The First 90 Days (13 page)

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Managing Learning as an Investment Process

If you approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process—and your scarce time and energy as resources that deserve careful management—you will realize returns in the form of actionable insights. An
actionable
insight
is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you reach the breakeven point in terms of personal value creation sooner. Chris Bagley would have acted differently if he had known that (1) senior management at White Goods had systematically underinvested in the plant, despite energetic efforts by local managers to upgrade, (2) the plant had achieved remarkable results in quality and productivity given what they had to work with, and (3) the supervisors and workforce were justifiably proud of what they had accomplished.

To maximize your return on investment in learning, you have to effectively and efficiently extract actionable insights from the mass of information available to you.
Effective
learning calls for figuring out
what
you need to learn so you can focus your efforts. Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it.
Efficient
learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious time. Chris Bagley’s approach to learning about the White Goods plant was neither effective nor efficient.

Defining Your Learning Agenda

If Chris Bagley had it to do over, what might he have done? He would have planned to engage in a systematic learning process—creating a virtuous cycle of information gathering, analyzing, hypothesizing, and testing.

The starting point is to begin to define your learning agenda, ideally before you even formally enter the organization. A learning agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: What do you most need to learn? It consists of a focused set of questions to guide your inquiry, or hypotheses that you want to explore and test, or both. Of course, learning during a transition is iterative: At first your learning agenda will consist mostly of questions, but as you learn more you will hypothesize about what is going on and why. Increasingly, your learning will shift toward fleshing out and testing those hypotheses.

How should you compile your early list of guiding questions? Start by generating questions about the
past,
questions about the
present,
and questions about the
future
. Why are things done they way they are? Are the reasons why something was done (for example, to meet a competitive threat) still valid today? Are conditions changing such that something different should be done in the future? The accompanying boxes offer sample questions in these three categories.

Identifying the Best Sources of Insight

You will learn from various types of hard data, such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press accounts, and industry reports. But to make effective decisions, you also need “soft”

information about the organization’s strategy, technical capabilities, culture, and politics. The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation.

Questions About the Past

Performance

How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has performed?

How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious?

Were internal or external benchmarks used?

What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage and discourage?

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What happened if goals were not met?

Root Causes

If performance has been good, why has that been the case?

What have been the relative contributions of the organization’s strategy, its structure, its technical capabilities, its culture, and its politics?

If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization’s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics?

History of Change

What efforts have been made to change the organization? What happened?

Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization?

Questions About the Present

Vision and Strategy

What is the stated vision and strategy of the organization?

Is it really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, is the strategy going to take the organization where it needs to go?

People

Who is capable and who is not?

Who can be trusted and who cannot?

Who has influence and why?

Processes

What are the key processes of the organization?

Are they performing acceptably in terms of quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not?

Land Mines

What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track?

What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid making?

Early Wins

In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?

Questions About the Future

Challenges and Opportunities

In what areas is the business most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them?

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What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential?

Barriers and Resources

What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Are they technical?

Cultural? Political?

Are there islands of excellence or other high-quality resources that you can leverage?

What new capabilities need to be developed or acquired?

Culture

Which elements of the culture should be preserved?

Which elements need to change?

Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning process both more complete and more efficient. Keep in mind that you need to listen to key people both
inside
and
outside
the organization (see figure 2-1
). Talking to people with different points of view will deepen your insight.

Specifically, this will enable you to translate between external realities and internal perceptions, and between the top of the hierarchy and the people on the front lines.

Figure 2-1:
Sources of Knowledge

The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following:
Customers.
How do customers perceive your organization? How do your best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? How do they rank your company against your competitors?