When we talk “learning” we are talking about much of human activity, not just the parts that take place in school buildings, or used to. As we try to understand what employment will look like in the near and midterm, we have to understand what enterprises and companies are doing, and going to be doing.
One piece of that puzzle involves studying how organizations learn, and how they structure learning processes to advance their capability, and the capability of their employees. Such processes are subject to change over the years and decades, and there’s a history of their development we can study.
There’s clearly a connection between how an organization evolves its process, and how learning processes evolve to work with the new way of doing things. So it perhaps is possible to project from corporate process evolution to what employees need to be able to do to support those processes.
IOW to be a candidate for a “job in the 21st century”, one needs to be able to work the processes in place to create value. Below are a few passages of discussion about how enterprise process has evolved, and from that one might deduce what skills an employee needs to bring to the table.
John:
Elon Musk seems all about the iterations…and the responses to failures and successes with the next iteration.
He doesn’t have a plan for all the stages of development, he takes it one stage at a time, and with enough failures, and enough iterations, and enough responses to the results, eventually he all of a sudden shows up with a highly sophisticated “product”…Tesla thought to be “Never get there”…until boom it was there. Same with his rocket ships.
Perhaps the process Elon is working with derives from earlier process paradigms, such as PDCA.
PDCA (plan–do–check–act or plan–do–check–adjust) is an iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products.[1] It is also known as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, the Shewhart cycle, the control circle/cycle, or plan–do–study–act (PDSA).
Another version of this PDCA cycle is OPDCA.[2] The added “O” stands for observation or as some versions say: “Observe the current condition.” This emphasis on observation and current condition has currency with the literature on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System.[3] The PDCA cycle, with Ishikawa’s changes, can be traced back to S. Mizuno of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1959.[4]
Kudos to Margot for the PDCA link,
Below some of Gary’s replies:
Lean start-up processes, of which Elon is a master, definitely incorporates elements the Toyota/Deming approach to continued improvement, with some very important changes in emphasis. The T/D approach is for improvement of existing processes, Lean is more about creating something entirely new. As such, there is an emphasis on defining the end objective and then launching a rapid-fire set of minimum cost/time experiments.
Lean was a rebellion against over-thinking the front-end of development (both initially and at each cycle). Traditional business practices had come to rely way too much on “strategic planning”, replete with reams of market analysis, cost models and risk avoidance. Lean is all about embracing risk by experimenting early and often.
Then, of course, is the need for the vision and drive to push the envelope and not accept NO.
more of Gary reply:
Deming and his emphasis on process and continual improvement was really big in the late 70’s and 80’s where all corporations of any size seemingly had to develop Total Quality Management (TQM) programs and get ISO 900 certification if one hoped to compete in the enterprise market. Lots of words, training (documented of course) and feel good stuff with only limited returns for most.
One of the results was to sort of institutionalize existing processes rather than question whether the process was even needed.