What have you learned?
When have you learned?
How do you keep learning?

Does the average employee get better at his or her job?

Does the average company/organization actually help people learn, so that that they can get better?

Are you getting better at your job?  (Yes, go ahead and ask me:  “Are you, Randy Mayeux, getting better at your job?)

Here’s Wikipedia’s description of a learning organization:

A learning organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. Learning organizations develop as a result of the pressures facing modern organizations and enables them to remain competitive in the business environment. A learning organization has five main features; systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning.

For an organization to be a learning organization, it has to be made up of learning individuals.  Don’t you think?

So, what are some traits of a learning individual? Here are some thoughts:

When an individual gets new information that “demands/compels” some change, he actually makes that change.

When she is lacking information, she seeks that information, and finds out where to find new information.

When he begins to notice (and he will begin to notice!) that his thinking is stale (and his thinking will get stale!), he will seek and ask for ideas from outside – way outside—his comfort zone.  He will read books and articles from authors/sources he would have earlier simply rejected.

Which, by the way, reminds us – learning individuals will read.  A lot.  And then some more.  And she will especially embrace the value of the longform – essay length articles, and books.  Tweets simply may not have enough content to teach much.

And, in remembering that “bias for action” that Tom Peters wrote about (theme #1 in In Search of Excellence:  A bias for action, active decision making – ‘getting on with it’. Facilitate quick decision making & problem solving), have you seen the movie The Social Network?  In the admittedly fictionalized version of Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook, that trait about Zuckerberg just jumps out at you.  When he got the “idea,” he pounced.  Immediately.  I mean, literally, immediately – he would jump up, run to his dorm room, and go to work.  He would work in 36-hour-sprints to implement the idea.  First the idea – then the work.  He knew how to code, he knew how to make it real, but he needed the idea.  He learned the idea, and then he implemented the idea — right then!

Now that is a learning individual.  And though it would help immensely if your organization helped you learn, you can become a more effective learning individual without the help of the organization.  It.is.your.job! to make yourself an active learning individual.

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Here’s a rather obvious recommendation:  If you live in the DFW area, make the First Friday Book Synopsis a part of your regular schedule.  You will hear content-rich synopses of 24 books a year, and receive valuable handouts in the process.

You will definitely learn valuable information.  But then, it is up to us – all of us – to turn this information into a new, more effective, reality.  And, until we do that, we haven’t really learned anything at all.

As one newcomer put it just last Friday, “why haven’t I been here before?  I will not miss it…”