دانلود رایگان مقاله تفکیک و بازسازی یادگیری در طول بحران سازمانی و شکست

A CULTURE OF LEARNING ALLOWS IBM TO REFOCUS ITS BUSINESS

In October 2014, IBM Chairman, President, and CEO ‘‘Ginni’’ Rometty told Wall Street stock analysts that IBM’s earning growth would be lower than had been expected. When Rometty reset expectations, she did more than publicly walk back the aggressive growth estimates made by her predecessor. She made a statement about the company’s ability to change direction and learn. A few months later, Rometty would lay out an investment plan for the future of the company. When she stepped back from aggressive growth estimates and charted a new course for the company, Rometty showed the importance of sustaining learning in the face of organizational threats. Unfortunately, Rometty is one of the few executives to focus on learning in times of potential crisis. Too often, executives ignore bad news and fail to make organizational-wide changes. Instead of making difficult decisions, executives ignore emerging problems. In doing so, they lose the opportunity to address potential threats before they escalate into full-scale breakdowns.

MPLICATIONS FOR LEADERS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Few organizations will experience the kinds of breakdowns experienced by the pilots at Air France and train engineers at Montparnasse; however, these and other high-consequence incidents we studied provide insight into how leaders in more traditional organizations can sustain and rebuild learning in the face of breakdown. First, leaders need to build learning into every level of the organization. Every individual in the organization, from the frontline employees to the board of directors, needs to advocate for surfacing and responding to problems, errors, and risks. The organization should focus on developing standards and reporting while holding individuals at all levels accountable for meeting these standards. One former student who works for a highly respected firm in the petroleum industry explained how the culture of safety infused every aspect of the company, even requiring employees to undergo training for how to cut fruit offered in his company’s cafeteria. Second, leaders need to be open to bad news. In the case of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, leaders failed to accept the declining position of the company. Employees who brought bad news were treated as disloyal to the organization.In contrast,resilientleaders court bad news and opposing viewpoints because these counterintuitive ideas help uncover possible complications. Setbacks become minimized because the organization has already prepared for problems. Unfortunately, we have seen too many leaders who simply ignore early warning signs and belittle employees who report bad news or who produce modest but realistic projections. Leaders can facilitate a culture of learning by conducting after-action reviews of near-misses, updating procedures when new problems come to light, and communicating the importance of reporting, tracking, and evaluating problems before they escalate. One study, from the health care industry, for example, found that physicians who use a more inclusive leadership style learn new procedures quicker and are better able to respond to problems than leaders who are more authoritarian in their approach to teamwork. Third, leaders need to build awareness that most risks do not unfold without warning but follow predictable patterns. The causes for breakdown are often well documented within an industry or region. Human error–—where an individual either ignores the problem, responds inappropriately, or escalates the problem to superiors who fail to take action–—is all too common in aviation. In fact, some analysis suggests that between 80% and 90% of airline accidents can be attributed to some human error in a chain of events. In the BP Texas City disaster, one investigation concluded that warning signs had been present for years, but leadership failed to address these warning signs. Further, BP used safety measures that were easy to gather rather than measures that were the most indicative of problems. Organizational leaders became complacent because personal injury rates were low at Texas City, even though years of budget cuts and lack of investment contributed to systematic problems that weren’t captured by injury records. In the aftermath of the incident, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration found over 301 willful violations of safety rules, suggesting that leaders either ignored or were indifferent to significant safety concerns.