Guy Kawasaki has an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer on his new book, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management. I like a lot of what he has to say, but one question and answer made an important point about strategic capacity:
Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.
One of the cornerstones of strategic capacity is “Learning by Doing.” It seems so simple, yet we don’t actually do it, so that’s why Pfeffer has to point it out.
Most strategic planning processes are biased against both experimentation and learning. Once you break up the plan into your functional areas, you realize that most of your resources will go into just getting the basics done. Maybe next year we’ll have that fund for experiments. You don’t learn that way. And I’m not sure that the way we add metrics to our strategic plans actually contributes to learning. Is that really self-reflection?
Comments