The Ultimate Survival Skill for the Information Age
by Dave Kahle
Published on this site: April 12th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
We're living in incredibly turbulent times.
The well spring of this uncertainty lies in one of the characteristics
of the newly-arrived Information Age. Business people are
being buffeted by an increasingly rapid rate of change. Consider
this. In 1900, the total amount of knowledge available to
mankind was doubling about every 500 years. In 1990, it was
doubling about every two years.
Imagine the implications of that kind of increase in the rate
of change! It means new products, new regulations, new market
configurations, new customers, and new technology in almost
every industry. It's no wonder that we're confused and uncertain
about what to do.
And the growth of that knowledge continues at an expanding
rate. One futurist predicts that today's high school students
will have to absorb more information in their senior year
alone than their grandparents did in their entire lifetime.
And Nesbitt is on record as predicting that in the year 2020,
the rate of knowledge will double every 35 days!
That incredibly rapid pace of new knowledge is driving the
forces of change at an unprecedented rate. And that rate of
change is continuing to accelerate. The effect of that snowballing
rate of change on our businesses and our jobs can be cataclysmic.
It's almost as if a malevolent spirit were stalking our economy,
rendering all the wisdom of the past useless, and casting
a spell of confusion and uncertainty over the land.
The indications are that this rapid state of change will not
be a temporary phenomena we all must live through. Rather,
it will be the permanent condition we must accept for the
foreseeable future. Rapid change is not a phase we're passing
through, it's a process we're entering into.
That means it is likely that the conclusions, paradigms and
core beliefs upon which we based our decisions just two or
three years ago are likely to be obsolete today. Even more
sobering, the conclusions and strategies which we develop
today will be obsolete in a couple of years. We can count
on this continuing obsolescence of our best ideas and strategies
to be the constant state of affairs.
One of my clients recently told his employees, "The only
thing you can count on is that you won't be doing this job
in three years." His point was that the job will change
in that period of time to such a degree that it'll be a different
job. The technology used will likely change, as will the
customers,
the systems and the focus of the job.
The insightful person will accept that rapid change is now
a defining characteristic of our economy, and plan to deal
with it effectively on an on-going basis. Instead of thinking
we should just persevere until it's behind us, we should prepare
for rapid change to be a way of life.
What's the best way to go forward in the light of this rapid
change? What mind sets can we adopt that will equip us to
survive and prosper in turbulent times? What skills do we
need to survive and prosper in the information age?
I believe there is one core skill which will define the most
successful individuals. It's the ability and propensity to
engage in self-directed learning. The only sustainable effective
response to a rapidly changing world is cultivating the ability
to positively transform ourselves and our organizations. And
that's the definition of self-directed learning.
In the face of a world that is different one week to the
next, our most powerful positive response is to cultivate
the ability
to learn. By "learning," I don't mean just the acquisition
of new information, although that is a necessary prerequisite.
Rather, I mean the kind of "learning" that requires
one to change behavior on the basis of an ever changing understanding
of the world. Learning without behavior change is impotent.
The individuals who become disciplined, systematic self-directed
learners will be the success stories of the information age.
Likewise, those organizations that become learning organizations
will have the best chance of surviving and prospering.
Read what other have said about it:
"...the key thing as we go forward is the ability
to learn. You can not arrest the pace of development in the
marketplace, in the world, socially and technologically. It
is coming at an increasing rate. You've got to be able to
learn and adapt..." Beale.
Because of the forces surging through our economy, it's safe
to say that tomorrow will be significantly different from
today. It will be more complex and somehow significantly changed.
And that will be true of all the tomorrows in the foreseeable
future.
The most skilled employees, therefore, will be the ones who
can continually access the changing facts and growing complexity
of their jobs, and then change appropriately.
That's "self-directed learning."
"We understand that the only competitive advantage the
company of the future will have is its managers´ ability
to learn faster than their competitors." Arie P. DeGeus.
In a world that is rapidly changing, today's hot new product
is tomorrow's obsolete dinosaur. More important than any one
product is the ability to continually create new products.
Today's strongest employee could very well be tomorrow's employment
problem. More important than any one employee is the ability
to find and maintain employees who are constantly growing.
Today's closest customers could be out of business tomorrow.
More important than any one customer is the ability to attract
and retain customers.
All of these are applications of the ultimate competitive
advantage - the ability to learn faster than your competitors.
"In fact, I would argue that the rate at which individuals
and organizations learn may become the only sustainable competitive
advantage." Ray Stata.
As the economy becomes more and more global, competition will
increase. Few businesses will enjoy a secure market position.
The quality of competition will also improve as competitors
strive to out do one another in providing customer service
and value added products and services. In this new economy,
those who survive and prosper will be those who know how to
learn, and who do so faster and more systematically than their
competitors.
And those organizations that become learning organizations
will be those who fill themselves with people who regularly
engage in self-directed learning.
How, then, do you instill this "self-directed learning" in
your organization?
Here are three tactics to begin the process.
- Wipe the Slate Clean.
Imagine that you have written the history of your company
or your career on a blackboard. You have every decision,
every strategy, every success and every failure noted in
detail. The sum of this experience provides the rationale
for why and how you do everything that you now do.
Now, take a wet towel, and wipe the board clean. Erase the
past. As you do so, you eliminate the unspoken acceptance
of the way things are, and replace it with the new understanding
that things may not be the way they should be. Just because
something is, doesn't mean it should be. The reason you
started doing something may no longer exist. Remember, with
a world turning over more or less completely every two to three years, any decision or
procedure which had its roots in a situation that three
or more years old may not be justified today.
This little exercise provides a mental image for a change
in thinking that needs to take place if you're going to
become a learning organization. You must begin to think
about things that you do, not on the basis of the past (three
or more years ago), but rather on the basis of the present
and the future.
It's a way of eliminating one of the biggest barriers to
learning and changing. That barrier is the mental obstacles
that we put in our own way. Here's an example. One of my
clients was frustrated with his continuing inability to
motivate his sales force. He spent much of his mental energy
and financial resources attempting to get his force of largely
independent agents to spend more time with his product.
Yet he never thought about going to market in ways other
than through his traditional methods. When we broke down
that barrier of relying on the past and wiped the slate
clean, we discovered a marketing method which holds tremendous
potential for his business. However, it took a change in
thinking, a thought process that wasn't tied to his past
in order to look at the situation on the basis of the present
and the future rather than the past.
That principle can be applied in every area of your business,
from something so fundamental and important as your method
of reaching your customers, to something as mundane as the
way you answer the phone, or fill out a receiving document.
- Give Learning a Strategic Emphasis.
Build in the need to become a learning organization
in the most fundamental building blocks of your business.
Write it into your mission statement. Get the board to pass
a resolution advocating it. Display your commitment to it
predominantly in your personnel manual.
Talk about it at your employee meetings. Make it an agenda
item in your executive meetings. Articulate it as an initiative
in your strategic planning sessions. And, begin to model
learning behavior yourself.
- Make self-directed learning a part of everyone's job
description.
Begin to create learning expectations for yourself and
all your employees. Talk about their need to learn and grow.
Include it as an item on every job description.
Then encourage, develop and support learning opportunities
throughout your organization.
Here's some things other organizations have done:
- Require every employee to attend a certain number of
outside seminars per year.
- Create "Learning Groups" within your company.
These are temporary groups of people who come together for
a short period of time to learn from and with one another.
One of my clients, for example, has a weekly manager's lunch
where everyone brown bags lunch and discusses one chapter
of Steven Covey's book, Seven Habits of Highly Successful
People. The principle of short term, small group meetings
conducted around the free-flowing discussion of some body
of content, can be used throughout your organization. We
organize and train sales people and sales mangers to enter
into this process, for example. People on the shop floor,
service technicians, customer service reps, etc. can all
enter into short term learning groups. Since they are temporary,
the configuration of the groups constantly change, thus
exposing everyone to diverse perspectives. The groups can
be homogeneous (people from the same department or job title)
or heterogeneous (people from different departments and
job titles). The important thing is that your employees
are expected to engage in self-directed learning, and you're
encouraging and facilitation that process.
- Reward the effective application of learning. In other
words, when someone finds an effective way to change things,
reward them. One of my clients holds a monthly employee
meeting, where the employee who has made the biggest positive
change in the way things are done is rewarded with $150.00
cash bonus.
Begin to implement these strategies and you'll take the first
steps to transforming your organization into a learning organization.
You'll begin the process of mastering the ultimate skill for
the information age.
The Growth Coach(r): Dave Kahle is a consultant and
trainer who helps his clients increase their sales and improve
their sales productivity. His latest book for sales managers
is Transforming Your Sales Force for the 21st Century
http://www.davekahle.com/svtransforming.htm
You can also sign up for his sales ezine called "Thinking
About Sales" at http://www.davekahle.com/svmailinglist.htm
You can reach Dave personally at 800-331-1287 or by emailing
him at [email protected]
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