As well as After action Reviews, I’ve been reading aboutaccountable autonomy.
This idea of ‘accountable autonomy’ is a pretty powerful one, it’s exactly the sort of empowerment, with responsibility, that I’ve been banging on about in education; employees are rarely given the accountability to take control of their own learning paths – they’re subjected to centralised ‘L&D dept.’ curriculum choices.
But what would happen if employees could take control of their learning, but in an accountable way? Reminds me of the £2,000 ‘learning accounts’ I read about a while ago. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if employees were given two grand each year to ‘go and learn’. Spend it on anything you want – the only requirement is to present back to your peers what you spent it on and how it helped you in your job.
Now, that’s a step too far for many companies. So how about the next best thing? Blogs for employees – distributed and managed in an accountable, but autonomous way…
Blend in some decent RSS mojo, and you will have created a learning ecosystem, developed by and from people first, and flowing back into the L&D dept.
Giving employees the ability freely blog wouldn’t require a major shift in corporate policy, but it would send a clear signal of accountable autonomy…and that’s the first step to becoming a 21st century organisation.