A while ago I posted a question “Your Top Five Tips For Growing A Learning Organization” to Learning Organization Practitioners’ Network - LinkedIn Group. Eight people were willing to share their tips. Now I have combined them to a one list of five tips.

1. Integrity - Quote from John Fleming:
   

   “Ensure that as a leader one lives the truth in their efforts to help the organization to be successful. There will be times when tough decisions have to be made and the team(s) need to trust that they are being made with the best interest of the whole and each of the pieces in mind. One has to be firm and fair with consideration for all the elements in the system of the business and the economic environment in which it operates.”

2. Senior Management Support - upper management need to understand and support the change in order you to get enough resources and power. From my own experience I can tell that you can start without it, but it is a lot easier if you have this.
3. Persistence - Quote from Calvin Coolidge:
   

   “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”

4. Shared Vision - a sense of mission, what do we do and why we do it.
5. Communication -open and honest communication. People must be able to talk about both negative and positive things openly.

With these in place, you can begin the learning and changing the way your organization acts.

One of the most toughest things to handle in management is to protect your team from  external tasks. These requests usually come from marketing & sales guy who received them from the customers. In cases like these you must look it at from both business and management perspective: will accepting the request provide more money or prevent loss? How much will it affect to the team?

Understanding the team management perspective is usually forgotten. The case I usually come across is this: a marketing person comes with a request and asks how long will it take to do it. Now, these are usually small tasks, say 1-2 day tasks. When we tell them it takes 1-2 days they think that “that is close to nothing, let’s do it!”.

Let’s approach this with an example from ice hockey. You have a five players plus the goalkeeper, right? What happens if one of the players is away for 2 minutes due penalty? Here is a couple things that happen:

• The whole team goes in to defensive mode
• They are unable to perform a fully organized attack as one of their key players is missing
• Four of the players in the field has to now work harder
• Other side has a lot better chance to do a goal, which might lead to their victory

Now imagine one of your team members going to do some external task for two days. It will affect exactly the same way. The thing that must be understood is that when there is a team: team is constructed out of individuals, each bringing in their experience and time. When you take someone out of the team for two days recovering will take more than just the two freaking days! As in the hockey example, when you look at the big picture, you’ll have to understand that this will most likely affect to the end result. Also, for the two days other team members will suffer from this. Two days, “close to nothing”, might turn in to an effect that takes over week before the team is fully recovered.

Organizations usually have a vision, but as you might already know, it does not motivate everybody.

In situation like this a product vision can come to help you out. This is a vision that has been created with the product team. If they truly believe in it, the team will feel like they are really creating something that matters, something great - and that is the whole point of organization vision.. any vision!

People have got stuck to the idea of organization vision!

Realize this and you can create a vision that really matters: product vision, team vision, .. you name it. As long as the people are truly behind it, it is one of the most powerful tool you have ever known.

For the past two years I’v been reading and researching to get an answer to what are characteristics of a really good organization. I admit, that is not a long time, some people have used tens of years studying what is a good organization. But, based on my experience a good organization has the following characteristics:

• Learning Organization
  • All the five disciplines of it. We need to be able to learn all the time in rapidly changing world. Also we need to be able to cooperate with other people, to work as a team. Have a shared vision in everything we do.
• Direct Use Of Power
  • Everybody today writes only about collaborative management, but come on, really, you can’t always satisfy everybody! And even if you could, you’d missed the right time to take the action.
• Not Direct Use Of Power
  • The opposite the direct use of power, this is a pop nowadays. And yes,  you’ll need a lot of this skill, but you should not forget the direct use either. You’ll need to find the right balance..  as we agile guys would say, find good-enough balance (nobody is perfect).

With this kind of features organization is able to a) act rapidly b) keep up their expertize c) have a common dream which motivates (almost) everybody d) come along with different people and cultures. Conclusion is, one word, leadership.

Challenge in management is to keep everybody up-to-date on what we are doing and why.  One great way to get a clear picture is to do reality check regularly and keep it visible for everyone. Reality check means answering to a couple of question:

Why are we doing this?

• If you can’t answer to this, then you have a problem. Check that your project is aligned with the organization’s vision & strategy.

What is our goal?

• Define what is your goal. For example, our goal is to create a product X which will have the Y - features. Do not forget SMART for defining project goal (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-framed).

What is our vision?

• Define your dream - what is your long term goal. For example, our product will be used by 2 million people in 5 years.

What is our strategy?

• How are we going to do all this? What is your advantage? Where do you focus on?

Remember that you can add even more questions in there to help you to get even better picture of what the heck are you doing. Keep these visible for everyone. Everybody who sees it should understand what you are doing and why. Simple, but powerful.

Finally next version of my small RTS is ready!

Download

Screenshot:

Feel free to give any feedback!

One of the most interesting thing, at least in Finland is, that most of the people at organizations project management has once been doing real implementation work (e.g. programming, etc.). They were promoted to a management because they were specialist who had earned their co-workers respect. But, is that a good enough reason to promote somebody in to project management?

Defininetly not. Project management is a whole different profession. It requires leadership and in many cases the new project manager who was earlier the specialist doesn’t have this, or he/she don’t understand what project management is really about. These kind of project managers tend to end up doing the specialist work by themselves or aren’t able to concentrate in to right places, which will eventually kill the project management.

But, this isn’t fault of the project manager - he/she just doesn’t know what to do or how to do it. This is the fault of senior management, they should be supporting the new project manager all the time to help him/her to understand this new profession. It is very important to describe what the project management means in your organization, because it varys between different organizations a lot. This will help the new project manager’s to understand what is required of them.

It must be remembered that these days the project management responsibilities are getting harder all the time. For example impossible tasks received by the project managers are a very sad thing: upper management is giving impossible tasks to project manager, which she or he doesn’t have time or competence to complete. And in most of the cases the project manager will not say ‘no’, even though he or she should. Declining from doing impossible tasks is one of the very first things to be taught to new project manager as it is a requirement of his/her profession.

There are loads of things to be considered when promoting a new project manager. The decision should not be solely based on whet ever he or she is a specialist. Lately I have seen excellent project managers who do not have any implementation experience from the product line and are still able to do their job.

I have many times mentioned Learning Organization and now it is about time to introduce it.

Learning Organization has its root in companies such as Shell, but it became world famous after Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization- book, which described five characteristics of Learning Organization. Basically, it means an organization where people continuously drive learning in all ways in order to achieve what they truly desire. Also, as I see it, it means organization which looks after its people: you cannot achieve extraordinary results without them. Think about it the other way around, what does it require from individual to achieve extraordinary results?

For example: happiness, stable personal life, vision, continuous learning and so on. Not understanding the meaning of individuals is one of the biggest problems of our time.

The famous five disciplines:

• Self Mastery
• Systems Thinking
• Shared Vision
• Team Learning
• Mental Models

I’ll dig deeper in to these disciplines later in my posts.

This is how Peter Senge himself explains Learning Organization: “Organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together” (Peter Senge, 1990)

Where to start?
I recommend starting your journey from the Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. It is a great book that will also grow you as a person.

First quarter of the year 2009 has been hell of a ride!

List of what’s going on:

• I became a Technical Project Manager at Futuremark Corporation, and we published information from our next generation graphics technology called Kanzi, check it out!
• Rewrote the A* pathfinding algorithm for my small RTS. Still needs optimizations, let’s hope I’ll find more time to work on it in the near future.
• Continue studying Learning Organizations and Agile development practices. Currently reading book called The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, it’s great!
• Programmed Android application using OpenGL ES with the G1 phone. I really recommend checking Android/G1, it has the best development pipeline I have ever seen on mobile side: just plugin the device and execute Run from Eclipse and the program starts running at the G1!
• Trying to watch the IGDA Leadership forum videos.
• Writing a blog post about learning organizational things.

That’s about it for now.

The very first public version of my real-time strategy game project, codename : knight vs orcs, is now out!!

The game’s unique thing is that the logic is based on free movement, which means there are no tiles at all. Project uses my own 2D sprite engine (software renderer) and SDL Audio for sounds (disabled at the moment).

I have tried to keep the game small so that I can really finish it up someday. This is why it has only 4 unit types, 800×600 levels, etc. Please feel free to also contact me through my mail address : arto.ruotsalainen@gmail.com

Download Link

Here is a screenshot :

Game graphics by : http://reinerstileset.4players.de/