A note from me

Hi Folks!

Mary and I recently returned from our trip to Venice, arranged by the Art History in Focus group and guided by the outstanding Siân Walters and Luisella Romeo. If you ever also wish to deepen your appreciation of the world of art, I can certainly recommend these folks as a wonderful entry point.

I learned, for example, much about the occasional collaborations, mutual learning, fierce rivalries, regular mutual inspiration, and general creative energy unleashed in Renaissance Venice through a couple of generations of master artists and architects, and fuelled by the wealth of the city and its rivalry with Rome and Florence. It was wonderful to see works by Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Palma the Younger, often in their original settings where you could appreciate the architectural, lighting, and social circumstances that were taken into account and used by the artists.   

I was particularly pleased to discover an artist I had heard of previously but hadn’t really appreciated before – Veronese. A visit to the Church of San Sebastiano introduced me to several of his works. I loved his grand compositions and bold use of colour but particularly remember a small modest painting of Mary and Child in the church. Perhaps it was its simplicity that appealed to me in the midst of the grandeur.

There was definitely a learning ethos among the artists in Venice at that time, which fits nicely with the topic of this Newsletter.

Speaking of learning, I’ll also soon be preparing for the next episode of the Dodo Club webinar which will be hosted for the fifth time on LinkedIn on Friday, October 18^th at 12:00 UK time (13:00 CET). In the last webinar on October 4^th , we had a fantastic contribution from our guest – the marvelous Sarah Simpson – and there was some good engagement with the online audience. On the 18^th , I’ll again introduce an in-depth perspective on a topic we’ve considered in the Newsletter, followed by a Q&A session. I’ll also aim once more for a shorter 45-minute duration which is easier for people to fit within their “lunch hour”.  You can find the link to attend the webinar below:

The Dodo Club Webinar - Episode 5

This is an opportunity for you to pose questions or comment on recent, or any, Newsletter content or any topics related to leadership, strategy, scenarios, energy transitions, or the current affairs I comment on.  

I hope you enjoy it and also find you learn something! 

My Bi-Weekly Guide

The Learning Ethos (and Art)

As introduced in Edition 21 of the Newsletter, one of the 5 characteristics of high-performance teams that I have come to recognise is the learning ethos. Team members are encouraged, enabled and empowered to learn continuously from direct feedback, from the insights of others and from the broader world around them, and to apply relevant lessons to enhance the performance of the team.  

One of my illustrious predecessors in leading the Shell Scenarios activities, Arie de Geus, memorably remarked that the ability to learn quicker than others may be the only truly sustainable competitive advantage.  You may find his article ‘Planning as Learning’ illuminating or his book ‘The Living Company’.  

Having recently been immersed in Renaissance art, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that I’ve chosen a fresco by Raphael to represent the learning ethos. ‘The School of Athens’ is within the Vatican rather than in Venice, but it represents learning in a number of ways.  

First, of course, it portrays a group of ancient philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, with Plato and Aristotle featured in the centre. For many people, the Greek philosophers of antiquity, with their love of ideas and learning, are considered the crucible in which Western Civilisation was forged. Certainly, this was a driving ethos in the Renaissance period with that word, itself, denoting re-birth and the re-discovery of classical lessons. 

Secondly, the painting is a fine example of the use of accurate perspective in art, an innovation first explored during the early Renaissance in the work of Brunelleschi and then learned, adopted and improved by subsequent master artists.  

Thirdly, Raphael acknowledges in the fresco the influence of at least two masters he has learned much from, namely Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Within the painting, there appears to be a portrait of Raphael himself looking out at the viewers, the figure of Plato appears to be a portrait of da Vinci, and the self-absorbed figure of Heraclitus at the front appears to be a portrait of his rival at the Vatican, Michelangelo.

All the senior leaders I have ever met tell me that they are always open to learn. However, my experience is that they resist being ‘taught’. I think this is the case for many adults whose maturity and life experience, and fear of loss of face, create resistance to learning from others. Hence the art is to create effective circumstances where people can learn for themselves, alongside others.  

In promoting and developing the learning ethos for high-performance teams, I suggest it is useful to consider the following 5 factors.  

1. Relaxed but Purposeful Reflection: 

   People spend a lot of time under pressure and largely rely on mental models of the world around them and patterns they already know. Using the language of the late behavioural economist Dan Kahneman, their default mode is ‘thinking fast’.  While often appropriate, this isn’t conducive to new learning where reflective ‘thinking slow’ is needed. If confronted with new circumstances while stressed, the default responses are fight, flight or freeze and not learning. Hence periods and circumstances for relaxed reflection need to be created if teams are going to learn.  

   However, because ‘thinking slow’ expends more mental and physical energy than ‘thinking fast’, there is a danger that relaxed circumstances alone will just encourage people to drift into rest rather than deep reflection. To be purposeful in learning, the following factors are also important.
   

2. Relevance and Motivation:
   To motivate people to expend the necessary mental energy to engage in deep reflection about an area, they must already have a deep sense that this will be relevant to achieving their goals.  Sometimes that may come about because something of importance is under threat.  I’ve heard leaders use the clichés ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’  and ‘Never waste a crisis’ and, indeed, these can be motivations for attention and change. However, there is a real danger that short-duration stress responses are triggered through this approach rather than the continuous deep learning that characterises a high-performance team. The true learning ethos requires combining acknowledged relevance with relaxed reflection in a purposeful way. At best, that acknowledged relevance can flow from the shared strategic narrative of the team (see Edition 22 of the Dodo Newsletter).
   

3. Stimulating Innovation:
   Performance feedback or external circumstances may motivate attention, but continuous improvement generally also requires generating and learning new and unfamiliar ideas. To bring a team into the mode of creative thinking necessary for that usually benefits from the injection of new perspectives that they can respond to. A good approach to this can be through finding external expert ‘sparks’ to stimulate team deliberations. 
   

4. Breadth of inputs:
   Even the choice of ‘sparks’ to stimulate thinking can be shaped by existing mental models of what is important that may be in danger of becoming outdated. Hence it is valuable to also consider the occasional sprinkling of ‘out of the box’ stimuli from thoughtful sources that may seem distant from the attention areas that seem most obviously relevant.
   

5. Psychological Safety:
   Team members will not speak up and learn from each other and others if they are fearful that something they may say could be considered silly and so they risk loss of face. There has to be a pervasive culture of trust and respect in the team, modeled by leadership, in which every team member feels psychologically ‘safe’ and that their input and questions valued. Mutual support and encouragement are essential.

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

When have you experienced a genuine learning ethos and has this contributed to high performance? 

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