A marketing agency that creates creative videos and posters have been having a really bad year. The manager of the production division found that the employees aren’t working as motivated and quick as before. So in the next quarter the manager tried to have a weekly performance review in order to rev up the performance. It did work for a while but later on the manager found out that you can’t last a marathon with a sprint.  Later on the management team tried to focus on what drives the people to work. The team found out that people were gaining praise for doing new things even if they were not delivering their promised results. They thought that short-term results were more important than satisfying the consumer. And when the time came to choose, they felt that their individual goals were bigger than the company’s. All this was limiting them from participating wholeheartedly in the transformation underway. Mindsets needed to be flipped through a set of targeted initiatives. The people came to realize that satisfying the consumer is what will bring the short-term results. There won't be any success for the individual if the company is not doing well. They started to be recognized for executing with discipline focusing on our full potential to deliver challenging goals. Sharing the story of why the transformation was necessary and addressing these mindsets engaged the employees with a whole new level of energy, and only a few months later the organization was able to deliver its first quarter back on track and continue the trend. Companies that take the time to identify and shift deep-seated mindsets were 4 times more likely to rate their change programs as successful, according to the McKinsey Quarterly transformational change survey 2010. mindset shifts are linked to the highest impact behaviors a person wants to change.

When your company or organization is trying to implement a new culture or formulating one, it should hold a unique point. Because KG is trying to implement the new learning culture where learning doesn’t have to be in a class but you can learn through other media such as reading, videos and podcasts. By unique it can have a range of things, the unique approach, the unique ritual to make it more sticky, the unique culture and many more unique approaches. This unique point will bring out the stickiness factor more for everyone in the company. The author of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, defines the Stickiness Factor as the quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea. The stickiness will depend on the context.  Bola, one of KG’s business units, had a really interesting ritual and requirement to work there. The requirement is that you can’t just like sports, you have to love it and be crazy about it. You can’t just know the surface or basic knowledge of the sport that you are into, you have to know facts about it. For example, if you are into Formula 1, you have to know the fact of the champion in 1997, which drivers use which car and so on. The unique ritual is that every Friday at 3 PM, either you have work to do or meetings, it would be stopped and everyone has to play soccer. Larisin and Corporate HRD have a common practice in implementing the learning culture. Once a week an employee has to do a “Ted Talk” where they share the knowledge they know to everyone there. This knowledge can be your expertise or something that you know or do for fun. In order to have the learning culture mindset by doing this kind of knowledge sharing can strengthen the need of learning culture. Since you have to share your knowledge you have to at least learn something. The unique approach talked in Harvard Business Review is “shocking rules”, in other words, rituals and practices that are memorable, so “bizarre,” that people inside the organization “encounter almost daily” and that people who hear about them wonder why they are necessary. There are many examples of this “shocking rules” such as Amazon where Jeff Bezos insisted that the office furniture are built or bought by buying cheap materials, especially the desk where they bought cheap doors and nail the legs to it. This shocking rule reminds everyone that even though they are one of the biggest online marketplaces with billions in revenue, they should look at every opportunity to save money so they can deliver the best products at the lowest cost. In the end, not every lock can be opened with every key. This unique approach may work at your business or company, but at times it wouldn’t. It could because of the previous culture was too great of a difference with the one you want to implement now. Shocking rules are worth the try.  

Many companies are starting to implement learning culture as part of the digital transformation. With the Industry 4.0 emerging, many companies are moving towards digital transformation, and it’s not easy for the employees to settle in with this change. There are a number of uncertainties that would create anxiety for the employees such as the automation takeover. But many companies are still implementing the classic classroom learning where it’s more of a mandatory activity rather than a voluntary one.  Contextual learning is a learning system that is connecting the academic content with the real world context. A real example of contextual learning would be the learning system in SALAM Yogyakarta (Sanggar Anak Alam). They are using contextual learning on their students. The school doesn’t have the standard curriculum given by the government, instead they are using their own curriculum. The way the students study is also different, they don’t study from books but they try to study by understanding scientific concepts and theory such as friction, buoyancy and many more through seeing and experiencing those concepts and theory. What the students learn isn’t guided by curriculum like the usual school, but instead on what they find interesting to study that day. (continue here or next paragraph) The purpose of contextual learning is in order for students/learners to understand the purpose of learning. So they will know what they need to learn in the future, in this case a work environment, and be adaptive towards uncertain change. Contextual learning doesn’t demand the teacher to teach the students/learners about the subject but becomes more of a facilitator if they have questions. In the workplace contextual learning can be carried out by individuals, and if they have questions they can refer to someone who is more experienced in that subject. The benefits of implementing contextual learning in your work environment are hands on learning which you can combine theory and real world actions, an experience-based learning that would be at the back of their head, and more productive and enhancing concepts to the students/learners. (continue this plz) Being adaptive in this digital age means that you need to be able to absorb information quickly and implement them in a short period of time too. With the ever-changing work environment, classroom learning is old-school and is not effective today. Contextual learning can be done by an individual’s own initiatives and could grow into creating a learning culture in the department or company. Contextual learning has a great benefit on you, as the one who takes the initiative, and the company in order to be adaptive as a whole by creating a learning culture.