From the last few articles on building your company’s DNA, you should have a sense that building the right culture for future success revolves around re-designing the ways in which team members interact with others within the company to deliver positive, effective solutions. Teams are the building blocks through which high-performing organizations harness the human, knowledge, and intellectual capital within their companies for distinctive, competitive advantage. The focus in building teams should be creating and weaving an Action Learning mentality into all team meetings through which everyone gains and wants to do more.
Action Learning and The Spiral of Knowledge
Rapid change in the external environment requires adaptive, agile responses within organizations to avoid falling behind or becoming irrelevant in the marketplace. Today and the future demand more than simply building learning organizations or knowledge-creating companies, as some of the literature suggests. It requires ACTION LEARNING to create “specialized capabilities where none existed previously, close process gaps, or generate new capacities” (LaRue et al, 2004, p. 9). You can ensure teams are consistently and constantly “pushing the envelope” into new ways of thinking about sticky issues by following a proven design for success.
By their nature, Action Learning Teams (ALTs) institute change through continuous reflection on their progress moving forward coupled with intellectual “bootstrapping” through which new knowledge is created and acted upon. Within their charters, ALTs are clear on how they use the Spiral of Knowledge (Nonaka and Nishiguchi, 2001) to move from the known to the unknown quickly and create new knowledge paths and plans with which to move forward. The foundation of The Spiral of Knowledge is the SECI process: Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization. SECI uses the complimentary nature of tacit knowledge, i.e., that which exists within each person, and explicit knowledge, which emerges as everyone shares their knowledge and gaps appear between the current and future states, which is truly the unknown.
Transforming knowledge quickly and routinely from tacit to explicit states is the key to innovation and growth and the SECI process, when embedded in team practice, has amazing effects. The SECI process engages whole-brained thinking by helping members move from analytical left-brains to creative right-brains through purposeful design and execution. Here’s a quick outline for making SECI an effective cultural practice in your company:
- Socialization: Any joint activity where members feel comfortable in sharing personal, tacit knowledge with others, such as in meetings, eating together, living in the same environment, or simply spending time together. Socialization captures knowledge through physical proximity.
- Externalization: Capturing tacit knowledge on any topic means relieving others of the burden of carrying this knowledge themselves. Externalization requires sharing one’s tacit knowledge and capturing all input so all can see, such as on a whiteboard, easel sheets, or shared technology space. Externalization “crystallizes” what is known and serves as the foundation for new knowledge. Dialogue is a primary method for externalization.
- Combination. This is where the energy accelerates as existing knowledge is reconfigured through sorting, adding, or categorizing, and new knowledge emerges through this process. New knowledge requires an examination of old concepts, creation of new concepts, and in the organizational context, development of new plans, products, or services. Combination is the source for innovation and change that propels a company forward.
- Internalization. This is where the rubber begins to meet the road because team members must determine how the new knowledge will affect their areas of responsibility and what needs to change within to make the new knowledge actionable. Internalization “matures” when new explicit knowledge is embodied within the tacit knowledge required to execute internal processes and get jobs done. In short, internalization “reframes” knowledge required to do one’s job because more of the future is now explicit and clearer.
| The chart to the right shows the continual flow that emerges within the transformational SECI process. Internalization sparks new ideas as additional gaps become evident, and the process renews itself. This concept is exceptionally powerful in understanding the continuous process of knowledge creation and points to the root purpose of knowledge in the realm of business, which is the continual creation of innovations that spark growth and change for the better.
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Changing Culture through the Four Stages of Action Learning
Organizational culture reflects the “correct way” for thinking and acting on problems and opportunities within the organization, thus changes brought about through teams reflect “new ways” that change the culture in some way. The Four Stages of the action-learning process – inquiry, design, deployment, and integration – are embedded within SECI. Inquiry exists within Socialization and Externalization, Design occurs within Combination, and Deployment and Integration are present within Internalization.
Culture change begins within the Combination/design stage when a pilot project is introduced for testing and evaluation before full deployment throughout the organization. The design stage will have its doubters, but when the deployment stage introduces change on a broad scale, people must move from their comfort zones, challenge the identities with which many have become complacent, and eliminate resistance as the value of the changes become evident. Strong cultures that have not embraced change as a routine part of their business model may be particularly hard to break; however, these cultures will not last long in today’s VUCA world. Changing an organization’s culture is akin to changing a body’s DNA; however, unlike human DNA, organizational DNA can and does change, especially as a company grows and responds to the ever-changing world around it.
Additional Suggested Reading:
LaRue, B., Childs, P., Larson, K. & Goldsmith, M. (2004). Leading organizations from the inside out: Unleashing the collaborative genius of action-learning teams. New York: Wiley.
Nonaka, I. & Nishiguchi, T. (Eds.). (2001). Knowledge emergence: Social, technical, and evolutionary dimensions of knowledge creation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Questions for the Week: What sticky issues exist that Action Learning Teams need to tackle now? How do we implement the SECI process within standard team practices to engage “whole-brain” thinking?
| About the Author: Dr. Ray Benedetto is co-founder of GuideStar, Inc.® a practice in organizational leadership for performance excellence (www.guidestarinc.com). He is a retired Air Force colonel with a distinguished active-duty military career. He is board certified in Healthcare Management and a Life Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). Dr. Ray taught leadership for 12 years for the University of Phoenix Chicago campus. He holds degrees from Penn State (BS), the University of Southern California (MSSM), and the University of Phoenix (DM). He is co-author of “It’s My Company TOO! How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Engagement for Remarkable Results” (Greenleaf Book Press Group, 2012) and numerous ezine articles available online. You can reach him at ray@guidestarinc.com. |