The senior leadership of Hertel, a fast-growing $1.2B global industrial services firm with over 10,000 employees headquartered in the Netherlands, has brought the mindsets and leader behaviors of ARC into being part of the everyday disciplines of their work. A 100 year plus old privately held company, Hertel's promise is to Perform, Deliver and Improve - and it keeps that promise, without exception. The use of ARC in its Asian operations may well be the first known use of ARC in countries such as China. Congrats to Hertel for their vision and disciplined leadership!
Signet’s new website, EmergentLearning.com, is focused on information, tools and practices for growing know-how within and across philanthropies and nonprofits through Emergent Learning. What does it take for teams, organizations, communities and networks to learn faster and better about, from, and within the work itself? To learn in partnership with grantees, peers and everyone else who has a role in the social change you aspire to create?
A new research report on the state of the art of learning through grantmaking,
A Compass in the Woods: Learning through Grantmaking to Improve Impact, is now available. It describes in detail the common learning challenges grantmakers face and the good practices we discovered. A few key insights: Foundations over-invest in discrete learning activities, and in producing “lessons learned” at the end of a program... but under-invest in closing the loops that result in visible improvement. This research report will soon be available free along with a self-assessment. More information
Moody Famiglietti & Andronico is a 100-employee accounting and consulting firm in Tewksbury Massachusetts. After reading about AARs four years ago, MFA's leaders decided to bake them into every customer engagement, no matter how small. “AARs and BARs--they're famous here now,” says Matthew Boyle, an MFA partner. “When an e-mail goes around saying 'There's a BAR on Client X' everyone knows exactly what to expect.” What they expect is a 15 to 30-minute, hyper-efficient meeting that includes every person who has interacted with the client within the past year, and employees with experience in similar projects for different clients. Before the meeting, the presiding partner distributes a prep packet that includes the client's tax and audit information. BARs are not the place to get up to speed. You show up up to speed. Read more
SAME promotes and facilitates engineering support for national security by developing and enhancing relationships and competencies among uniformed services, public and private sector engineers, and related professionals. Signet's Marilyn Darling and Charles Parry discussed several challenges such organizations are facing, and offered Signet's perspective on solutions.
Why can't we get Lessons Learned to stick?
In the past decade, the impulse to “not re-invent the wheel” became “capturing and replicating Best Practices” which translated into IT based knowledge management solutions. As we all came to see, “Build it and they will come” failed to deliver on the promise. What is needed at this point is not more software, but a cultural adjustment. Read more
How do we get more buy-in to continuous improvement by line employees?
Methods used in continuous improvement often fail to get enough traction to pay off.
1) It is not clear enough how
engaging in improvement matters to line employees—so they do the ol’ check-the-box;
2) Analytical tools are applied outside of the flow of work (by specialists or in classroom settings)— so there is a disconnect between thinking and doing;
3) Employees don’t see follow-through when they suggest improvements—so they check out. Read more
How do we keep our capacity to respond to emergencies from eroding?
Let's look at that by asking more detailed questions:
- Are there ways to raise the bar on HSEEP standards for Lessons Learned?
- How do we build accountability over time and changing conditions?
- How can we speed up the rate of cultural change to improve preparedness?
Read more
Our institutional memory is walking out the door—what can we do?
First, we need to identify the core capabilities needed to succeed in the future and put a method in place to grow and sustain them. This requires a way to develop and implement practices that surface tacit knowledge. Then, you need a means to embed that know-how in the organization in ways that will improve results in the future. Read more
The Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support (WINGS) conducted a peer learning event at the European Foundation Centre in Brussels, Belgium for participants from 10 countries. For this event, WINGS introduced the methodology known as Emergent Learning (learning that emerges from practice) by Signet Research & Consulting, developed to help organizations or networks improve the quality of thinking about the challenges it faces and build a strong link between what it is thinking and what it is doing in practice. Signet's EL Map™ tool helps articulate the best thinking about succeeding in addressing a challenge, develop a plan to test out that thinking, track results and produce a body of high quality lessons learned.
A toolkit to assist the WINGS network participants strengthen their own peer learning activities will be created. WINGS will use the EL Map™ as the framework for its future peer learning events and workshops. See a full description at WINGS website.
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