In my last post, I spotlighted social psychologist Carol Dweck\u2019s landmark work on growth mindset and offered a link between her research and customer experience excellence. Building on Dr. Dweck\u2019s findings, let\u2019s dive into the first of three posts that unpack Dr. W. Warner Burke\u2019s model of learning agility.<\/p>\r\n
Professor Burke is an organizational psychologist who began studying the characteristics of high potential individuals and high-performance teams. In 2017, Professor Burke released his ground-breaking book, aptly title Learning Agility<\/a><\/i><\/b>, Dr. Burke, along with partners at the Center for Creative Leadership, assessed hundreds of leaders to determine the behaviors needed to adapt and maximize leadership potential. <\/b><\/p>\r\n Dr. Burke defines learning agility as a set of skills for dealing with new experiences flexibly and rapidly. These skills involve trying new behavior, getting feedback on those attempts, and making quick adjustments, so new learning occurs when there is no clear path to success. Dr. Burke\u2019s research uncovered nine learning agility skills:<\/p>\r\n In addition to defining these skills, Dr. Burke developed a tool for assessing the degree to which individuals possess them. In a moment, I\u2019ll discuss the first third of the learning agility skillset (the other two-thirds will be reviewed in upcoming posts).<\/p>\r\n The leadership development company, Korn Ferry<\/a>, looked at learning agility across organizations and how learning agility connects to leadership potential. According to their research, only 15 percent of employees at most organizations are \u201chighly agile,\u201d meaning there is a significant opportunity to increase this valuable competency across most businesses. Korn Ferry also found that high learning agile individuals (compared to the less learning agile) are eighteen times more likely to be identified as high potential employees.<\/p>\r\n So, what are some of these agile learning skills, and how do they relate to improving internal and external customer experiences? Let\u2019s look at three of them.<\/p>\r\n According to Dr. Burke:<\/p>\r\n Flexibility <\/b>involves \u201cbeing open to new ideas and proposing new solutions.\u201d Flexibility is the process of shedding behaviors that have worked in the past in favor of new behaviors that meet future demands. In this way, flexibility involves unlearning as much as learning. Flexible team members adjust course based on current needs and the feedback from others. To successfully meet rapidly changing internal and external customer experience needs flexibility is a superpower.<\/p>\r\n Speed <\/b>involves \u201cacting on ideas quickly so that those that aren\u2019t working are discarded, and other possibilities are accelerated.\u201d Speed is about quickly changing behaviors and expeditiously reading situational cues to form a plan of action. In my work with and a book about Zappos (The Zappos Experience<\/a><\/em><\/strong>), I spend a lot of time addressing service speed. I also blend speed and accuracy through a concept I call service velocity. Velocity is meant to emphasize service speed at the desired trajectory.<\/p>\r\n Experimenting<\/b> involves \u201ctrying out new behaviors (approaches, ideas) to determine what is effective.\u201d I\u2019ve worked with highly talented CX teams grounded in design thinking (deploying processes where they empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test). Their customer-centric and iterative approach continually relies on \u201ctest and learns\u201d to observe consumer behavior and actively pursue customer feedback.<\/p>\r\n Inspired by Dr. Burke, here are this week\u2019s challenge questions:<\/p>\r\n\r\n
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