What I observe in our business organizations-even in our public institutions�is that after a crisis or breakdown, or after something worked really well, we don't get together and say, �Okay, what do we each think happened, and what can we learn from it?� We either take credit for it, or, if it's an error, we try to bury it as fast as we can and move on.

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Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of 'The Learning Organization,' realizing that knowledge is our most important product... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, 'We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead.'

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If you're interested in creating sustainable growth, sustainable productivity, sustainable morale, you can't do that through autocracy. You can work the numbers for a quarter or a half a year, you can drive people to exhaustion for a few months or a couple of years. But if you haven't focused on creating capacity in the organization, it will die through those efforts.

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We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently; �Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises.� So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

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The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.

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