February 1998 Marketer Articles

A Commitment to Education

By Karen Roper, SMP, and Alan Lambert

Symbiotic Connections
The handwriting has been on the wall for years: Education is falling behind change.

Just as computer hardware and software become obsolete as soon as we buy them, what we learn in school is passé before the ink on our degrees is dry.

As was predicted by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in 1970, we've reached a time when technology is driving change so fast, we can hardly keep up.

Yet, as A/E/C consultants, we are expected to lead the technological revolution, not follow it. Our best clients-who have the sophistication to acclimate quickly to new technologies and improved service delivery methods-will want to follow our lead. If we don't lead them, someone else will while we scramble to catch up.

How many clients can afford not to work with innovators?

Even public-sector agencies are under tremendous pressure to improve the quality of what they do and how they do it. Commercial owners and government entities alike have to answer to the imperatives of the marketplace. Those who cling to the tools and processes of yesterday are pacing themselves into extinction.

A/E/C companies succeed by creating value for themselves and their best clients. In this age of short product life cycles, long-term relationships are sustained only through a vigorous investment in a two-way learning process involving education, testing, refining, and sharing. By committing to a constant exploration of the tools and innovative methods that enhance the work you and your client do together, you engender a symbiotic connection that feeds on itself and nourishes the relationship.

Marketers have a special role here, because we understand that corporate viability and innovation are essentially marketing issues. What counts is the quality of our organizational cultures. It takes guts to invest in the future. And, it takes a special blend of organizational competence to attract and nurture the kind of innovative creativity that continuous learning breeds. Marketers, more than most in this industry, are uniquely prepared for driving this force for organizational re-birth.

Can we do it? Some of us will; many of us won't. But we all can do far more to be at the forefront of the revolution. The Learning Organization

A generation ago, people came out of school at a specific level and looked for a position in a company where they could spend their entire working lives. Because of the slower pace, people sometimes held the same position throughout their careers.

In the next generation people realized they could often gain better positions, and sometimes better experience, by switching companies. Things moved a little faster, and they picked up knowledge by moving around and learning from different colleagues.

Though technology was changing faster, companies found little reason to invest in training people who would take their new knowledge with them when they moved on. They found it more economical to hire people who had learned the new technologies and skills-or at least claimed to-elsewhere.

Today, a company's survival depends on taking charge of this situation. In this world of accelerating change, a commitment to developing team members through ongoing education, research, exploration, and training will make a difference, both to employee longevity and to forging stronger relationships with clients.

A good employee is smart enough to know that she will learn more and go farther in her career by staying where a commitment to education and learning keeps her at the forefront of change, while less-talented employees may opt for frequent moves that mask their shortcomings.

A smart client knows that, by teaming with companies with a real commitment to education, he will have continuing access to the leading edge of technology and project delivery practices which, in turn, will expand his own competitive position within his industry.

The challenge for companies is not so much to create "training programs" as it is to create the cultural impetus for learning and innovation.

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, argues that five interlinking disciplines promote this cultural bias for constantly expanding the organization's capacity for greater value: Systems Thinking
Understanding organizations as integrated sets of activities or "whole systems" that constantly adapt to change.

• Mental Models. The capacity to question assumptions and help build new mental pictures of what the organization (and its business relationships) can be.
• Team Learning. Creating "dialogue" to exchange effectively, among teams and their clients, ideas and information that enhance organizational capacities and deepen client relationships.
• Shared Vision. A sense of shared personal visions of the future that grow into a unified vision for the organization and its core clients.
• Personal Mastery. Linking individual goals for personal growth to the organization's vision-and through "creative tension," accurately contrasting organizational vision with current reality and drawing current reality toward the vision.

The means through which a company adopts this model as its organizational core are not easy-they take tremendous commitment, leadership, and the ability to effectively link employees and company leaders who intuitively share these values.

One way to start is to probe deeply into areas of technology and service delivery relevant to a company's future markets and clients-and then to identify key players in the organization who can amplify and expand this body of knowledge to make it integral to the company's processes.

Such exploration and educational growth is expensive. It is not unreasonable for a company that makes the commitment to provide the tools and time for this sort of educational research to expect a similar commitment from the worker to the company. While the company can't expect workers to sign up for life in order to receive training, reasonable commitments and participation in the cost should be negotiated as part of an overall contract with selected key individuals.

Because education is expensive in terms of time, resources, and out-of-pocket expenses, owners must select candidates wisely. Employees should be selected by considering the other values they bring to the company: people skills, work ethic, can-do attitude, and other hard-to-teach talents.

Good employees are good candidates even, or maybe especially, if their areas of service are becoming obsolete. Talented, dedicated team players in dying markets should be targeted for immediate participation in the learning organization.

Of course, in all cases the candidate's aptitude must be assessed. You want to initiate education in areas where workers will have the opportunity to excel-on behalf of themselves and their company, and on behalf of the company's primary clients.

Educational Resources
Organizations must then consider the educational resources available to them. A learning organization would draw from at least two primary sources:

1. programs that provide skills development in technologies, applications, and work processes

2. research and development to expand and innovate organizational operations.

Skills Development. For the first area, a multitude of options exist, from consultants who customize in-house training programs, to local colleges or universities with flexible-schedule classes, to self-directed or online courses of study, to seminars and workshops sponsored privately or by professional societies. It takes some serious research to select the right ones for your needs.

The worst possible way to select an educational resource is to respond blindly to the mailer in your in-box. Education is an investment. It should be researched just like any other investment. Review what the resources promise to deliver, check references, and if possible, meet with the educator. Then invest a small amount and deter-mine the results before you invest more.

A poor training choice may produce a "Hawthorne Effect" (the temporary improvement in productivity provided by increasing and decreasing lighting at a Western Electric Company plant in 1924; employees would temporarily work harder simply because they had been singled out for attention). But, such an effect is not in the company's long-term interest.

Research and Development. To develop an effective research and development (R&D) program, the company must be able to mine its own creative resources. R&D activities generally focus on how an organization can expand and innovate its core operations. For an A/E/C company, as with most service-based entities, core operations are what it produces for clients and how it delivers what it produces. R&D will focus on such things as compressing project delivery cycles rather than improving billing procedures. Clear and coherent invoices are important, but they are not a core operation.

An internal team should consider work processes, team communications, production and delivery technologies, Internet/Intranet applications, and how these functions can be adapted to provide a higher level of service to clients.

The learning organization will also intuitively (and explicitly) probe opportunities that such research produces from the vantage of Senge's five disciplines: How do these new applications and processes effect the organizational systems already in place?

• How do these innovations reshape the mental picture of our organization- validate or invalidate our basic assumptions about what we do?
  
  
• To what extent has this development been formed through an infusion of ideas from among various team members and their clients? As such, does it offer meaningful value to how workers produce and clients receive?
  
  
• In what ways do these changes enlarge or diminish the shared vision of our organization as it is manifested by our workers and clients?
  
  
• How do these innovations affect and deepen the skills and mastery on which our workers thrive as professionals in this industry?

In the next millenium, ongoing education will become a greater part of our responsibility to ourselves, our companies, and the clients we serve. Leaders are making the commitment now. Are you?