LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how to enhance collaboration and performance in large-scale organizations through Flow Engineering
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Exploring the impact of GenAI in our organizations & creating business impact through technology leadership.
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Just as physical jerk throws our bodies off balance, technological jerk throws our mental models and established workflows into disarray when software changes too abruptly or without proper preparation.
Leaders can help their organizations move from the danger zone to the winning zone by changing how they wire their organization’s social circuitry.
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
February 10, 2025
As we discussed in our previous post, an organization’s ability to learn continuously is more than just a nice thing to have—it’s a critical competitive advantage.
As Mark Schwartz argues in The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy, successful organizations don’t just encourage learning—they systematically embed it into their operational fabric through what he calls “learning bureaucracy.”
As Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear note in their award-winning book Wiring the Winning Organization, the most successful organizations create the conditions in which people can solve difficult problems and bring new insights into practice quickly and effectively. That is, leaders can wire their organization for success by not just encouraging but enabling continuous learning.
Let’s dive into some tips on how to enable continuous learning in your organization.
According to research presented in the guidance paper “How to Thrive (or Fail) in Building a Learning Culture,” leaders must provide both time and physical space for learning to occur. This means:
A cautionary tale from the guidance paper describes an organization that invested heavily in innovation centers with design-thinking tools and collaboration areas. Despite the investment, employees avoided using these spaces because taking time for learning was politically seen as not doing “real work.” The lesson? Both space and cultural permission are essential.
In Sooner Safer Happier, Jonathan Smart and his coauthors warn against creating “learning bubbles” or silos where knowledge gets trapped within teams or departments. To prevent this, organizations need robust systems for sharing learning:
Toyota, as described in Wiring the Winning Organization, provides an excellent example through their systematic approach to sharing learning across teams. When one team discovers a better way of working, they have specific processes to ensure that learning spreads throughout the organization.
Mark Schwartz argues in The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy that organizations need to go beyond just encouraging learning—they need to systematically embed it into their operational fabric. Here are practical approaches:
Several tools can help enable continuous learning:
Traditional metrics like training hours completed don’t capture real learning impact. As demonstrated in Sooner Safer Happier, organizations should focus on outcome-based measures. As stated in the book:
“A focus on output, rather than outcomes, guides behavior away from continuous learning, reflection, and adaptation…In a learning organization, continuous learning happens at the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level at the same time. The absence of any of these layers prevents the creation of a learning organization and keeps knowledge siloed inside learning bubbles. Focusing on outcomes with nested learning loops promotes organization learning and continuous improvement.”
Barclays provides a compelling example. As documented in Sooner Safer Happier, when they shifted focus to measuring actual business outcomes, they saw dramatic improvements: lead times decreased by two-thirds, throughput tripled, and incident rates fell by a factor of twenty.
Begin with these concrete steps:
The key is moving beyond just encouraging learning to actually enabling it through concrete systems, tools, and practices. As Kim and Spear emphasize in Wiring the Winning Organization, leaders must create the conditions where continuous learning becomes a natural part of how work gets done.
Remember: the goal isn’t to create perfect learning systems from the start, but to begin building the infrastructure that makes continuous learning possible and practical.
Next week, we’ll explore how leaders can model and encourage these learning behaviors throughout their organizations.
Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.
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