New technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, have the potential to propel the rate of learning in business to new heights—the volume and velocity of data have exploded, and algorithms can unlock complex patterns and insights with unprecedented speed. In an era of shrinking product life cycles and rapidly changing business models, the companies that are the first to decode new trends or emerging needs have the best chance to take advantage of them.
But learning at the speed of algorithms requires more than algorithms themselves. New technology can accelerate learning in individual process steps, but to create aggregate organizational learning and competitive advantage it must be complemented by organizational innovation. Moreover, slow-moving contextual shifts, driven by social, political, and economic forces, are becoming just as important to business as fast-moving technologies. To compete on the ability to learn, therefore, leaders must reinvent their organizations to leverage both human and machine capabilities synergistically in order to expand learning to both faster and slower timescales.
A Brief History of Learning Organizations
In first-generation learning organizations, businesses learned how to execute existing processes more efficiently—best exemplified by the “experience curve.” As Bruce Henderson observed half a century ago, firms tend to reduce their costs at a constant and predictable rate as their cumulative experience increases. For example, in the early 20th century costs of the Model T consistently fell by about 25% every time the cumulative product volume doubled.
In this model, learning was a game of continuous improvement aimed at reducing marginal costs. Competing on learning was essentially about building volume, and therefore experience, faster than competitors. This permitted a strategy of pricing for the anticipated value of learning and pursuing cost reductions systematically, using mechanisms such as statistical process control, kaizen, Six Sigma, and quality circles.
In recent years, a second-generation concept of learning came to the forefront: learning how to envision and create new products. In other words, companies must learn not only to descend experience curves but also to “jump” from one curve to another.
This second dimension of learning has always existed in business, but its importance has grown. Technological innovation has compressed product life cycles, so new learning curves appear before old ones have fully played out—and firms must balance both dimensions of learning at the same time. For example, Netflix jumped from a DVD rental business to a streaming service to in-house content creation, while expanding to 190 countries, in less than a decade.
Today, a third phase of the learning game is beginning to unfold. Modern technologies, such as sensors, digital platforms, and AI, promise to massively accelerate the rate at which information is generated, gathered, and processed. This potentially enables companies to operate at superhuman speed, learning about the market and reacting in seconds or even milliseconds.
At the same time, however, companies must also expand their learning abilities to consider longer timescales, as social, political, and economic shifts gradually reshape the business context. Most businesses have woken up to the reality of time compression, but this is only half the picture. The range of timescales that need to be considered is being stretched in both directions. A third-generation learning organization is one that can embrace this new reality—adopting algorithmic principles over shorter timescales while adapting to nonbusiness forces that operate over longer ones.
To make this leap, businesses cannot rely on technological sophistication alone. Repeating a well-established historical pattern, evolution of the organizational model is needed to unlock the potential of new technologies. The original experience curve could be exploited only when new industrial technologies were complemented by organizational innovations like new factory layouts, redefined roles for workers (such as the assembly line), and new managerial approaches like quality circles and kanban. In the same way, to build the third generation of learning organizations, leaders must reinvent the enterprise not only to unlock the potential of new technologies but also to synergistically combine the unique learning capabilities and timescale advantages of both humans and technology—in other words, to build effective “human + machine” machines.
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The third generation of learning organizations presents an enormous opportunity. Companies can unleash both the power of technology for rapid learning and human ingenuity on longer timescales. But this will require leaders first to reimagine the organization and how it is managed.
More: BCG By Martin Reeves and Kevin Whitaker