Learning vs. Performance

Could it be that "great teams are less productive?"

That's the headline that got my attention over at Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge.

As it turns out, there is understandable tension between "learning" and "performance," insofar as when you're learning something new you're probably not immediately very good at it. In other words, there's inherent tension between performance today (where you excel at doing what you've done before) and performance tomorrow (where, unless you're learning some new things now, you'll be behind the curve).

But back to the HBS research. 

Prof. Amy Edmondson started her research in the context of hospitals, where tracking and analyzing "errors" has been raised to a high science.  In hospitals, "errors" are an indispensable input to learning and organizational change.  So Prof. Edmondson assumed that she would find a positive correlation between high-performance teams and low error rates.

She found the opposite:  The more integrated, effective, and highly functional the team, the more error rates were reported.

And massaging the data in various ways only confirmed or amplified the result (for example, controlling for the severity of the patients' disease on the assumption that "better" teams might get harder cases just made the effect more pronounced).  Then the eureka moment:  In well-led teams, the climate of openness made it easier to report and discuss errors, as opposed to teams with weak or punitive leadership. 

Good teams, in other words, didn't commit more mistakes, they recognized and recorded more mistakes.  

If you're wondering how to transfer this from the operating room to the conference room, I have some thoughts:

• Poor communication, or an environment dominated by bullies and narcissistic perfectionists, will ensure that everyone in sight devotes tremendous energy to ensuring that mistakes are not recognized, or are blamed on innocent bystanders if recognized, or are turned into exercises in obsequious self-abasement if recognized and tagged to their owner.  A recipe for better performance next time?  Not.
  
• By contrast, a high-performing team, with a culture of openness and an "idea-friendly" approach, will acknowledge and make the most of "mistakes"—which, assuming beneficent intentions all around, are most likely just attempts to go the extra mile.
  
• When I say "making the most" of mistakes, I should clarify what I mean.  And to clarify that I need to explain that I think there are two fundamentally different categories of mistakes, or categories of learning opportunities, if you prefer:
  
  • Situations where someone fails at accomplishing a well-known task with ample precedents and a well-worn track record of success by others at different times and places.  These are failures to understand precedent:  To understand how to ride a bike, how to dance to a waltz in four-time, how to prepare for a deposition.  The learning opportunity here is simply to put the unfortunate under the guidance of a more experienced senior and let mentoring do its magic
    
  • Then there are situations where the "mistake" is because we're in unknown territory and you tried something that plausible might have worked but didn't in reality.  Here the learning opportunity is to de-brief, reanalyze what went wrong and what could have been done differently, and figure out how to do better next time.

Now, the question and the challenge for you as a senior manager is how to distribute the individual, high-performing, teams' learning across the firm. 

Sometimes, of course, it can't be done:  A new approach to summary judgment motions probably won't gain much traction with your tax lawyers.  But you can still celebrate the innovations and signal that your firm rewards creative thinking.

But your most important job may be precisely to help others walks that fine line between high performance today and stasis tomorrow. "Learning" is opposed to "performance" only in the temporal sense.  Learning today is an investment in performance tomorrow, but/and learning today distracts from performance today.

There's still one thing we know works:  Open lines of communication.  To identify mistakes as promptly as humanly possible, to diagnose the cause and apply the right "learning opportunity" paradigm, and to ceaselessly push into the future.