Learning as a discipline

As an entrepreneur, leader, programmer, sales person, or student we are constantly being pushed to learn new things. In many instances, we actually do end up learning many of those things. But, how do you create a systematic framework for personal lifelong learning, one, which helps us learn across many aspects of business, technology, start-ups? How do you institutionalize learning within your organization, such that the organization (be it a small group, or your entire company) can learn to learn new things in the ever-changing marketplace?

I am a big proponent of building a learning organization. A system of learning that helps you develop closed loop learning process with you and your environment. It is my firm belief that technologists and entrepreneurs who become good at learning, end up being much more successful in their careers eventually. They develop greater resilience to challenges, they are able to morph to changing environments, and therefore establish their mark and leadership within their organization.

Why is learning important?

In a typical company or an organization, one has to deal with multiple business or technical issues. Some times you have to evolve your business model to better fit the market, sometimes the product needs to be developed further or differently than originally envisioned, sometimes the sales tactics within an account has to be thought through differently, or in some cases you may have to try a different strategy to raise financing for your project or company. Challenges can shift from one situation to another, but fundamentally, one has to learn to “adapt” to new and evolving environments, and learn to observe and act. Every Action in business leads to reactions in the environment, you have to learn to observe the reactions, learn from the intended and unintended effects of the action and reaction, and fine-tune your future course in almost real-time. Learning to learn helps you accomplish this heroic act of navigation, while in mode of day-to-day action.

Many of us are so caught up with the tactics of our day-to-day actions and reactions, that we do not ever invest in developing a framework of learning, there by foregoing the opportunity of life-long learning and career advancement.

Build Learning Loops

As you develop an organization (or network) of people who have to learn to learn from each other, it is important that there are clear and simple learning loops between these individuals. For example, a group of developers have to set up a system where QA and developers have clear learning loops between them. These learning loops could be a simple process where QA learns from what the developers are experiencing or where the developers learn from the challenges that QA teams are facing in debugging the code. The purpose of this learning loop within the organization is to flow data, insights, and key findings between QA and developers in a timely and relevant manner. These loops are closed loop as they help both parties learn from each other and hence offer value to both sides. To establish such learning loops, one has to consciously build organizational processes and culture, which fosters team learning across these two groups of individuals. In many situations, when a group of people or even a single individual is failing to correct their problem, or learn from their past mistakes, it could very well be the result of missing learning loops between this group and his environment. A good example could be a sales guy, who is constantly trying to get an appointment with his prospects, but he/she is repeatedly failing to establish contact and is not able to learn from his/her limitations. In this example, if there was a well developed learning loop between the prospect and the sales person, after 2-3-4 attempts of establishing contact, the sales person will start to study the effect of his sales calls and begin to realize that things are not working as planned. He/she will then start to adapt to a “Plan B” which might drive him to try an alternate route to establish that contact with the prospect, or perhaps to change the game by having some one else reach the prospect instead, and then forward the contact to him. This adaptability is the essence of learning individual or a learning organization.

Learning begins with Listening

Good learners are good students. They know how to listen to what is being told to them. In many business and technical situations, there is a clear feedback coming from the customers or markets or other parts of the organization to your actions. Some of this feedback is clear and verbal, and some of these feedbacks are subtle and non-verbal. As a smart professional, your job is to learn how to listen well to these inputs without letting your ego come in the way. The urge to speak up and get noticed is a natural one, but perhaps, should be saved till the point, you have personally assimilated the feedback from the environment. A good example: imagine that you are passionately building and promoting your products, while the customer is clearly, choosing to go with your competitive product offerings. The idea here is not to give up or get demoralized because competition is winning on you. As a good learner, you will focus your energy to listen to this feedback and dispassionately work to change the game to your advantage. Most often, product developers, end up not listening to the market, and therefore miss the window of market opportunity.

Begin to unlearn your past

Very often I come across individuals who weigh in too much of their prior experiences. They may have learnt that serving customers a certain way works well, or in some cases may have a bias towards a style of marketing, which will help them be successful. While past is good to learn from, most of the outcomes of your current venture, will depend on how you navigate the future. You have to look at the world as it comes at you, and apply techniques, which are relevant now, in this time and day - Not what worked last year or last decade. Experience should teach you to unlearn your past, so that you are open-minded for the future. Top tier entrepreneurs and technologists are busy shaping the future, not over applying the rules from their past experiences. Your past experiences gives you a sounding board, a gut check to help you apply what might be relevant today or in the future – No more!

Establish your mentors early on

This one sounds obvious, but very often I find that many professionals do not take the time or trouble to identify a mentor who can give him/her the guidance through his lifetime of career. Mentors have been there done that. They have played several innings; you want to draw upon their experiences to your advantage. Most successful professionals establish their mentors early on in their careers. At siliconIndia.com, I am proud, we have set up a nice platform for mentorship, to help those who want to start learning from their mentors. If you have not checked out the mentorship section of the siliconindia.com web site, I would strongly urge you to do so. These services are freely available to all of the registered members of siliconindia. There are other credible platforms for mentorships, for example TIE has a successful mentorship program to help you navigate through your career or venture startup. Mentors are different from your direct managers, as they are providing you an unbiased advise aimed at merely helping you achieve more with your time and resources. Many forward looking organizations are now formally setting up mentorship programs to complement the traditional management systems, and therefore create a stronger learning culture. The key to success in any mentorship program is a good emotional tie between the mentor and the mentee.

Practice makes you perfect

Most successful professionals, entrepreneurs have achieved their success not through luck or some extraordinary act of brilliance. More often they have achieved their pinnacle of success because they have been practicing their stroke over several years. They keep playing their shots, till they learn to hit the ball with perfection. All of us have gone through our college days, and still remember the days where you spent days solving tens and hundreds of math or science problem to become good at getting your grade. The same act applies in your career. Successful entrepreneurs are marathon runners, they know how to keep at it, keep practicing their strides, till they get it right. And when they do get it right, it appears effortless from the outside as they achieve the impossible. Deep within these successful professionals know that it is their passion and practice that is helping them achieve their dreams.

Tap online resources like SiliconIndia.com to enhance learning

It is this very vision of learning that has led the dedicated team of siliconindia employees and volunteers to create an online platform for life long learning through http://www.siliconindia.com. For those of you who are active members of siliconindia.com online community, I firmly believe that as we are building this powerful siliconindia community, we are helping drive learning and knowledge for the rising Indian professionals. We can help fellow siliconindians through our encouragements, feedbacks, honest criticisms, blogs and articles. I would like to see our siliconindia network community grow into a strong example of a true learning organization, where we draw upon the power of the group, to enhance the career, knowledge and standards for each one of its members. Feel free to leverage professional networks like SiliconIndia.com to help build your own learning network.

As always, please send me your feedbacks or suggestions online at http://blogs.siliconindia. com/gunjan or through email at gunjan@metricstream.com.

Thank You.

Gunjan Sinha