Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

Chapter Seven

Putting Teaming and Learning to Work

This chapter explores execution-as-learning as a way of operating that contrasts with a more traditional managerial approach that separated learning from execution. Rare in practice, execution-as-learning provides a competitive advantage at any organizational level: product development teams, hospital emergency rooms, and automotive assembly plants alike. Put simply, execution-as-learning is how a learning organization works. Every aspect of execution is conducted with a learning mindset and the liberal use of learning behaviors.

Learning is an imperative for any organization to stay competitive over time. As we saw in Chapter Six, some of this learning takes place among people working across ...