Trust as a Success Factor in Organizational Learning
| 06 | Jun |
| 2013 |
John Hagel
During his Social Capitalist interview, conducted in
conjunction with his Deloitte
Center for the Edge co-researcher and co-founder John Seely Brown, business
strategist and consultant John Hagel explained why trust is such a critical
factor in your organization’s ability to learn and adapt successfully.
I think this is one of the reasons that we put so
much emphasis on a specific “soft” skill, which is how you build trust-based
relationships.
Many years ago, [Brown] made the formulation that
tacit knowledge doesn’t flow – it’s very sticky. It’s within ourselves, within
our heads, and we’re very reluctant to share it or to even expose it unless we
trust the people we’re with.
This is because within the process of trying to
access that tacit knowledge, we’re going to stumble, we’re going to fumble,
we’re not always going to have the right words. So we’re definitely not going to
attempt to access it if we don’t trust the people we’re with. If you can’t build
those trust-based relationships, you’re going to have a very hard time accessing
this tacit knowledge – and in a rapidly changing world, the tacit knowledge is
where a lot of the value and insight is.
Think about the explicit knowledge that’s written
in textbooks. It takes a year, two years, three years to get that textbook out,
but by the time it’s out and written and codified, it’s old news.
The new stuff is in people’s heads – the stuff
that they’ve just experienced – and it’s in accessing the new stuff that
trust-based relationships become so central.
To read the full transcript of John’s Social
Capitalist interview, click here.
To listen to this and other Social Capitalist podcasts, download them at
iTunes.
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