Many a times I have wondered whether human minds are attuned to learning in organizational setups in a way that makes them personally grow into amazing individual talents.
As far as I have read and have seen through my experience, I have seen that there belongs a “majority” category that’d have to be pushed to learn things they wont under normal circumstances. Mostly that happened coz of the connection of learning to other things: Learning - knowledge - productivity - rewards (MONEY).
It is seldom that we find people in the lower hierarchy of the organizations who are self motivated to read, learn, and think of bigger things in life irrespective of what others may want or pay for this knowledge gathering expedition. In the Grand Indian organizational setups, people in supervisory roles come with a lot of baggage in terms of Ego, nepotism, subordinate-threat, etc.
To begin with these issues, one needs to see the way most of our children are brought up in different family values. Children are compared to each other and thats done in such a way, it drives them to believe that certain things (like power, knowledge, etc.) are things that only a lucky few have and therefore ‘you show it in your actions that you are better than others’. Which is terrible. Which is like spoiling that child’s future learning patterns and inter-personal relationships.
In most organizations across India, people are used to a learning curve which becomes active when the supervisor or the “management” asks them to learn something and then dangles the proverbiel carrot infront of them. People live their lives and replicate the same thing with their own juniors and the pattern continues. Any attempt to change is met with a resistance that cannot be expressed in words.
I have seen that in start-ups and in smaller set-ups wherein the constraints are so much that you are forced to think other than the ordinary ways, then people go to the drawing boards - the basics. Basics here relate to the innumerable number of research studies that one has to “read” or study to ensure that one is abreast with the latest trends and scientific data that will help to develop the next generation of products. The question here is - what happens when everyone goes into that cycle of jumping to “google” or search things the moment they come up with an idea. The problem of measurements and the data that is available through them, or even the theories of researches is that fundamentally it stops people to think from step 1 to step 2 without consulting any of the above.
The problem with many people today is that right after the objective, they seek the best practices to ensure that they follow the standards set by someone else. I feel it is something like wanting to get someones else’s girlfriend in the way that guy did it sometime back. I will not want that result. It is no harm to read what had happened, but only after I have made a skeleton of what can probably be my action plan (not following best practice blindly).
Learning, which is need based, is something that drives individuals, teams, and ultimately organizations to achieve the best results and sustain systems and winning processes for the next few generations. Why do I need to learn? Because I need to be aware of all possible competencies that are required in my line of work and related stuff. Because I know that end of the day, these basic knowledge factors will be something that will give me the strength and belief of ‘going at it’ all by myself when I have the task to design the next best practice.
Most people are so busy creating the next masterpiece, that they forget to master the “scales” first. Learning is something that can be the music everyone wants to play in their lives. There are many people who live and die without letting others hear that music they had inside themselves. The “music” can be anything - the best sales process, the design that created a furore, the best pitch of a product, the product that changed the course of history for a company, the platform that saw perceptions being changed, etc. But in all this, one has to always remember that we first look at the bigger picture of a jigsaw puzzle, and we begin by placing the smaller blocks in their places one by one.
Stephen Covey says that in most of our lives, we forget that our character and personality ethics are like Harvests. We sow the seeds and we are solely responsible of the quality of seeds that go in and the kind of manure, water, etc we put in for harvesting them. And as is true in real time, every harvest takes it own time. The more we put artificial stress on the land to reap is shorter harvests, more do we lose the fertility of the land in the long run. This has been one my life’s biggest lesson.
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