Learning in organizations is a juggling act. If you want the whole organization to learn, you have to focus your energy on three aspects of learning at the same time: individual learning, team learning, and organizational learning. When all three of these aspects are operating optimally, you get high-performance behaviours and results occurring at all levels of the organization. This looks and sounds easy to do, but it's no small feat. The good news it can be done if you know how to learn at the speed of change.

Think of individual learning, team learning, and organizational learning as a juggler would think about juggling three balls. The professional juggler's job is to keep all three balls in the air at the same time and to make it look easy to do. That's what the audience expects. Let's say that you want to learn to juggle as well as the professional juggler. You can't learn to juggle by starting with three balls at the same time. To learn to juggle, you start with one ball. When you're good at juggling one ball, you add the second ball. Then, when you're good at juggling two balls, you add the third. And then you practice, practice, practice.

What's interesting about learning to juggle is that you can learn to juggle one ball easily. Adding the second ball is tricky, but still fairly easy for you to grasp. It's that third ball that's hard to add. Adding the third ball requires something different from you. The key to adding the third ball is to let go of what you think you know about juggling, and to simply let the ball figure out what to do. I know what you're thinking: How can a ball figure out what to do? Well, it only feels like the ball is figuring out what to do, when, in fact, it's your unconscious mind that is in charge. When you're trying to add the third ball, you have to let go of what you know (your conscious mind), and let your unconscious mind take over. You have to stop thinking about how to add the third ball.

Let me explain. When you sign your name, your unconscious mind tells your hand to do the signing. How do you know that? It's because you don't think about signing your name; you just do it. Now, try to sign your name while thinking about how to do it. Because you've engaged your conscious mind, you discover that you can't sign your name easily; in fact, you've lost your signature. This is the same with organizational learning. I'll bet that in your organization, people analyze everything, in order to know what to do. What have we done before? Has it worked? Why did it work? If it worked before, it should work now. Humans have an insatiable desire to know. Unfortunately, that only produces half the equation for high performance. To achieve high performance, people in the organization need to analyze ... but then, they need to let go of what they know. It's like letting go of the third ball. Unfortunately, you can't start organizational learning by letting go of the third ball. You have to start at a place that's more concrete and easy for people to grasp.

The best place for any organization to start learning to juggle is to work with the first ball individual learning. It's the easiest place to start, and it builds motivation for learning. Then, if you want measurable results that affect the organization's performance, you add the second ball team learning. Why? Because even though high-performing individuals are an asset to any organization, high-performing teams are collectively more intelligent than any high-performing individual. It's teams that affect the level of organizational performance. Then, if you have the courage to let go of what you know, you add the third ball organizational learning. Yes, letting go of what you know requires courage to experiment, to invest in the long term, and to learn.

If you decide to develop high-performing individuals through individual learning, your Return on Investment (ROI) is low to medium.

If you decide to develop high-performing individuals and teams, through team learning, your ROI is medium to high. Your ROI increases to high to very high if you decide to share the individual and team learning across organizational boundaries. That's when your organization starts to learn as a whole. The results of organizational learning are outstanding. These results can include increased revenue generation and cost-savings, increased employee morale and productivity, and increased competitive advantage. The price for these outstanding results is courage and persistence.