Executive Briefings

Published December 2009

Be Irritating in 2010

Mike Prokopeak

Here’s unusual advice for CLOs: In order to get ahead in 2010, you might need to be more irritating.

It may sound counterintuitive, but by being an irritant, learning leaders can help the organization grow and increase their influence.

At its root, learning is an "irritation" to people’s existing assumptions, forcing them to incorporate, analyze and synthesize new information into an existing frame of reference. So while irritation can be a distraction, when designed properly it becomes conducive to the learning process.

That same principle holds true in organizational learning, said author and learning consultant Roland Deiser.

“If learning is triggered through irritation — we are challenging our current perspective, assumptions, knowledge and so on through new encounters — then I think that you can design that irritation [so] that it’s helping the development of the organization and the strategy in a way that the business needs it,” he said.

“The existing frame of reference on the organizational level would be the existing business model or the existing culture. You have to continuously design irritation to that structure to make the organization learn and adapt.”

Deiser is the author of the book Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation. He is also founder and executive chairman of the European Corporate Learning Forum and a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

Designing irritants to the system will help create a more adaptable and agile organization, he said. Failure to do so increases the risk of having an insular, outdated business model, as leaders follow along a perceived path to success oblivious to new conditions and competitors. Think of the music industry pre-iTunes.

Many CLOs hold up business-driven learning as the way to create an agile organization. While it is better than learning disconnected from business, that approach doesn't overcome the insularity problem.

“If you align with business, there is always the danger that you reinforce an existing business model,” Deiser said. “If learning becomes just a support function for the business, it doesn’t have the power to innovate.”

Deiser proposes an alternative: learning-driven business. At its core, creating a smart, adaptable and agile organization requires the organization to treat business processes as learning processes. And it moves the learning executive out of the shadows and into the light.

This movement is a natural evolution of corporate learning away from traditional training and deliverables to a design methodology, expanding the learning mindset beyond the HR limits that have kept it largely marginalized. It also requires CLOs to think about learning architecture and act as the chief architect.

“I strongly believe that learning is not a set of programs, but learning is designing organizational mechanisms, processes and structures in a way that they almost naturally foster learning and development processes that rise from the business challenges companies have,” Deiser said.

That’s a sophisticated view of how learning operates in the broader business system, but it’s one that CLOs, if they haven’t already, can take concrete steps to achieve. To start, they need to shift their focus beyond skill building to how people and their skills operate in the broader business context.

“Even the best people are hamstrung if you have poor organizational design and culture,” Deiser said. “Even if you have a great organization, if you make the wrong products or you stay with a business model that doesn’t work anymore, you nonetheless become obsolete. How do you also make the organization smart, not only toward its people, but also toward its industry?”

Deiser said smart organizations also incorporate a broader range of emotional, political and ethical competencies beyond the cognitive domain and take their development cues from employees. The traditional “push” model, even if it is pushed just in time, can only have limited impact. To be more impactful, learning needs to be driven by learners and embedded within the structure of their everyday business practice.

If CLOs take that approach, they have the chance to turn the challenges of 2009 into the opportunities of 2010.

“Learning could be an absolutely key practice and a key capability to lead us out of that slump if we understand learning is a much, much more broader concept that just people qualification,” Deiser said. “What did we learn from [the financial] crisis, what structural or systemic deficiencies led us into this? Can we get into a real dialogue about that stuff or not? That is learning.”

Engaging in this kind of dialogue requires CLOs to become systems enablers and designers, not just deliverers of content. It also requires that they develop the political savvy needed to influence stakeholders and move the organization from point A to point B.

“CLOs need to rethink their role and identity. It’s an incredible opportunity really to develop the profession,” Deiser said. “They need to become quite creative in seeing opportunities within organizations where they can connect certain dots that are currently unconnected.”

That transition from trainer in chief to chief designer can be difficult for learning leaders who grew up in a traditional training organization.

“If you as a chief learning officer are just happy in designing seminars and [trying] to sell them to your top executives, your value contribution is not large enough and you may have a hard time,” Deiser said.

While there’s real opportunity to be the catalyst — the irritant — that can make these changes happen, the question is whether or not learning leaders are up for the challenge of designing the smart organization.

“There is currently a lot of white space in organizations when it comes to this learning paradigm that is not captured by anybody,” Deiser said.

CLOs, it could be led by you in 2010, if you have the capability and are willing to be a little irritating.

Mike Prokopeak is the editorial director for Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at mikep@clomedia.com.

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