Isn’t it always interesting to hear somebody say “yeah, we tried that, it didn’t work…” When it was tried; what were the conditions surrounding the business? How was it implemented? How were staff trained? Most questions are never answered with any clarity and real understanding. No real analysis of the changes failure or success was ever done. Meaning that an opportunity to learn was lost.

We all learn by our experiences, from walking to riding bicycles, trial and error and a few bruises and scrapes. We take actions and observe the results. What would we think if we made a decision and never saw the consequence of it? This could be the case if the results are far out into the future or in a distant part of a larger system.

Kinda like sending an e-mail or fax and never really knowing if it got to the intended recipient! Yeah, that does happen. Fire and forget!

This in a larger extent is the problem facing businesses and organizations. We learn best from experience but often we don’t directly experience the consequences of our most important decisions.

Promoting staff, introducing new computer systems and hardware, new facilities, etc are typical of decisions that don’t leave much chance for trial and error learning.

Cycles may be longer than job tenure and we all have short memories. We have seen examples of this in student enrolment at colleges when there is a surplus of a typical field, say lawyers. Enrollment drops and students switch to other fields. As the cycle runs its course another shortage develops. It’s much like the “buy high, sell low” philosophy so students should look at entering a field when few are entering it to be at the gate when the next shortage is evident. Seems obvious now that I mentioned it doesn’t it?

What tends to happen is that businesses form functional silos to allow managers to get a handle on their decisions and their impact. These silos often end up leading to fiefdoms which stop the free flow of information across the silos. Then process management is introduced to allow information to travel across silos, such as ‘order to cash.’ This has not proved to really break the silos but does open information flow. Still leaving room for improvement in understanding decisions and their actions.

So the question is; Are we really learning form our experiences? Very large organizations have developed complex management cockpits and dashboards to try and learn from their decisions. So unless you’re working for one of the large companies with budgets nearing the GDP of a small nation, the results of your decisions may not be what you think they are.

Ensure rational dialogue takes place to evaluate new ideas, they may not be the same old solutions re hashed. The environment may have changed significantly, there may be a new approach that will make it all work!

Your ‘experience’ may be leading you and your business astray.

Graeme Nichol, principal Arcturus Advisors, (http://www.arcturusadvisors.com) has enjoyed worked on 4 continents gaining experience through Big Six consulting companies and boutique firms. Some of seemingly useless at the time.... Including; Business strategy, project management, change management, systems thinking, developing learning organizations, team development, productivity and quality improvement, and large scale ERP implementations.

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