The Four S’s Of A Learning Organization

[Original article published on Forbes]

By Doug Pardo, Forbes Councils Member

As an executive coach, I serve clients leading early-stage, high-growth organizations. For many, there often isn’t time to consistently step back and learn from suboptimal outcomes. A common mode is often “heads down, get things done and find quick solutions;” this rarely if ever gets to the heart of the issue or the role that the leader is playing in the issue. As this occurs, team members head down diverging paths, reducing team alignment and increasing the future likelihood that a team underperforms.

In contrast, stepping back and investing time and attention into diagnosing issues will have the opposite effect: Individual and team growth compounds over time, leading to a culture of learning. Accomplishing this requires coordination and buy-in from teams at all levels and clear communication from leadership on how issues will be addressed and diagnosed. A model I often highlight is the Four S’s Learning Framework—See, Synthesize, Solve and Systematize—sequential components that promote efficient, focused learning.

1. See

• Identifying and surfacing suboptimal outcomes requires a culture of safety, trust and humility. Issues can very easily rest in an individual or organizational blind spot or could be intentionally avoided altogether. Ensuring all team members are scanning for issues will ensure that they don’t fall in the blind spot of any one team member. Avoiding the assignment of blame and fault and instead sending a strong signal that ownership, accountability and learning are encouraged and rewarded will build safety and trust, reduce defensiveness and promote issue identification and visibility.

• If you don't know what the problems are, you aren’t solving them and may even be focused on the wrong ones. Whether they're big or small, measurable or not, a team needs to identify where the suboptimal outcomes are occurring—where actual outcomes do not match what is/was expected. At this point, seeing does not require solving. Addressing everything can lead to fatigue, inefficient use of time and missing patterns. Done well, your teams will be better able to recognize and identify trends and patterns.

2. Synthesize

• It’s critical to connect the dots between the issues to identify key patterns. If you’re successful at identifying where outcomes aren’t meeting expectations, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. It’s important to take the time to find and identify the patterns across the issues that are identified. If there are 20 “issues” on your list, for example, there are almost certainly not 20 separate issues to solve. Distilling the list of issues to the areas that require the team’s attention will help guide and focus diagnosis.

• Identifying a pattern will result in learning that can be applied to other issues. Yes, some issues based on scope or degree of misalignment may require their own attention, but many will be related. When the team forms a comprehensive view, you’re in a position for more efficient problem-solving and effective learning. Efficiency is not a goal unto itself, but the reality for early-stage, high-growth companies is that it’s necessary.

3. Solve

• Diagnosis starts with identifying whether expectations were understood and aligned at the outset. In hindsight, leaders often realize their teams did not have a shared vision of what success looks like, were working toward different goals or were even operating from different plans. Once the gaps are identified, focus on the role of the people (especially the leaders) and the plan itself. Who missed what? Why? Where did a leader not provide clarity? Exploring these questions will help you to identify what elements of the design need to be improved, how team members need to improve and where leaders can provide enhanced clarity.

• It’s less about quick remedies and more about thorough diagnosis across the patterns that were identified. Accomplishing this requires making sure to avoid jumping to quick and often incomplete solutions. Don’t confuse feeling good about finding a quick solution with finding the right solution. Instead, focus on the deeper, more patient discussion about the people and the plan that led to the suboptimal outcome. It’ll pay significant dividends in terms of time.

4. Systematize

• Once the learning occurs, all teams need to be made aware of the improvements. Great learning often gets lost, leading to repeat issues and, furthermore, significantly reducing the compounding effect of the learning over time. Each team and leader can choose to communicate the learning in their own way, but what’s most important is that the learning is shared and codified in a way that allows for others to operate consistently in this new way so that it becomes a part of how the team operates going forward.

• Codifying and sharing the learning in order to incorporate it into the DNA of an organization takes discipline. However, it does not have to be a formal process nor something that happens separate from the day-to-day work. It can happen at the local level. The learning can be discussed and incorporated as the objective is being pursued, or in a weekly sync or as part of a plan. It takes a team of people to invest time in something that will pay dividends later, and learning should be a core part of how the organization operates. What matters is that it becomes a natural part of how the team operates and pursues excellent outcomes.

There’s no one right way for a company to integrate learning and problem-solving into its organization. In some companies, it may be a formal and discrete process with scheduled meetings and certified managers. In my experience in the military, it took the shape of “after-action reviews” and in-the-moment course corrections.

Regardless, just by starting down this path, a team will begin the process of making it habitual. As you experiment with applying this framework and weaving it into your organizational DNA, the team will inevitably grow and learn together and, in turn, be more prepared to solve and learn from the challenges ahead.