How the Meta-Learning Lab Helps Corporations

Within corporations, we seek to create learning that will spark innovation, decrease cycle time, build lasting customer relationships, lower turnover, increase organizational agility, and forge competitive advantage. We infuse the organizational culture with dedication to continual improvement in these areas, making them self-sustaining.

Consider an example, Fortune 50 network computer company with more than tens of thousands of employees working in more than 100 countries around the globe.

As the server market has matured, the company has decided to take its sales pitch and positioning up the corporate ladder. Instead of selling price/performance, its sales reps will be selling solutions to business problems. Industry expertise will become their competitive advantage. They want to be perceived as experts in their primary markets: automotive, digital entertainment/media, education & research, financial, government, manufacturing, retain, and telecom.

This is a new role for the sales reps. Fiercely independent, these sales people have traditionally managed their own accounts as they saw fit. In the future, they will be more like Special Forces spotters in Afghanistan, calling in massive firepower exactly when and where it’s needed. Their advantage will come more from addressing business issues than from technical expertise. Team selling will replace the solo performance.

Converting the sales force into customer-focused problem-solvers is not a training problem. No amount of workshops and CDs will be sufficient to lead the sales people down an unfamiliar path. Instead, at the individual level, the company will need to change the sales people’s belief structure. This will require the development of personal mastery, new attitudes and mental models, intense reflection, small group membership and interaction, and personal dedication. At the outset, perhaps the most important function is making the sales task clear.

The company will have to replace putting the competition down with putting the customer first. The organization will need to sponsor development of learning environments designed with natural, sustainable learning processes in mind. To convey both the mechanics and the desirability of new tools, new incentives, new roles, and new operating rules, the company will need to deliver and sell the message in an engaging, respectful, challenging, supportive, relevant, tailored manner.

Looking down “from the balcony,” we can see that the change program will be paddling upstream against a powerful current; the company needs to do whatever it can to improve the odds of success. This calls for involving informal as well as formal learning, community development, respect for change efforts – successful or not, setting aside time for self-improvement, and helping participants learn to be better learners, and continuing support. Managers must learn how to and buy into becoming coaches, mentors, and instructors.

Initiating the orientation to customer-focused selling is the tip of the iceberg of sustaining the effort. To stay sharp and avoid backsliding, we recommend a continuous series of "Meta-Learning Audits" to seek out process improvements. Does experience tell us that we’re using the right learning tool for the job? What opportunities do we have to…

Simplify and accelerate our people’s acquisition of skills, know-how, technology, life-skills, and business acumen?

Improve our people’s ability to build relationships with others: social skills, psychology, leadership, and emotional intelligence?

Help our people build character, values, and meaning as well as knowledge?

Help them develop meta-skills, process orientation, and philosophical context?

Help people lead more fun-filled, rewarding lives?

The Balcony: What is Meta-Learning?

Looking at the Learning Process

Improving the Learning Process

Leveraging the Learning Process

Meta-Learning Lab Helps Corporations

Engaging the Meta-Learning Lab