Nurturing the learning mindset

A friend, who is a senior executive at a logistics start-up, recently had a task on hand: To prepare a two-week long orientation programme for a cadre of 100 freshly minted engineers. While these engineers had finished four years of education at some of the best engineering colleges in the country, most of them had little or no practical experience. None of them had ever stepped inside a sophisticated warehouse, seen how a modern day truck is assembled or indeed how a contemporary racking system worked. Let alone be familiar with how cross-functional teams work — or how complex business challenges are meant to be solved.

You’ve got to wonder why such a yawning gap between the real world and academia continues to persist. Except that this is a challenge that India Inc faces not just in logistics, but in every industry — retail, consumer, manufacturing, infrastructure and software. Every year, hordes of students graduate from some of our best engineering, arts and commerce colleges, without a feel of the real world into which they step in. Internships are now common — but most of them are seldom structured with care and attention and do little to challenge young minds. Two years ago, we hosted two young interns who were more interested in collecting a letter of completion and adding it to their resume, rather than focusing on learning something substantive. It isn’t just about interns though. Most firms struggle to figure out what to do with these young people.

This is exactly what my friend is ready to face as his intense, carefully curated orientation programme draws to a close. Soon, his newbie engineers will be stationed at various outposts across the country. And he needs to figure out a way to continually engage the minds of young people, ensure that they bring in new ideas and challenge the way things are done inside, even as they learn the operational ropes of the business. And he knows that he simply can’t depend entirely on his next level leaders to ensure that the learning never stops for his new wards. A few weeks ago, we were with the CEO (chief executive officer) of a global firm of repute. And he told us about how he was grappling with a huge cultural challenge in driving his innovation and leadership agenda. His top team was greying — and slow to change. And this impacted even the young management trainees. Within two years of joining, they too lost most of their verve and initiative.

Creating a culture of continuous learning may seem like a difficult journey. The good news is that there are so many more enablers that companies can rely on today. Like online learning solutions that are available on tap. Massively online open courses, or MOOCs, as they are called, are expanding their range and scope. From machine learning to Excel, from creative writing to Design Thinking, there is a wide repertoire to choose from. And it would seem as if Indians have taken to it in a big way. Coursera says India is their second biggest B2C (business to customer) market after the US with nearly 2 million learners out of a total of 26 million.

There are many reasons why MOOCs could fundamentally change how we look at learning: They are self-paced, on demand, they fit into your lifestyle and easily accessible, even on a smartphone. What’s more, some of the new online Master’s (or Nanodegrees) course add up to even 30 per cent of credits leading up to a full-fledged Master's—and that too, at a fraction of the cost of a regular university education. 

Two weeks ago, I was chatting with a young architect-turned-entrepreneur, who was looking to set up a new business centre in Mumbai. And our  conversation veered around to how to build his business plan. I pointed him to Steve Blank’s hugely popular course on How To Launch a Lean Start Up on the Udacity platform. It was experiential, and provided the basic building blocks to designing his strategy in a iterative manner. As he thought through his plan, the young entrepreneur could use the Business Model Canvas, on which the course is based, to test out various assumptions and see how they stack up. And participants are taught one clear principle: The answers lie outside the building. And they need to step out and discover real insights that could drive his business.

This is, in many ways, a good example of the Action Learning approach — something some companies are beginning to embrace. Identify key business challenges from within the organisation. Create cross-functional teams. Help them with collaborative business building skills such as the Business Model Canvas or Design Thinking. Throw in team-based coaching. And support the business challenge teams with a bunch of learning interventions such as immersions, experiential talks and curated content. Also, there are now new cloud-based solutions such as Edcast, which calls itself the Netflix of knowledge, that pull together the learning content available both within and outside the firm to create a powerful customised experience. That’s the future of learning that we’re headed towards.
 

The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel, a learning platform that aims to serve a community of entrepreneurial leaders