Learning is the key KPI for transforming organizations

How many times did we fall off the bike in early childhood? Countless times I bet. But we persevered, and we were encouraged to get up and try again. And finally – at least most of us – learned to master this key capability and our world became bigger in an instance.

The analogue in this for me is the fact that young kids continue trying and learning. Their mind-set is inherently set to try, test, fail and learn in infinite loops – delivering them new skills every day.

So where does this great learning power disappear when we mature? Or let alone: where is it in corporate life?

One of the big issues that corporations face is the fact that its employees are terrified to make mistakes, essentially to fail. Quite a paradox in a time of disruption, when companies increasingly would need to take more risks in order to play and win in new value spaces.

Employees are the ones that need to create this new future. They need to be able to trust that failure is not only useful but also accepted. It serves an important purpose because it allows them to learn what works and what doesn’t work. For organizations it’s key to foster change towards this mindset. In fact, organizations ought to be acting like that encouraging and enabling parent.

The idea of having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset is that people with a growth mindset are more willing to embrace and face challenges head-on and want to learn from them. And organizations that demonstrate a growth mindset commonly tend to have more innovative employees and a risk-taking culture where people are more incentivised to step outside their comfort zones.

So how can organizations get there?

By empowering and enabling employees to take more ownership, more leadership and by allowing them to unlock their entrepreneurial potential. It starts with embracing a new way of working with focus on making work more experimentation focused.

At ING we developed a Lean Innovation Way of Working which we named ‘PACE’ and that is now successfully being used by most departments e.g. innovation, legal, risk, etc across the whole corporation. Employees need to learn that creating new disruptive solutions, processes or business models is largely about validating assumptions no matter in which department you work. And to validate these assumptions you need to set-up and run experiments. These experiments, when they’re done well, will either validate or invalidate your assumptions. By continuously validating assumptions through experimentation you will – in fact - never fail… instead, you will be learning what works or doesn’t work in the fastest way possible.

The concept of validated learning, as described by Eric Ries in his bestselling book The Lean Startup, is predominantly embraced by corporate innovation professionals. But, if organizations want to put their transformation and culture change on steroids, they should embrace validated learning on a much larger scale. It should become the key KPI of the corporation, in all facets, all departments and all teams. Applying the principles of a growth mind-set and validated learning will dramatically change the DNA of the corporation by changing people's perspectives on failure and eventually will unlock their entrepreneurial potential.

I fully agree with Eric Ries that… “the only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”