STRATEGIZING by Emanuele Sacerdote
I finished reading The Fifth Discipline di Peter Senge(Scientific Editorial, PuntoOrg Series, 2020), a book that all managers, professors and students should read to better understand the issues relating to human resource management and human nature. Central point of the text is the "learning organization”, that is, the organization's ability to learn through action and experience. "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." Especially in the world of work, learning also takes place through the principle of "cross fertilization", according to which people learn and grow by working and designing together in a common environment: an excellent example is the large community of Silicon Valley which, between companies, universities and infrastructures, has generated an ecosystem.
I think I can summarize that if an organization reduces, limits and slows down its learning capacity, it slows down cognitive progress, increases immobilism and, consequently, productivity, growth, advantage and turnover should contract.
This new post-covid risk of potential learning impairment is one of the more concerning side effects I see for our profit and non-profit organizations, private and public.
We are currently experiencing this historical moment in existential suspension (we lived in a motionless time and are living in expectation for something to happen or for it to happen again; we have been locked up at home in a paradoxical, improbable condition that has never happened before), in spatial contraction (before we could move, travel and learn, now space has contracted, due to distancing), in experiential lack (we used to use our six senses – including memory – together to gain experiences, to understand and to evolve, now we use, perhaps , three or four and not always together, in the hope that essentiality does not turn into real famine), in emotional weakness (a huge part of the learning process and cognitive progress depend on the ability to generate and govern our conscious and unconscious emotions and , due to the new "limits", our emotional capacity has been reduced to a minimum.)
All in all it means that we are feeding the soul and mind less and could potentially grow less. If all of this were part of the new reality and the new normal, it's easy to predict a less productive, more static and more fragile society.
Apart from the desire to find a vaccine as soon as possible, I ardently hope that the new options - smartworking, digitization and technology - will be able to expand and enhance the experiential, emotional and evolutionary process by combining physical and virtual reality.
Personally I will not stop trying to learn with the old tools and with the new ones, always with extreme prudence, determination, criticism and pervaded by insatiable doubts.
All the Best!
