Become a Learning Organization

Being agile and learning how to iterate on customer feedback is something I am learning to harness much more. The ability to learn new things, especially in a landscape where technology is changing and evolving so quickly, is an important skill to hone. This is also true for businesses. Companies and organizations cannot afford to hang on to the status quo for too long before the tides of change roll around.

We’ve seen how this happened in the past with waves of disruption that left incumbents in their tracks. Examples of Netflix disrupting the video rentals market or Uber disrupting the taxi cab industry spring to mind. If you fail to embrace the change, you will often be left behind.

Innovation through experimentation is a sentiment that is heard a lot in the technology and startup world. Fail fast and fail often is a mantra many strive for. The question of whether failure is really ever failure, but rather a means of learning something you would have never otherwise known unless you tried is a healthy approach to take. As long as you strive to create value with these types of experiments, you are sure to learn plenty in the process.

So becoming a learning organization is as much about figuring out what is currently working as it is about knowing what is also coming down the line. It seems to me that probably the best way to monitor this is to have a very tight relationship with your customers. Becoming data rich from constantly engaging with your end user gives you great feedback and allows you to assess market sentiment at the same time.

“The companies that we admire today are great at building strong processes for understanding customers on an ongoing basis, as opposed to one-off research activities while hoping some magical insight will drive the entire product strategy. Those processes and the culture behind them are what leads to constant innovation.”

Learning how to learn

The ability to learn is a core strategy for you and your business. Learning to become efficient at learning will be a strength you can use as a competitive advantage. As a startup or small business owner, you will want every competitive advantage you can get. With small teams, personal mastery and your team’s ability to integrate the learnings of each person into your overall strategy for the future is key to your success. Being a small team allows you to be very agile with this approach, and benefit faster than larger organizations.

Continuously gathering feedback and learning from your existing users can also help to shape the mental models you hold about your product or service in relation to the market. By challenging your own mental models on the current state of your user base, you are constantly upgrading your perception of how things work and what you can do now to prepare for the future.

Technology and Software as a Service startups are one industry where learning and feedback is key to building a solution that works for the end user. Agile methodologies and constant iteration are employed in order to refine and enhance the product offering. But this methodology can be applied for any business really.

Encouraging experimentation as you evolve and grow will help to keep fresh ideas circulating. Every company, big or small, needs to learn how to cope with rapid and unexpected changes. Creating better learners also leads to better productivity, which leads to efficiencies in your business' ability to adapt to change.