Organizational Learning is No Accident makes an important point: effective learning requires time to reflect…and our “right now” form of communication (email, IM, etc.) doesn’t allow reflection time…making it difficult for people and organizations to change (time being an important component to acclimate to changes).
Excellent material on the challenges of building in the necessary time for reflection to power organizational learning and change. One interesting aspect to this line of thought is that reflection has to become an explicit process for it to work at the operating pace of today’s economy.
It’s a bit of a paradox. When we had time for reflection to work at its natural pace, we didn’t have to depend on learning to keep our organizations aligned with their environment. Now that we need the learning, we can’t rely on unaided reflection.
Turning a problem into an opportunity, we need to highlight the importance of reflection to learning, develop skills at active reflection, and make it easier to create the raw materials for reflection (hint: weblogs). I’ve written about this from time to time with pointers to some resources I’ve found useful.
See:
- Learning to learn
- Reflection on reflecting
- Categorizing knowledge (particularly about After Action Reviews)