Learn or Lose: Agile Coaching and Organizational Survival

by Daniel Prager

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. 

― Alvin Toffler 

Introduction

Overview: Change and evolve, or wither and die

For organizations to survive and thrive in the Information Age they must become truly adaptive. This will require a huge cultural transition away from the mechanistic, hierarchical, command-and-control approaches that were highly successful through the recent Industrial Age, but have now expired.

What is needed for survival is a transformation into true Learning Organizations. The essential cultural change is from a rigid focus on performance and risk-avoidance around a fixed (or infrequently changing) business model, to one that embraces continual learning, experiments, and small, typically reversible, changes.

Agile and Lean methods talk about learning and change, but I want to emphasize these facets as the central factor to cultural change. Without embracing ongoing learning and change, one may well upgrade one’s old approaches by cherry-picking elements of the new “Agile” way, but this is likely to only be a short-lived improvement. It is not enough.
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Read the rest of my article on InfoQ