Chaos to calm: The importance of being a learning organisation S3 E2

In episode two, Jenni looks at what it means to be a learning organisation. She discusses the evolutionary mindset needed by the leadership team and the things to consider if you want to make some changes both in your mindset or in your organisational culture. She also shares eight ways to grow an evolutionary mindset.

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field

The Fish Rots from the Head by Bob Garratt

The Fearless Organization – Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C Edmundson

Implications of complexity and chaos theories for organizations that learn

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about the importance of being a learning or an evolutionary organisation. Now, I mentioned this in my book, Influential Internal Communication, and it’s come up a few times in the work I’ve been doing with clients more recently. So, I wanted to explore it a bit more and explain it a bit more, just in case it’s something you’re starting to look at. 

So, I’m going to share a bit about what chaos is inside organisations, just to really ground us in what that means. And then I’m going to go into what it means to be a learning organisation, how that can help you go from chaos to calm. And then we’ll also discuss the evolutionary mindset needed by leadership teams and the things to consider to sort of take you there. So, this is

A lot about mindset change. And it’s also a lot about organisational culture.

What is chaos?

Well, in chapter two of my book, I talk about the fact that without communication there is chaos. Now, when I write about chaos in organisations, people often jump to this mental image of people running around, there’s a major crisis, the world’s on fire, we’re all in a state of panic. And it all feels completely chaotic and horrible. But this is rarely the case in organisations. 

Chaos is all around us all of the time. And to take the Cambridge dictionary definition, it’s a total state of confusion with no order. So, not complete panic, but a total state of confusion with no order. And chaos theory in mathematics suggests that apparent randomness of chaos is false.

It says that there are underlying patterns that show connections, patterns and loops. And if we look at this idea alongside that dictionary definition, we can see how it can be applied to organisations. 

If chaos is a state of utter confusion, but there are patterns within that confusion, we can then create calm, we can explore and delve into those patterns and find a way through it. So, even where there is complexity, you can find that ability to bring some sense of control. And in organisations, chaos is everywhere, partly because organisations are complex. And they’re complex because organisations are people.

So, the chaos you see in organisations is the symptom. And getting to the root cause of that is important. So I often talk about understanding the symptoms and diagnosing the root cause. So the symptoms you might see might include things like a high turnover of staff, teams not working well together, a culture of greed at the top, a lack of governance across the board. People off with stress. 

There’s lots of different ways you can see chaos symptoms inside organisations. Depending on the symptoms and the root cause, the fix could be to look at whether or not you have an evolutionary mindset or a learning organisation. Now, this will be particularly relevant for organisations that have a large deskless population, because in my experience, this is where the importance of listening and learning comes in to avoid the chaos. It’s where we often listen the least in terms of organisations.

What does it mean to be an evolutionary or learning organisation? And what’s that mindset you need to get there?

Well, there’s work that’s been done by Smith and St. Ong, who suggest that an organisation needs to be evolutionary in approach and adopting a mindset that is comfortable with change and also having the ability to influence habits, thinking and learning. 

That whole comfortable with change thing stays with me a lot in terms of that definition, because I’m not sure many of us are comfortable with change due to the fact that we’re not naturally comfortable with ambiguity. 

Now, an evolutionary organisation takes a systemic approach to this. It looks at sort of the component parts, the processes, the systems, the design, and it takes a learning approach, a growth mindset approach, to sort of see how it can bring some balance. And to bring that balance needed to control chaos, there has to be this mindset that can work through things and see how these patterns and systems can be created to take things forward. 

Now, as a leadership team, what’s really important is that you have this combined skill set as a team. It’s why the makeup of a leadership group is so important, because there should be complementary skills in there that allow us to almost challenge each other in a constructive way that allows us to be evolutionary and learning at the same time. 

In the book “The Fish Rots from the Head”, which I read after becoming certified in company direction, there is a whole chapter on the learning board. And this was a concept that we covered on the course, and it goes into detail in the book. And the model is described by four distinct viewpoints that must be considered all at the same time. So, for a board to be a learning board, it must be looking at these four different areas. 

Now, even as I’m saying it out loud, I can feel how difficult that’s going to be to do that all at the same time. That’s quite challenging. And it’s much easier to focus on functional activities or tasks or operational things that help the organisation do what it needs to do. But as a leadership team, we need to be stepping up above that. And if you want to be a learning organisation, then this mindset and this perspective is really important. So, I’d encourage you to read more about the learning board model. And I’ll pop some links in the show notes to the book as well. 

Now, all of this has strong links to psychological safety and the work that’s been done by Amy Edmonson. And her book, The Fearless Organisation, was on my must read list in 2021. And I’ve popped a link in the show notes for that book as well. 

Now, Edmondson talks about the fact that a learning mindset blends humility and curiosity. And it’s humility as a trait that we need as leaders, really in every organisation, because without humility, we’re not able to really be curious. Humility is simply recognising that you don’t have all the answers. So, it would naturally encourage curiosity as a trait. And according to Edmondson, research tells us that when leaders express humility, teams engage in a more learning behaviour.

And this is where we can start to explore the things that need to happen to shift mindset and shift the culture to enable this change into being a learning organisation with an evolutionary mindset.

Now, a mindset can be defined as the accumulated shared perceptions or assumptions of a given group, and it covers behavioural, cognitive and emotional elements of the whole group’s psychological functioning. The group’s mindset gains power because it operates outside of consciousness. So it acts like a conditioned reflex. 

Now, this is important because even as we try to change our mindsets, our old ones will always come forward under stress or anxiety or threat. And I think we can all relate to this. We can all try and change our mindsets to change our behaviour. But some of those old habits and old things will always come back when things go wrong. I feel like I’m talking about eating chocolate when I’m trying to be good with food. It’s going to go back to old habits. But it’s trying to change that thinking and change that mindset. And that’s what we’re trying to do. 

What do you need to consider when becoming a learning organisation?

So, to become a learning organisation and enhance or grow an evolutionary mindset, there are a few things to consider. And I’m going to run through eight different points that I want you to explore if this is something you’re starting to look at.

It’s the being able that is so important. Having awareness of change is one thing, but actually being able to change is the skill set that we need to really work on.

And if you don’t understand people, it’s going to be really hard to change both the organisation and your own mindset. We have to understand what it is to be human if we want to become an evolutionary, or a growth, or a learning organisation. 

What don’t you know and how do you want to learn? You know, we all learn differently. So, knowing your own preference, knowing whether you want to learn listening to a podcast or attending a course or reading a book, understanding how we learn and how we grow is really important for us as an individual. It helps us understand more about how we can help others. And it also means that we’re stepping into that space of being able to change, which is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to take action into making a difference. Now, I know that I don’t learn particularly well watching online events. So, during the pandemic, that was particularly challenging when a lot of the in-person events moved to being online. I’d much rather be in person. And that’s how I tend to learn. So, having that awareness has helped me work out the best ways for me to grow. 

So, we might want to think about the reasons why we might be procrastinating on something. What are the things that are stopping us? Is it fear for procrastination? Is it mood? Is it that we want things to be perfect? What are the things that are stopping us from moving forwards? And importantly, when chaos hits, do we just bury our head in the sand? Do we just overthink it? Do we just avoid it? Do we just ignore it and run away? You know, if we’re not ready to openly discuss those symptoms and those things that we’re seeing that are causing chaos, that’s possibly a reason why we’re not able to grow and change the mindset and change that organisation to be more of a learning organisation. 

So what needs to change in order to bring a sense of calm, and what needs to change in order to align to the business outcomes? Now that isn’t always easy, but that has to be the focus that we’re looking at. What is the business trying to achieve and how do we need to change our mindset in order to do that?

You know, we have to make it okay to talk about where things have gone wrong.

And proactively invite input from others across the organisation. If we’re not listening, talking, discussing everything, we’re not learning. Now, I believe mindset is the main challenge organisations have, and part of this is linked to our inability to be vulnerable, which stems from our need to be accepted and belong. It’s why so much of the work we do with organisations and teams has to start with understanding more about people. If we can’t change our mindset, the organisation won’t change and grow. And being a learning organisation is where you can really start to thrive.

How can I actually achieve this?

Now, I had some feedback from a listener of the last two seasons of the podcast who asked me to include some more case studies. So here I want to share a bit about some work we’ve been doing with a client. Because in the focus groups we were running with their deskless workers, we were discussing what needed to change in terms of internal communication. Now, the conversations in focus groups often go in various directions. And in one of them, there was a really strong desire from the team on the front line to change the organisation to a learning one.

They used this language specifically: we need to be a learning organisation. They wanted the leadership to be open to ideas from the ground. They wanted them to listen to the reality of the work. And they wanted them to accept that things are really just a bit broken in terms of trust and culture. 

Now, we’re still in the process of working with this client on the outcomes of the focus groups and also of the survey. But what was really interesting was that it showed me the power of listening and action. You know, if we don’t listen to the people inside our organisations and take action, we won’t change things to ensure we thrive and hit the goals of the organisation. And for workers on the front line, the deskless workers, they don’t always feel listened to. And the learning organisation really puts listening at the heart of that.

So, if changing your organisation to be more of a learning organisation, to have an evolutionary mindset or a growth mindset, then listening has to be the start of that. 

Thank you for listening!

In the next episode, I’m going to be talking about leadership as a team. We often talk about leadership as one person to many. So I want to talk about the importance of it as a team. It’s a topic that comes up again and again for us in the work that I’m doing with leadership teams and boards and communications functions, helping them improve communication inside the organisation. If we don’t look at the leadership team as a whole and that alignment up there, we’re going to struggle to really go from chaos to calm. So I want to delve into that a little bit more. 

Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. And you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. Please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. And as always, details are in the show notes.