As we thought about our organizational goals, one of the things we wanted to emphasize was how, Library and Technology Services should strive to be one of the best learning organizations. Taken from Wikipedia – “a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself” Which organization doesn’t want to do this, right? But, as an organization, are we facilitating the learning process enough? that is the big question. In order for this to be successful, both the leadership and the staff must be committed to it.

I just want to make sure that some of the underlying characteristics described in the Wikipedia article as quoted from The Fifth Discipline written by Peter Senge are not directly applicable to an organization like ours. But true to being a learning organization, we should study them and distill from them what we can take away!

Approach and Attitude – One of the most difficult things about this is that we need to get the members of our team to realize that first and foremost, learning benefits herself/himself. It is the case that such learning will have a downstream effect of helping the organization transform itself, but that should not be a requirement. If the team members suspect that the organization has an underlying motive of promoting learning in such a way that the organization is benefitting more than the individual, this concept is dead on arrival.

We try to promote the idea that our staff can take a couple of hours a week to explore things that interests them. We don’t require that it be directly connected with the work they do. We have had some interesting things happen as a result, ranging from someone building a weather station to participation in MOOCs to transcribing civil war letters. We are proud of such explorations because these hopefully enriched the individuals first and foremost and in the process, as an organization we benefitted indirectly. This is just one example of how we need to be conscious of a value proposition that benefits the individual first.

Learning is Lifelong – Learning is continuous and lifelong. Sometimes it is more structured and formal, like taking a course, or being involved in an activity such as Yoga or some sports. However, mostly we learn in unstructured and informal ways – use of a smartphone, watching Jeopardy on TV, talking to our friends about their travels. Learning never stops. We tend to to apply some of what we learn in the work place or share them with our peers.

We, as the leaders of the organization, need to think about how to encourage continuous learning and sharing of ideas. Letting it organically happen rarely succeeds. We have some work to do in this area. We have some cases where we have provided opportunities for several staff members to “learn on the job”. What I mean is, we have seen potential in certain staff members to learn and grow that we have offered them related positions to apply that eagerness to continue to learn and grow. In most cases, we have seen them tremendously successful. In a few cases, we simply could not keep up with their growth and they have moved on to other greater opportunities. As much as we hate to lose them, we are so happy for our staff alumni/alumnae.

Balance – One of the most difficult thing that I have had to do is resisting the excitement to apply what I have learned to things I do at work immediately. As many of you know, I am enthusiastic and willing programmer. There is a constant evolution of new frameworks and programming paradigms that I keep on top of and practice. Several of my staff also do the same. But, we cannot expect to change the way we do business with a small staff every time there is a new framework we need to adopt. This sometimes is interpreted as contrary to encouraging learning, which is not true. This is just one of many such examples. We have to learn how to balance the sustainability of what an organization does with how we apply what we learn.

For example, may be there are aspects of what we learn, be it a new algorithm or new technique that we can adopt to what we do at work. Frankly, there are also many other ways in which your excitement can be tapped into – make an app and share with others, volunteer to help a non-profit, may be even do a startup – options in this day and age are limitless. But all I ask is, no matter what you do, think about balance, because it is very important. This is one thing I have learned the hard way over the last umpteen years.

So, what did I learn last night? My wife’s institution only offers Office 365 and she pops all the emails to her Gmail, her preferred platform. Email stopped flowing a few days earlier so she called her helpdesk, me! I thought it was because of the volume of emails, so I helped archive inbox items. Nope, nothing helped. Google’s error message was “Error: Server is unavailable. Server returned error “Line length exceeded limit: Line too long” “.

Of course, it is Greek even to an experienced techie like me. Finally a Google search revealed the mystery – this error comes up when there is an email with an attachment larger than 20 MB! Sure, the error message is so clear that I can’t believe I missed that!

Lessons learned – always do a Google search first and save time!