How will we learn faster than others? (Part 5)
Welcome back to our on-going series on change management. If you’re joining us for the first time, you can catch up using the links here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).
This week we are looking at the question of how we can learn faster than others. According to the McKinsey article a key to long-term success in business is learning faster than your competitor. The article states, “‘Agentifying’ the organization, becoming more sustainable, reshoring supply chains, or solving for structural shortage of talent are not problems that can be solved for by “a small group of experts in the corner”, but instead require building new capabilities.
The article goes onto to advocate that organizations should engage in 90-day cycles of “decision, action, and reflection…to understand how to improve and which roadblocks to remove.”
In the academic world any call for speeding up research or research processes is likely to be met with at best mild annoyance and at worse outright hostility. While I have grown to appreciate the care and consideration academics can give to a topic, I have also seen this care and consideration become a significant impediment to institutional change. The irony of academics (especially those in health research) calling for people on the outside to change and adopt our latest research findings to improve their lives, all the while clinging to processes and structures that in some cases haven’t changed in centuries will never be lost on me 😅.
That said, I do think there is something to consider here when thinking about this question of how we can learn faster in the academic world. Beginning generically with how we work, I think about writing and perfectionism. How many of you have a manuscript that is “almost” done sitting in your files right now? Now I know what you’re saying as you read this, “But Meagen if I just had a half a day to sit and really think about it, I could get it done.” I’m sure that’s true, but when was the last time you had that much uninterrupted time?
In this case, maybe learning faster is realizing you will never have that uninterrupted time, so you start working in the pockets you have available (check out this post for some ideas about that) and you get that paper out the door by the end of the semester.
On the side of our research, I hear a lot about collaborators dropping the ball. In this case, learning faster might be about finding new collaborators from other departments. If the people in your department or research unit are not interested in the work you do for impact, you need to look where there are people interested in what you do.
Learning faster might also mean recognizing that even with collaborators, you are still going to be doing the bulk of the work for projects you are interested in doing. This is not because your collaborators are lazy. Rather it’s simply that for projects that are important to you, there is no one else that has the same vision and interpretation of the literature or investment in success that you do. It’s your idea so, you must be the one to do the hard work of making that happen. Your collaborators will be there every step of the way, but you are the leader and you needed to own that.
It has taken me most of my more than 10 years as a professional academic to learn these lessons and I know there are more that I must take to heart. After reading this article I am committing to a version of the 90-day cycle that makes sense in my world and life. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you have read a couple of times that I want to try to learn how to make the most of GenAI technologies in my day-to-day life. I have made zero progress there. So, for 1-hour a week I am going to learn a new GenAI functionality and see how it can apply to my world. At the end of my 90-days I’ll report back ☺️.
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