 Give time for questions, I am sure the audience will ask you a lot. Definitely. Okay, welcome, let's get our brains going. I have two objectives and two only for this session. One is that you question everything I say, so don't write down the slides in terms of what I'm saying. Just question everything I'm saying and especially if it doesn't make sense and I don't necessarily want questions right at the end, just stop me at any point and say, actually that just doesn't make sense, not from my experience and we can explore that. For me that's much more important than anything else. What I'm going to do is take you through the whole notion of organisational learning because knowledge management didn't just turn out out of the blue. Before that, lots of people were exploring since the 1950s, 40s, etc. How do we learn as individuals? How do we learn as groups? How do we learn as organisations if there is such a thing? So I want to explore what we know and also how do we make sense of things when something bad happens in organisations? If you get the equivalent of Fukushima happening, how do you suddenly make sense of it? And you've got to make sense of it today or tomorrow. And what are the processes that go through in people's minds, etc.? So that's my first objective, question everything. The second objective, which is much, much more important is to get you to coffee before time. So I think I've got 45 minutes. If I can end early, that's even better. Because also remember that this week isn't just about us presenters somehow imparting this amazing knowledge to you, etc. It's also about you making connections. Remember, there's a tremendous pool of knowledge within this room and it's about you making those connections because that's what's going to be fantastic when you leave here at the end of this week. It's those connections. So coffee is really important and you really need to make most of that coffee time. So let's start off with individual learning. Can I ask the lovely people at the back, the South Korean gang, can one of you please help me? Can we have a big round of applause for the South Koreans, please? Can one of you please help me? How do you learn as an individual? How do you learn? Shall I point to someone? The gentleman in the yellow t-shirt. Can you stand up and tell us how do you tend to learn as an individual? You could think of it at work. You could think of it at school. How do you learn? Someone teaches me. Someone teaches you. But do you just take whatever they say for granted? If you want to get a top score, let's say in an exam, how do you learn? Because often I find that when I'm taught lots of things, it's like throwing mud at a wall. Most of the mud falls down. How do you retain all that? Any thoughts? No. Anyone from the Korean gang? We have many training courses in the HRDI. And in the site, we have a mentor, several mentors. In the first one or two years, we follow the mentor acting. Someone who is much more experienced than you are to almost help you along that particular process to learn from them, in a sense. What about when problems occur? What do you do then? If you have a problem at work, do you go to the mentor? Who do you turn to? If we have a problem, we have the program and organizations. We talk to each other and the manager and the director. So really come together as a group somehow to sort of work out what the problem is, what some of the options are, and what could be the optimal solution possibly. Optimize? Yeah. Okay. Right. Thank you very much for that. What I'm going to do, so first of all, look at the common sort of notion of individual learning. It's like the most common thing people tell you about the Colb's learning cycle, that you have experiences, things fail. And one of the important things is reflection in terms of this cycle, because when things go wrong, you reflect. Why did they go wrong? What's wrong with me that I keep on doing this again and again? And what you find in organizations, people just say we don't have time to reflect, and therefore you get into this action fixated learning cycle where people don't necessarily learn much. One of the big things which I was pleased with the last speaker was this model is deficient for me. Anyone think why this is, why I think it could be wrong? There's one big thing that's wrong with it. Anyone? Give me. It's individual. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Any other aspect, so it's individual, doesn't recognize as Larry was saying yesterday about the social relationships in learning. But the other thing in my own mind what's deficient is it doesn't have that burning desire, it doesn't have that motivation. Yeah. It's like, I don't know if you've ever tried to teach anyone who's not really interested in learning and they've got no motivation. No matter they do the cycle, nothing sticks. Yeah. So really, unless you've got that fire in your belly that you really want to learn this thing, nothing's going to happen. Yeah. Then in terms of learning as groups, this was old Peter Senghi when he wrote his fifth discipline. He was interested in the whole notion what do we actually do when we get into groups? And he said, well, we get into discussion and dialogue. Yeah. And he's also saying that dialogue is great because it allows us to expand it, it allows us to explore and get more into divergent thinking, not just saying, this is how we ought to solve this. And just because this book or this report says so and so we ought to do it. But then saying, he also recognized that in groups discussion is really important because sometimes today, right now, we may need to make a decision. So you really, at that point, need to get into some form of convergent thinking, thinking, right, out of everything we know and most of the time in organizations, we have incomplete information and we have to work on the basis of that and therefore if you've got that incomplete information you still have to say, what are our options and what is going to be the most important one for us to solve this current problem from what we know? And also saying that there are some blocks in groups. You can get defensive routines and it's interesting, some of you may have read, I think it was Chris Argyros' article about why executives find it difficult to learn and it's purely because of these defensive routines. They've been so good throughout their lives doing so well that suddenly when new things turn up they don't want to show that they're just as vulnerable as the rest of us. So they can develop these defensive routines feeling threatened or just hiding ignorance. Another interesting thing that's come up this morning and was also alluded to yesterday, so in terms of team learning I'm going to bring out quite a major thing which is around these informal networks. Communities of practice. Of saying it's not a formal thing, it's not like coming into round a table in an office saying what's the agenda today and so on. It's really coming together as an informal group of people who respect each other in the workplace. The classic example of course was Rank Xerox where they had 1200 pages of technical documents on how to fix photocopiers. And if you and I read it or anyone read it no one can actually fix a photocopier using that. However, what they found was that when they got together at lunch times and in their informal groups and things they'd say, I'd say to Larry, I've got this problem with this copy. I've been shaking my head for two days, just don't understand what's going wrong. And he might say to me, oh, you know what, I had exactly the same about two years ago and what you're talking about the posing problem isn't the real problem. You ought to be looking at this, this, this and this. Which then sort of helps you and everyone else make sense of what's going around. And it developed and one of the important things Larry was quite conscious of bringing out yesterday was about stories and storytelling. It's really saying that the glue in those communities of practice are those stories. Because those stories are about individual people. They're about cognitive ideas. They're about things that happen in the workplace. So it's creating linkages between these stories and everyone that you're working with. And you can have a laugh and a joke about it. And also what's useful is the ties. So you may have strong ties, but it's also useful to have people that have weak ties and we talk about some people who are also boundary spanning individuals, people who can span between one community and another and another because they're also useful because they stop us just being in our nice little world. I think Andrea yesterday was talking about silos. He talked about silos. We can all get into our lovely little silos and it's saying we need these people, these boundary spanning individuals to cross those silos to bring in different and new forms of knowledge to help us along. Okay. Any questions so far? Nope. Okay. So moving to the organisational level, the problem that we have here, and I've put it's paradoxical because I've said organisations are not merely collections of individuals. Yet no organisations are without such collections. Simply organisational learning is not purely about individual learning. Yet organisations learn through the experience and actions of individuals. What then are we to make of this notion about how do organisations learn? Put your hands up if any of you got any thoughts about how do organisations learn or even fail to learn? Any thoughts? Yeah, please. So somehow that individual knowledge is becoming dispersed around the organisation, so it's not just belonging to that individual, it belongs to the organisation. Yep, no, that's an excellent start. Any other thoughts? Yep, young man? Okay, so almost what you're saying is that the managers may decide, this is how we do it, we heard about people, processes and technologies, so they may decide these are the processes, these are the routines that we have and saying that maybe as long as the routine is fine, it's a bit like we saw that film of the two women, they had a routine to sort of do the chocolates, but it got faster and faster and they were thinking, how do we keep doing that? Okay, so how do organisations learn when things don't happen correctly? Yep, yep, come on, come on through. We may just do the post-action assessment or something like that, just analyse what we did, what we could have done better and maybe do some retrospective assessment even and like the lessons learned exactly. Yeah, so it's almost like often at the end of a project, people say, let's have a project review, what went right, what went wrong, what are the lessons learned? Yep, however I know from years of working in the construction industry, you had the same construction companies making the same mistakes again and again, they had fantastic reports saying, oh, we've learnt so many lessons and then you go to a project a year later and they're making the same mistakes. Did you have some thoughts? Culture, okay. This has become their organisational culture, making the same mistake again. Okay, hold on to that, hold on to that for a second. Tell me what cultures we just had to talk about culture, what type of culture do you think would be good for learning and what type of culture would be bad for learning? Particular organisation? Yeah, for any organisation. So we just had a talk all about culture and about knowledge sharing and so on and I'm interested in learning. I'm interested in that we as a nuclear power plant are learning continuously, let's say. Let's say my vision is that we want to be this learning organisation and as a nuclear power plant, I want us to be the top learning organisation in the world. What is it about culture you would say that would help me if I was the director of that plant improve the learning? Well, first is, second I guess is sharing and first is to accept that you cannot know everything and you can't make a mistake. This is the first thing that you have to accept. That you can't know everything? Okay, if you pass it over to this young man. Not acting as a director. Okay, not acting as a director. The guy who's making the same mistake. So it's not top down. You're a director, you ignore him. So it's not important what he tells you. This is the first mistake. When you get in a room and say let's try to find the problem. Okay, just go back to this cultural thing. If I told you that I'm interested in let's say knowledge sharing which we were hearing from the last speaker, a cooperative culture. Do you think a nice cooperative culture would be good for learning? It could be good but it's not present in every nation. So you're saying a nice cooperative culture would be good for learning? Okay. Can I ask you why do you think a cooperative culture could be bad for learning? Could you help me? Why do you think cooperative cultures could be bad for learning? It's a difficult question. But maybe we have to improve not only cooperative culture but the culture of each unit. Okay. And the culture of communication between units. Right. And between top level and the middle level and the ordinary people. So at the different levels you're saying need to explore the culture. Yes. What I'm really trying to get at is that often a lot of people when they look at culture and learning they think oh, cooperative culture, fantastic, improved knowledge sharing, etc. The downside of it is a cooperative culture. Everyone is a yes person. Can become a yes person. Everyone can be, oh, we're all lovey-dovey. We're all cooperative. We all love each other. We're fantastic as an organization. And no one's really questioning what we're doing. Yeah. Everyone's just thinking, oh, but I have nice relationship with you and you and you and you. But no one's thinking, can we do this better? Could we do it differently to what we've ever done it before? Yes. Maybe the confrontation not between the people but the ideas. The ideas. Yes. Okay. So we have to discuss more about the best solution. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Please, please do. Please. Yeah. Be grand. Because we talk about corporate culture. Yeah. And we have many global companies even in the nuclear field that they might have some companies in different countries. So relationship between corporate culture and kind of prevailing national culture. You know that, I don't know. We are Latin Americans, normally things go bottom up in a very scattered way. In some other cultures things are very vertical top down. So if you have an ideal culture for a learning organization but this ideal culture somehow clashes with the national prevailing culture. Yeah. I'll explore that because of course one of the key people who have written a lot about national cultures that everyone goes to is Hofsteder. And what's nice is at London University my colleague wrote a paper dismissing a lot of it. But let's explore some of the aspects. One simple aspect is to think of national culture. For example, even in Europe between Northern Europe and Southern Europe being Northern Europe being more individual oriented Southern Europe being more family oriented. Yep. Or group oriented. And again you could say similar things between Europe and Asia for example being Europe being more individual oriented Japan, Southeast Asia more group family oriented. So yep. I saw in my organization many times some people want to help others correcting their mistakes. And the first person who makes the mistakes don't learn. The other person just correct but sometimes don't teach them how to do because they rush and other problems. I saw them many times and the first person keep doing the same mistakes many, many times. Right. So it's almost saying that they carry on doing that and it's almost as Chris Argyris talked about single and double loop learning of really saying do we in organization whether it an individual or an organizational level when we hit a big problem do we just carry on doing the same things the same way. Yep. Which is a form of single loop learning or do we actually explore some of the assumptions that we've used that have created this problem and what's underlying this and then look at other ways and other options and that's almost a form of double loop learning rather than just saying we just carry on with the same routines. Just going back to Monica's point because she was asking about national culture organizational culture and organizational learning. So with Monica's question I was saying really if you even did it simplistically national culture about individual family orientation with organizational culture remember that majority of people sadly and most of the literature purely look at the surface norms which is about how do we do things around here. Yep. Not many people go underneath it and saying culture is very deep within any organization. You're looking at the beliefs, the values, the attitudes and the assumptions. Yep. And very rarely do people explore that but it's about whether you have for example an American multinational company working in somewhere like India coming from a very individualist culture and then the potential clashes of coming somewhere like India where it's much more group and family oriented that there could be potential conflicts and it was interesting that over coffee this morning you don't mind me sharing this Larry about we were talking about Toyota and talking about the whole conveyor system at Toyota and if you have any problems or questions you type them in on a terminal and it comes up on a big screen and within 30 seconds maximum minute people have already answered your question. Yep. So there is that level of sharing however Larry was saying you know what, they tried something very similar at Ford in America just didn't work because of the different culture. Yeah. So it's really important that one understands the context but doesn't say that the solution is to change the culture because what I was pushing yesterday is changing the culture takes five years minimum even if you get rid of all the senior managers you're not going to change the culture overnight. Yep. Okay. Yep. I'm curious about because you have experience in different industries now you're talking about Toyota so could you share some impressions about the nuclear corporate culture so what you feel that maybe the main threats related to safety like what happened with the individual when an individual makes a mistake or is also accountable is it comparable to other industries because we listen that all around everybody says no so everybody should be brave and willing to engage risks and okay you learn by failing I think this learning by failing is not really here in the... Well safety is up most really in the nuclear industry however having said that I would say that it's really important in the nuclear industry not to isolate yourself. Yep. That's why I've been keen to look at lots of industries throughout the world to look at the commonalities that bring them together rather than... and also saying that the nuclear industry can learn from other industries but other industries can also learn from the nuclear industry. Yep. So there's no major difference in terms of knowledge management practices. Yep. Can I add something to that because of course you learn from mistakes in the nuclear industry and wherever and especially in the nuclear industry if you take the incidents and if you do a nice analysis of these incidents and you use them as learning tools of course you learn a lot of course you learn a lot so the only thing is that how do you manage this? In the sense of the perspective towards risk so the willingness to engage in risk so of course once you make a mistake you have to learn from that and the nuclear industry has developed a lot of tools to learn from mistakes but the question is when you have to add for example what we saw Elon Musk if someone has assumed risks in the world is Elon Musk that has put a lot of money in companies that in principle no one believed in. How is that... how should the nuclear mentality or knowledge management or safety culture position before that like willingness to assume risks? That's totally different Two points here very important first of all no blame culture I think because very often people making nuclear mistakes without being observed but nevertheless some kind of the faults are coming on and the people from my point of good organization they openly will describe what happened that if they know that they will be not punished for this because it's not a crime they made it unintentionally maybe sometimes tools are not good or procedure is wrong or something like this this is very important from other point regarding the risk all people working in nuclear facilities should understand on which type of facility they work and we are coming to the safety culture safety culture in general means that everything that you are doing even small actions you will do thinking somewhere in your background about safety and consequences which can be even simple thing because people sometimes not predict what could be the result of the action but they should stop, think, act from the safety point of view and then proceed and this is really the most important element of the safety culture because we are talking about safety culture safety culture is important safety standard, safety culture but what does it mean each individual should understand that he is working in the risky environment and this risky environment not only the people who are working at nuclear plant or another facility but also I can say society and if each individual will act like this and this could be part of the organizational culture it could be part of the organizational learning, whatever and then we will significantly reduce risks in our activities in nuclear but simply saying each person working in nuclear facility should be responsible person in different aspects I am right? But it is also recognizing what we heard earlier but it is also recognizing what we heard earlier from our last speaker that cultures in the nuclear industry are very different around the world and even within the same country between east and west you will get still very different cultures but what we are hearing is very much about saying this whole notion of no blame but learning from it as a group and collectively that must be a way forward yeah sure, yeah, yeah, please please, please, just pursue it that is true regarding safety culture I think it is one of the most characteristic ingredients of nuclear of course, yeah if I had to avoid this the best way to avoid this is keep doing things in the same way I have always done that the best best is doing nothing so what if I had the possibility of improving safety exactly and I think that is where the whole thing about Larry's point yesterday was that in different industries whichever industry you are in you are not working as an individual you are working with a group of people so then you may say look, I have been here three years and the way we seem to do this particular process in terms of safety stinks I know everyone does it but as a collective I have got a proposal to do it differently what do you all think so that then it is a collective responsibility you are all taking that risk on collectively but also getting external help if it is a major risk issue, yeah and trying to see if you take on that risk what are you going to do to mitigate it if something adverse happens yeah I think oh sorry, just just to this observation I think a questioning attitude is a key ingredient that helps in both ways that's right, yeah it's how I started, okay something I wanted to add on this no-blaming culture and also the learning from the mistakes like in my research group we've got this book that we call How Not To Do so basically what happens is that whenever we take a new student maybe in their project they will make some mistake that will delay the project at the end when they are graduating we will document what they did wrong so that when we take any new student that book keeps on getting bigger and bigger this is how not to do so basically no matter which ideas you are having on how to tackle your problem please don't go this way because this way leads to failure basically a lot of organizations have done exactly that they call it error harvesting yeah where they are sort of saying oh errors and mistakes are good but how do we all learn from it in some way or another and so many organizations have used different techniques but to do exactly what you are saying yes, I have a little problem with the error harvesting in the sense that how not to do is particular to a specific situation for other situation that way maybe the best for them so when you have an error that way away from doing this in that particular way probably it might not help all the students that's my particular Maria Elena just said about having that questioning inside so no matter you may find written down this is the mistakes we've done but you have to say does it apply to this current situation today yeah so you have to ask yourself you can't just take it verbatim that's why I often worry that a lot of things in knowledge management are very prescriptive people say do this, do that do the other and I'd say one thing at least from me take away from this whole week question whatever you're doing yeah oh I've got the slides doing matter the slides I've got time to over there but maybe I'll have one more and then I'll do a few slides and you can tell it five more minutes thank you okay question is more important before I ask my question I'd like to actually do a sort of flashback to your question on factors that actually hinders collaborative learning we shouldn't lose fact of the site that we have we have a sort of individual learning patterns we have fast learners we have slow learners and this tend to actually be a sort of disincentive to collaborative learning experience and that's my take on that so we should actually look at the different individual learning patterns we should factor it in our consideration my question will be centered on actually your take on the best learning model because personally I believe that the constructivist collaborative approach is a good model even though it has some deficiencies as heard by Jim Piaget and Lev Vygotsky et cetera but what I'm saying is when we have a sort of collaborative learning we tend to share our knowledge and experiences and we build on the learner himself is not just a receiver of knowledge he's also a sort of constructor of knowledge because he tend to also give back to the other members of the group so this is I think so I want to have your take on the best learning model or paradigm that you think is best for organizations I'd say for me there isn't a particular one it depends on that context context-contact because in some organizations a very competitive culture can also be really useful for high levels of learning but in others a highly cooperative could be but you have to also within cooperative cultures and cooperative structures almost have to look at each one of them is different is this useful to almost sort of going back to our last speaker helping us meet some of those organizational objectives I'm just going to spend two minutes quickly whizzing through a couple of slides just so that we talked about this single double loop learning this is a good one I like this slide this was from March it's fantastic because it talks about success and failure we were talking about error harvesting and so on so really saying that what happens if you're highly successful you tend to maintain the status quote you think oh everything's fine everything's great we've got our safety standards brilliant we're doing really well all our graphs are showing we're fantastic gets you into risk aversion maybe complacency you're into exploitation and that can lead to efficiencies and reliability but it can also lead to failure however failure itself can be fantastic for organizations because then failure can help organizations look at exploration behaviors and exploratory learning really saying that from these mistakes we're going to look at why did we make these mistakes going into error harvesting that I was mentioning experimenting and that in itself leads to innovation greater resilience and potential success in the future I'm going to okay I'll just do this one last one and then I'll forget about all the slides you can see them online etc sensemaking it's really useful the whole notion we've heard that the nuclear industry highly complex safety is an issue there could be uncertainty certain things could be unintelligible in terms of environmental changes etc how do we make sense when something wrong or bad happens we have various stories we have our mental models our mental models are from what happened in the past when we try and make sense of new situations there's a situational awareness which we're really trying to look at what's happened in the past trying to say what's it mean currently especially if you're in a crisis situation and that will help us develop future actions I wanted to leave you with that because there were two other aspects I was going to cover one is about dynamic capabilities yesterday we heard about competencies KSAs as the HR gang they call it knowledge, skills and attitudes and I forget what else we heard but an important aspect if you want to get into this area look at how do we develop dynamic capabilities when suddenly something new happens how do we develop some form of absorptive capacity also to develop that capacity not that everyone thinks in the same way but we've also within our teams got people that think in very different ways anyway I'll leave it there am I late for coffee no thank you very much is that okay no questions