
Meet regularly with customers to gather knowledge about products, competitors, consumers’ preferences, and the quality of your service. Identify best-practice organizations (even in other industries), use site visits and interviews to study how they get work done, and generate ideas for improving your own practices. Look outside your immediate environment to gain new perspectives. They produced the most successful, error-free launches in Boeing’s history. Several members of the learning team were later transferred to two start-up programs-the 757 and 767. It then compiled a booklet of lessons learned. Example:īoeing compared the development processes of its 737 and 747 planes (models that had serious technical problems) to those of its 707 and 727 (two profitable programs). Review your successes and failures, identify lessons learned, and record those lessons in accessible forms. General Foods experimented with self-managing teams at its Topeka plant with the aim of adopting this approach across the company later. Use demonstration projects to produce knowledge you can use for systemwide changes. For instance, specialty glass manufacturer Corning experiments continually with diverse raw materials and new formulations to increase yields and provide better grades of glass. Use small experiments to produce incremental gains in knowledge. Systematically search for and test new knowledge. Instead, generate hypotheses, gather data to test your hypotheses, and use statistical tools (such as cause-and-effect diagrams) to organize data and draw inferences. Garvin offers these suggestions for mastering five organizational learning practices: Solving Problems Systematicallyĭon’t try to solve problems by relying on gut instinct or assumptions. Woven into the fabric of your company’s daily operations, these activities help your organization make enduring improvements that translate directly into measurable gains-including superior quality, better delivery, and increased market share.
