Most organisations say they want to become learning organisations.
They invest in training.
Leadership development.
Knowledge systems.
Reviews.
Data.
Lessons-learned exercises.
All of these can help.
But I’ve been wondering whether learning begins somewhere rather more fundamental.
With a choice.
Something happens.
A decision produces an unexpected result.
Someone receives feedback.
An assumption turns out to be wrong.
A colleague sees something differently.
At that moment, we have choices.
We can defend what we did.
Explain why circumstances were against us.
Look for someone else to blame.
Quietly move on.
Or we can become curious.
What happened?
What part did my choices play?
What can I understand now that I couldn’t understand before?
What might I choose differently next time?
This is where I believe Human Agency becomes important.
Human Agency is the ability of people to make helpful conscious choices and to act upon them.
Learning isn’t simply receiving new information.
It requires us to do something with it.
And sometimes that means being prepared to change our own understanding.
That isn’t always comfortable.
The more invested we are in an earlier decision, belief or course of action, the harder it can be to examine it openly.
Which creates an interesting organisational problem.
A company can possess enormous amounts of experience without necessarily becoming wiser.
People can attend training without changing behaviour.
Teams can conduct reviews without questioning assumptions.
Organisations can record lessons without applying them.
The information exists.
The learning doesn’t necessarily follow.
Perhaps that’s because genuine learning requires agency.
Someone has to choose to question.
Choose to listen.
Choose to reconsider.
Choose to accept responsibility for their part.
And ultimately choose to respond differently.
Leaders influence those choices enormously.
When somebody says “I think we got that wrong,” what happens?
When established thinking is questioned, is curiosity encouraged or regarded as disloyalty?
When someone changes their mind because the evidence has changed, is that recognised as learning — or criticised as inconsistency?
Every response teaches people something.
Not simply about the subject under discussion.
But about whether it is wise to keep learning openly.
Perhaps the organisations that learn fastest aren’t necessarily those with the most information.
They are those in which people remain willing to change what they do because of what they have learned.
And that raises a rather different question for leaders:
Does your organisation merely accumulate experience — or does it develop the Human Agency to learn from it?
I’ve written more about Human Agency and why I believe it matters to organisations here: Human Agency Paper
Related Articles:
How Human Agency Shapes Organisational Performance Before Results Appear
Why Organisations Cannot Mandate Trust: The Role of Human Agency