Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996

Leading the Agile Organization

Learning How to Learn

Jim Harris
Strategic Advantage, Inc.

The only way we truly learn is as a team, through other people. It took humanity some hundreds of thousands of years to develop language and, yet, today children are speaking by the time they are two. It took us another fifty or sixty thousand years to develop written language. But by the time children are five years old they read and write. That child stands on the shoulders of 150,000 years of human development without even knowing it. Everything that I am is the product of entire generations before me. I only learn through others.

In the same way, we can't learn things in our institutions except for as a team. Principles, such as Einstein's E=MC2, exist in nature prior to our uncovering them. But it is only through the interaction of teams that new ideas are formed--for instance, the presentations here today stimulated me to think in ways I've never thought before, and I've been enriched by the people to whom I've listened. I would not have had those thoughts had it not been for them.

Ninety-five percent of Sun Microsystem's revenues come from products that weren't commercially available 18 months ago. That's the pace of change we're dealing with and it is changing the way we work. Eighty percent of the technology you and I will use in our day-to-day lives in just 20 years hasn't been invented yet. Just think about the automatic teller machine. It didn't exist 20 years ago, but would you deal now with any financial institution that wasn't on Interac or Cirrus? No way. I have a notebook computer that weighs less than six pounds that has more raw processing power than a mainframe of only 15 years ago did. The examples go on and on.

So how can I take a course today that will prepare me for the future when the future hasn't been invented yet? The only way that I can prepare for the future is by learning how to learn. Learning how to work as a team, learning how to be innovative. It's meta-learning. This is the essence of what the future is.

Success is a function of two things. To use a baseball analogy, it's a function of our batting average--I could have a 1,000 batting average: I hit every time at bat, but I'm only at bat once a year. Or I could have a 250 batting average and get to bat 400 times a year. Who is more valuable to the team?

You see, perfection or progress, which are we interested in? If you want to increase your success rate, increase your failure rate. Babe Ruth had the most number of home runs, but he also had the most number of strike-outs. And Bill Gates has a list of failures longer than my arm. It's all just times at bat. Don't bet the whole farm on every time. Many small iterations. We have to increase our tolerance for pain and failure, which means we have to increase our tolerance for the fear of the learning paradox and get back to what has already been referred to as that childlike nature of creativity and the excitement and the joy of learning. When we get to that, it will become fairly exciting.

Thank you. I look forward to the sessions.