3.4.2 Why Learning Matters In a business context, learning means transforming new information into new skills, behaviors, and actions. Organizations \"learn" in the sense that they modify how they get the job done to reflect new ideas, knowledge, and feedback: how to produce a product more efficiently, how to install new equipment, what the competition is up to, and so on. As in The Fix, learning involves improvement and change. It should be pretty obvious that learning is important to an organization's health and long life. Yet. despite larger and larger investments in education and training, many companies (and managers) still fail to make tangible progress. Some managers don't see much need for further learning. They've got work to do and little enough time to do it. Others see real value in learning, but they, too. feel overloaded with meetings, deadlines, and other work. Still others feel that teaming is too much work and aren't convinced of the payoff. It seems easier and safer to keep doing what already works. Here's Professor Linda on why it's easy for people to neglect learning: Transcript: I think what makes all of this very hard is that if you've been successful and things have worked for you. you dont necessarily know what aspects of what you've been doing have been working for you and which ones have been holding you back unless you have been introspective and reflected on why has it worked. We tend to stop and reflect only when we have a misstep or make a mistake. which is why stars can have more trouble learning to lead because they actually haven't stopped to reflect on why they were even successful as stars or whatever has gone on. So then. when they go to try to help other people. they have some misconceptions about why they were successful. So I think that what's hard about it is that if it's working for you we're all busy. There's just lots to do. We just don't bother. We don't take the time to reflect. and once we do stop to reflect. it's going to take us a while to work that out. And the other piece of it is it's about unlearning. You know good and well what you need to be doing. right? But that means you have to unlearn what you used to be doing. and that is very hard. The problem is. you have to do the right thing poorly before you can do the right thing right. So your performance actually goes down before it gets better. Does your company have an explicit approach to organizational learning (as opposed to just individual learning)? If so. what do you think about it works. and what doesn't work