Stage 6: Evaluation

In this stage begins the real-time application of OM, the process of turning old knowledge into new knowledge. It is this formulation that provides one of several more knowledge platforms that provide other opportunities for even better experiential learning.

The first is when an event of a similar nature to the chosen experience in Stage 3 arises. Learners then retrieve the devised lessons of Stage 4 and, using the dummy-run knowledge acquired in Stage 5, reinterpret the knowledge to oblige their employer’s new circumstances.

After a decision has been taken but before it is implemented, the decision maker justifies concisely the determination in writing with an institution-specific precedent (if possible) and an accompanying rationalization under the basic headings “The Decision,” “How,” and “Why.” Citing precedent will provide evidence that the decision has been made contextually while the complementary justification imparts the necessary attendant conceptualization, useful (with the earlier Stage 4 Learning Audit) for further experiential learning down the line. It also averts later memory lapse and, if learning is actively championed by the employer, encourages managers to be less defensive than they might otherwise be—an important component of discovery and new knowledge.

Even then, this is not the end of the learning process. After the outcome becomes measurable, they use the loop again to assess whether revised practice can be turned into even better practice, in which case the Learning Audit can be updated again. In the multilinked chain of evolution, explicit knowledge has become tacit knowledge and then has become explicit knowledge again. In essence, old knowledge has become new knowledge available to be reapplied—a process that supports the universal paradigm of progress being incremental and learning being continuous.

In addition to using prior experience as a tool to assess the many variants of decision making ahead and behind actual events, the logic of the EBM Teaching/Learning Loop is to make continual incremental improvements to real business situations. The more often reflection is undertaken, the more frequently the opportunity arises to modify and refine decision making to better effect. On the basis that if one waits until after a task is completed, there is no opportunity to refine it until a similar task arises; there is also the option of starting the reflection stage before an experience is completed.

It may all sound like an elaborate process, but then, management was never intended to be uncomplicated or effortless. In truth, it is already tortuous and not as successful as it could be. My argument, which I have already proffered, is that it is better to get the front end of decision making right and make improvements than to spend as much, or even more, energy and money on the remedial end of the exercise.

In summary, one does not have to go via Z to get from A to B, which is the whole point and goal of experiential learning and its leading coconspirator, organizational memory. The urgency of Peter Drucker’s productivity call, and especially productivity growth, is knowledge management’s bigger and better role. It is what competition and the free market is all about.