I’ve been teaching the idea that the strategic initiative leader (the program manager) functions in the role the Chief Learning Officer (CLO).

Here are three essences of the CLO role:

• Establishing an attitude and culture that is friendly to learning. The CLO role regards the statement of “I don’t know” as an opportunity to discover useful information. Ignorance is not a weakness.
• The leader leads by asking questions. One of the best is this: What don’t we know? When problem-solving, the question “How might we ___?” often opens up the conversation.
• Use experiments and probes to increase the learning. In particular, in areas of complexity, watches for emergence. If an experiment is working out, the leader moves to amplify its positive effects. If the experiment is not delivering benefits, the negative effects are dampened.

When it comes to strategic initiatives, I find that a mindset of efficiency gets in the way of success. I recently found some support in an article by An Kramer. The following table summarizes some of the reasons that we think of strategy execution as a learning endeavor rather than one of efficient deployment.

I find that most people in my seminars greatly appreciate the idea of setting the climate for learning in the team. However, they struggle and often are held back by traditional mechanistic notions of organizations that are focused on efficient production.

References. The above table is an adaption (by me) of An Kramer’s article “Ready for the Future: The Four Principles of Nomadic Learning,” in the journal, On the Horizon (2013). Kramer  credits Amy C. Edmondson (2008) for the distinctions.

How have you practiced the idea of “execution as learning?”