Sharing ideas creates a learning culture

(Originally published on Medium.)

Fix the culture in order to get people to share…? Not so. Create the mechanisms for people to share, and this leads to a learning culture.

Culture, after all, is the sum of our behaviours and the actions we take every day together.

Someone said that, I googled it but didn’t find it (there is SO MUCH writing about organisational culture on the Internet) but let me know if you know who I have just loosely paraphrased.

Photo of part of the page of a book, which reads: I tend, however, to agree with Dixon (2000). One myth, observes Dixon, is that (starts quote): [T]he exchange of knowledge happens only in organizations that have a noncompetitive or a collaborative culture. It follows that the first thing you have to do is fix the culture and then get people to share. But I have found that it's the other way around. If people begin sharing ideas about issues they see as really important, the sharing itself creates a learning culture. I have, of course, inserted an important caveat in that sentence: "about issues they see as really important."

I’m still reading Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan (2001).