief Learning Officer); creating shared understanding; broadening participation in the decision making process; and using technology to increase the organization's collective intelligence.

Our experience at I-Bus, and probably in most companies represented here, confirms that organizational change does not occur in a short period of time. The members of the organization must develop a respect for learning and the value of collective intelligence. Most importantly, social change and technological support of this change must complement each other. Neither can work alone. At I-Bus we embarked on becoming a learning organization and installed groupware tools to support this development. I have experience and evidence which I think supports the need for and success of a learning organization. I also believe that our installation of QuestMap has enhanced the relationships we are building and the direction of shared understanding we are achieving.