Learning Disability # 6 – Experience; Help or Hinder?



Learn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Learning Disability # 6 – Experience; Help or Hinder? article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

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.



EyeSpeak - Learn English Pronunciation. - Earn 70% Per Sale Selling EyeSpeak: The ultimate in English Pronunciation Learning and Teaching.
Magic Learning Systems. - Accelerated learning software for k-12, homeschool, and college students.


Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81


More Articles:


1. Innovation, Idea Selection, Valuation By Kal Bishop
There is no sure fire route to commercial success, but one can maximize the chances of selecting those ideas that are most likely to succeed. Organizations short of R & D resources must implement such processes. The Economist (2003) states that 3000 bright ideas result in 100 worthwhile projects, which are winnowed down to four development programmes. And four such development programmes are required to stand any chance of getting one winner.So how do we value ideas? There are quite a few cate…

2. Innovation Management – Eliciting Dominant Ideas By Kal Bishop
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are other useful definitions in this field, for example, creativity can be defined as consisting of a number of ideas, a number of diverse ideas and a number of novel ideas.There are distinct processes that enhance problem identification and idea generation and, similarly, distinct processes that enhance idea selection, development …

3. Managing or Coping? By Vernon Stent
Why do we have managers? I asked this question on a recent seminar and got into an intense argument with one of the attendees who was a large employer! I like to mix it a little and what fun it was to ask an employer to justify the existence of his managers:Vernon: Why do you have managers? Employer: To manage Vernon: You mean, to cope Employer: I mean, to manage Vernon: If not "manage" as in "to cope", "manage" as in ...what? Employer: Our managers are not just coping, they are making judgem…

4. Agenda-ize to Make Your Meetings More Productive By Larry Galler
Every business that I have ever seen has meetings of some kind. Some are productive but the vast majority of meetings start late, rehash some old stuff, and end even later, rarely producing much in the way of progress. It seems that many meetings happen by inertia, existing because they always have existed and will always exist no matter if they produce anything of value. This is expensive in terms of wasted time and talent. If your business is in this endless loop of non-productive meetin…