COLLECTIVE LEARNING

You can learn, but can you learn with others? If we are to develop effective groups, we need to be able to get people to first think together and then secondly, to learn together. In Neuro-Semantics we have focused on these skills in our Meta-Coach Training of Group and Team Coach Training. These are both group coaching skills and, simultaneously, leadership skills. To this point, Arie de Geus of Royal Dutch/Shell, tells this story in his book, The Living Company.

In the early 1900s, milkmen in England would deliver bottles of milk to the door of each country home. At the time the bottles had no cap, and two different species of British garden songbirds— the titmouse and the red robin— learned to siphon the sweet, rich cream from the top. Then between the two world wars, dairy distributors began placing aluminum seals on the bottles. Cut off from the rich, abundant food source, the individual birds — both robins and titmice—occasionally figured out how to pierce the seals. By the 1950s the entire titmouse population in the United Kingdom—almost a million birds —had learned how to pierce the seals. However, although individual robins had been as innovative in breaking the seals as individual titmice, the red robins as a group never regained access to the cream. The knowledge never passed from the individual innovators who had learned to pierce the milk bottle seals to the rest of the species.

Now that’s interesting and scientists were curious about why. Here’s what they found out: This difference in learning behavior could not be attributed to the birds’ ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the titmice and the red robins had the same range of communication. But was different were their social organizations, in fact, they differed greatly. Red robins are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robins sends a warning as if to say, “Keep the hell out of here.” They communicate in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries they do not cross. Titmice, by contrast, are a social species. They live in couples in the spring, until they have reared their young. By early summer, when the young titmice are flying and feeding on their own, the birds move from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten. These flocks seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside. The conclusion of the scientists who studied this case: Birds that flock seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly.

“Flocking,” as cooperating and collaborating, not only increases learning, it accelerates the speed of our learning and adapting. Arie de Geus, drew these conclusions: “Any organization with several hundred people is bound to have at least a couple of innovators. There are always people curious enough to poke their way into new discoveries, like the titmice finding their cream. However, keeping a few innovators on hand is not

enough, in itself, for institutional learning .... Even if you develop a high-caliber system of innovation, you will still not have the institutional learning until you develop the ability to flock.” (Arie de Geus, The Living Company. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 1997. Jeff S. Wyles, Joseph G. Kimbel, and Allan C. Wilson. Birds: Behavior and Anatomical Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (July, 1993).

Now while learning can be can a solitary activity, when individuals engage in that kind of learning they can only go so far in terms of group learning. For real progress, we have to learn together—to learn the process and art of collaborative learning. That’s an entirely new phenomenon and it is an experience that requires collaborative leadership.

It requires collaborative leadership because in traditional organizations there are numerous barriers that block this kind of mutual and shared learning. For example, there is the myth that “information is power,” there is the rule about giving information only “as needed.” There is the lack of feedback about the actions that people take and there is the lack of information about “what might have happened from the result of actions not taken.” All of these things prevent collaborative learning.

Such collaborative learning will require establishing feedback loops. It also requires experimenting to discover what works and what doesn’t. We also need a learning culture within groups and organizations, one where people can challenge ideas and hidden assumptions.

Collaborative learning inherently involves sharing what we’re learning, and spreading our insights and discoveries. Yet how many are paranoid of this! They fear that someone will “steal”their ideas and not give them credit. And that does happen. That’s why we have to have a trusting community and collaborative leaders who, in turn, prevent such things from happening.

For more — see the books The Collaborative Leader and Group and Team Coaching.