Adapt or Die: The Strategic Role of Learning in the On-Demand Enterprise
By Tony O’Driscoll and Paula Briki

As IBM examines the impact of Internet technologies on the future of the enterprise and the work they carry out, it envisions the development of the On-Demand Era in which business models are componentized around value rather than function, technologies are autonomic (they heal themselves), and socially enabled, networked organizations anticipate market needs ahead of time. IBM learning strategist Tony O’Driscoll and Paula Briki, a program manager for IBM's Learning Leadership team, outline the strategic role learning will play in the on-demand enterprise of the future.

History has taught us that market economies are typically characterized by extended periods of stability occasionally punctuated by short unstable periods that stretch the economic envelope into a new topography. Technologies such as the printing press and the steam engine were catalysts for previous economic discontinuities. Today, the initial transformation effects of the Internet on economies—and the enterprises that operate within them—are beginning to take hold. We now live in a service-driven, knowledge-enabled economy in which product cycles are shrinking and work is increasing in complexity and velocity. In this economy, computers have migrated from being information crunchers that optimize productivity to people connectors that create value.

At IBM, we have begun to examine the impact of Internet technologies on the future of the enterprise and of the work carried out within and across enterprises. What is emerging from this stream of inquiry is a vision hinged around the concept of organisms and how they evolve to adapt to their changing environments. We envision

• business models that are componentized around value rather than function
• technologies that are autonomic (they heal themselves)
• socially enabled, networked-organization designs that anticipate market needs ahead of time, allowing for the organic evolution of enterprise structures. 

The point: We are entering the On-Demand Era wherein the needs of the market must be sensed and appropriately responded to in real-time.

Emergence of the information-rich economic ecosystem

The current market economy places a premium on innovation, new business models and new ways of organizing work. Furthermore, it is facilitated by an information-rich ecosystem that enables the majority of our daily work activities. In this transparent and globally interconnected economy, organizations or individuals that cannot change as fast as the economic environment within which they operate are destined to regress to a mean of mediocrity.

This systemic pattern has a biological equivalent: Organisms that cannot develop the capacity to assimilate information regarding their surroundings in order to make decisions in the interest of their own survival simply recede into the ecosystem from whence they came. In other words, organisms within ecosystems must learn to adapt or they die. In the future, dominant enterprises will view themselves as organisms within an economic ecosystem where information is the source of sustenance and learning is the mechanism for survival and growth.

Here’s how it works: Developing information technology and the Internet enable the flow of information between multiple points without centralized control, which makes possible rich exchanges without the need for formal structures. Such non-linear dynamics are beginning to challenge the traditional, ordered frameworks of every organization, as well as empowering individuals to work and think more autonomously. As a result,  the enterprise hierarchy that segmented work functionally and cascaded information from top-to-bottom is yielding to a more collaborative and networked environment that extends well beyond the enterprise.

In the On-Demand Enterprise, value is created by groups of individuals who can rapidly address (and ultimately anticipate) customers needs and address them in real-time. Consequently, mechanistic models of organization are beginning to diminish in utility and could even become core-rigidities that reduce the ability of the enterprise to evolve within this new economic ecosystem.

According to Jay Cross, CEO of InternetTime Group, “Getting things done requires good connections, both the human kind and the Internet kind. Schooling has confused us into thinking that learning was equivalent to pouring content into people’s heads. It’s more practical to think of learning as optimizing our networks.” Fact: People build social networks, work, communicate, and learn across time zones and without physical boundaries. Fact: Information no longer moves in one direction, from top to bottom or from teacher to learner. Fact: Information has a social life of its own as it moves through time and space based on the desire and ability of individuals to interact with it in order to make more effective decisions with regards to creating customer value.

In this information-rich, open environment, the scarcity paradigm that undergirds most modern economic theory is reversed. Information is, by definition, a non-appropriable resource. That is, information can be shared without being given away. Therefore, it is an abundant rather than a scarce resource. If we take a positive perspective we could conceive of the Internet as a living ecosystem, with the central purpose to promote learning and growth. In this context, the Internet itself can be conceived of as a world-wide community of learners. How would our concept of learning in organizations change if we began to view ourselves as facilitators of learning communities in which the full collaborative might of the Internet is wielded to build relationships and foster innovation within and across the enterprise?

In the Information Age, value is created by groups of individuals who can rapidly address customers’ changing demands. Traditionally, firms like IBM represented this sort of group. However, as the economic ecosystem has evolved to a state that has a pervasive, ubiquitous, and transparent technical infrastructure supporting each individual’s learning and performance needs, the need for formal, mechanistic, and hierarchical structures is being eclipsed. We are moving rapidly towards what Tom Malone refers to as the E-Lance Economy wherein people become their own enterprise and they leverage the speed, transparency, and network effects of the Internet to find work that is aligned with their values and intellectually challenging. To that end, enterprises will need to have as many career paths as they have employees.

Enterprises as adaptive organisms

In the future, on-demand enterprises will need to develop a perpetual state of readiness for the unexpected. According to CLO of Trinity David Grebow, “Readiness is the state of being able to creatively adopt and adapt what you know and can do under a varying and often changing set of circumstances.”  A key source of capital in this environment is access to talented people. To ensure consistent access to talent, the enterprise of the future will need to create a culture with people that

• are highly motivated
• understand precisely what they have to do to help create value
• can see and relate the results of their actions and have a sense of ownership.

In this information-rich ecosystem, people become part of the infrastructure. They are nodes in a network that is aware of who they are, what they are capable of doing, and, perhaps more importantly, what they are keenly interested in doing. The enterprise that is able to network and tap into those resource nodes to address a surfaced need within another part of the network will be able to successfully conduct business within a system that is primarily focused on learning and growth.

In short, because the enterprise of tomorrow will have to operate as an organism within an ecosystem that is driven by information abundance rather than capital scarcity, it will take on a significantly new form:

• The core competence of the enterprise of the future will be the ability to anticipate market needs and rapidly convene the people, processes, and technologies required to best address these needs. 
• Market needs will be sensed through relationships that are cultivated across the network. The true power of enterprise in the future, then, lies in referent power (i.e., who you know) as opposed to position power (i.e., where you sit in the enterprise hierarchy).
• Enterprises that have the capacity to move more rapidly from need identification to response will be the most successful. This will require a continual evolution of the enterprise organism to maintain alignment with the changing economic environment within which it exists.
• Enterprises will not own huge amounts of resources. Enterprises will have to view talent as migratory volunteers who will work on behalf of the enterprise around an identified need for only a designated period of time.
• The information-rich economic infrastructure to broker these connections will be essentially universal, so the key differentiator for enterprises within this ecosystem will be their ability to convene the appropriate resources to respond to the need in the most efficient way possible.
• Successful enterprises of the future will focus the coordination and cultivation of human capital. In turn, enterprises will be judged by individuals through rating processes that will evaluate their resource-friendly approaches.  
  
  
• Learning opportunities and access to dynamic workplace technologies  will factor greatly into decisions to work (even temporarily) for an enterprise. 

Examining the strategic role of learning

In the enterprise of the future, work and learning become synonymous. Without the ability to innovate and adapt on an ongoing basis, enterprises simply go into retrograde. At the heart of the capacity to innovate and adapt is the ability to learn. An enterprise simply cannot innovate or adapt without first learning something new. Similarly, without the introduction of new insights or perspectives, it has been demonstrated that change does not occur. In this new information-rich economic ecosystem, however, learning becomes a far more complicated phenomenon than can ever be limited to the confines of training in a corporate classroom.

Training’s purpose is to efficiently convey knowledge about tasks the enterprise already knows how to do. Learning, on the other hand, happens when knowledge is shared about tasks or challenges that are new and different. Training serves largely to maintain the status quo, while learning involves not only absorbing existing information, but also creating new solutions to not-yet-fully understood problems. This new marketplace dynamic requires a new vision for learning: one in which individuals and organizations fundamentally change the way they talk about, work with, and act on what is known and what needs to be known in order to adapt, survive, and thrive.

In short, enterprises must evolve as a result of dynamic market economies, so too must the training function. Critical to successfully navigating this change is to understand the difference between learning and training in the On Demand era. Training functions must begin to realize that the path to strategic leverage within the firm (in other words, earning a seat at the strategic table of these new enterprise models) hinges upon the cultivation of a collaborative learning culture across the ecosystem—not just the enterprise. Creating an enterprise that truly has the capacity to learn so that it can adapt to the whims of a fickle economic ecosystem is the new challenge that we are being asked to undertake. This will require significant and systemic changes to the training function that go far beyond simply automating training processes and digitizing training content and distribution. 

As training professionals we have not taken the time to ponder the profound effects that the On-Demand Era will have on our work in service of the future enterprise. We have instead chosen the easy route. We are “paving cow paths” by applying this radically new technology to automate age-old learning processes and methods without any consideration as to how we might leverage the attributes of Internet technology to enable different modalities of enterprise wide and pan-enterprise learning. In our haste to jump on the e-learning bandwagon, we have automated the past—bad assumptions and all. We have failed to recognize that the collaborative aspects of the Internet allow learning to flourish informally within and across the enterprise. We have yet to comprehend the impact of just-in-time information within the work context as a powerful and productive alternative to just-in-case instruction prior to the work activity. In essence, we don’t need new technology to help enterprises learn how to adapt on an ongoing basis, we need new thinking. We must begin to focus on how to leverage existing Internet technology to unleash the latent innovative energy that’s dormant within the existing structure of enterprise.

A bright future is dependent on bright people. Emphasis must be placed on redesigning work and leveraging technology to make transparent all that is not related to innovative and creative activity. Enterprises that begin to understand how to provide a work environment that embraces, enables, and promotes innovation and learning on a perpetual basis survive and thrive. On the other hand, enterprises that cannot develop learning as a core adaptive capability are destined to go the way of the dinosaur.

Here are some guidelines to consider as you begin your own transformation to on-demand learning.

• Think: learning to innovate rather than imitate. Change your paradigm from training to learning.
• Think: business value over training volume. Clearly define how learning addresses the business need.
• Think: partner, ally, or die. Design your learning strategy at the enterprise level and link to the firm’s most pressing business needs.
• Think: flexibility over functionality. Develop flexible learning architecture models that can quickly adapt to changing business priorities.
• Think: process execution and employee development. Use flexible architectures that enable learning-while-doing rather than requiring learning as a precondition to performing.
• Think: learners are clients rather than captives. Ensure that your instructional design strategies move creative control and access to the learner.
• Think: present information and instruction. Know the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge, and know which instructional strategies work best based on the urgency of the business need and the time available to learn.
• Think: just-in-time not just-in-case. Make intervention selections as if you have to pay employees for their time to attend your interventions.
• Think: learning-while-doing over learning-before-doing: Integrate information and learning into a more authentic context.
• Think: technology does not equal strategy: Put technology in its place, it is a delivery mechanism—not a panacea.
• Think: collaboration not coercion. Try to emulate the characteristics of email with your learning infrastructure: no one controls, everyone participates.
• Think:  inclusiveness cultivates innovation. Creativity has no boundaries and can propel innovative practices when everyone’s ideas and contributions are used to nurture the learning process. 
• Think: informal community and formal curriculum. Recognize that there is more than one way to learn and that most learning happens informally.
• Think: customer, partner, and supplier. Recognize that learning extends beyond the enterprise and prepare to extend your capabilities and value-add beyond the enterprise.

In the On-Demand Era, the most learned pan-enterprise network will win every time. Our challenge as learning professionals is to deliver strategic value that allows the enterprises that we serve to become the most innovative and adaptable nodes within the emerging information-rich economic ecosystem. This changes the game for learning in a significant way. The vision for on-demand learning has been established. The survival anxiety motivation required within ourselves as individuals and for our profession at large to learn and adapt has been aroused. We must respond passionately and adapt rapidly—or we too may suffer the fate of the dinosaur.