While
some lessons can be learned by watching—a parent’s reaction after touching a
hot stove can be a good lesson for a youngster on dangers in the kitchen—other
lessons are harder to learn through observation alone. No matter how many times
you watch a surgeon perform open-heart surgery, chances are you won’t ever
learn how to pull off a triple bypass.
And
yet, in business,
companies routinely expect employees to pick up new job knowledge through
vicarious learning—through reading descriptions of tasks in
knowledge-management databases or by observing colleagues from afar. “The
predominant analogy for vicarious learning is the photocopier,” says Christopher G. Myers, assistant professor of Organizational
Behavior at Harvard Business School. The idea: Watch what other people
do, make copies of the good things and dispose of the bad things, and we are
good to go.
But
good knowledge transfer doesn’t quite happen that way, and organizations that
practice watch-and-learn vicarious learning run the risk of undertraining their
key employees, says Myers.
He
challenges the theory in a new working paper, “Coactive
Vicarious Learning: Towards a Relational Theory of Vicarious Learning in
Organizations,” in which he argues that observation and imitation are
rarely the best ways for employees to learn on the job.
“There
are some realms of life where that is true, but for the most part, problems in
business are more complicated,” says Myers.
The
limitations of traditional forms of knowledge management come from two sets of
assumptions, he argues.
The first assumption is that the
most important elements of a job function are observable, ignoring the crucial
tacit knowledge that can influence how someone carries out his or her job. “I
could watch a colleague challenge a student and I could think that’s the way I
should teach, but what I miss is the backstory, about why he is doing it in
that particular case.”
Perhaps even more crucial, those
systems assume that the person undertaking the learning wants to duplicate
exactly what the other person is doing—despite the fact that they may be perpetuating
mistakes made by a predecessor or simply following procedures that may be a bad
fit for a person of a different personality and skill set.
Instead, Myers envisions a model of
coactive vicarious learning.
“The major shift theoretically is
moving from a language of transfer, of taking fully formed knowledge and
passing it from one person’s head to another, and instead talking about
co-creation and building it together,” he says. “What that means practically is
vicarious learning must be more interactive. Both the learner and the sharer of
knowledge bring things to the table and together create something new.” Myers
was inspired to study the topic based on his own experience as an outdoor
wilderness instructor, an area in which the cost of failure is too high for
people to learn only from their own experience. “Trial and error is not
the way you want to learn rock climbing,” says Myers.
When Acquiring Knowledge Is Life Or
Death
In his own research, he has spent
hundreds of hours studying a similarly fraught industry—high-risk medical
transport teams—to learn how they acquire knowledge that can literally mean the
difference between life and death. He found that much of their vicarious
learning occurred not through studying procedural manuals, but through informal
storytelling in the downtime between missions, in which team members related
past incidents. “They would dig in with each other and dissect prior cases a
little bit, asking, ‘Why did you do it this way, and not that way?’ It’s
happening in these more discursive kind of ways.”
By contrast, Myers argues that many
companies employ knowledge management systems that favor more independent,
rather than discursive, learning. “They say, ‘I am going to write everything
down and everyone who wants to know anything about the industry can have that
document at their fingertips,’” says Myers. Except this system often doesn’t
get used.
Source | Forbes
No comments:
Post a Comment