This is the message that John C. Redding, executive director of the Institute for Strategic Learning, brought to Katharine Cornell Theatre on April 2 as part of a program organized by the University Services Human Resource Development Advisory Committee.

All organizations "need to deal with the fundamental question, 'Is what we're doing now going to be successful once the landscape changes?'" Redding said. "It wasn't that long ago that we ran our organizations, managed our organizations and structured our careers as if the future was going to be the way it is today...and customers were going to want pretty much the same kind of thing," he noted. All that has changed, and the "swirling gusts of competitiveness" are threatening the survival of all kinds of organizations, including higher education, he said. "If higher education doesn't recognize (that), it will become one of the dinosaurs of the next century."

Technology is a key force that has impacted the changes that are occurring. And globalization is "throwing things up for grabs and affecting how we compete," Redding said.

The downsizing trend of the past decade also has played a role, he added, and organizations "need to have people on the front lines making decisions that once were reserved for managers."

All of these forces, he said, are coming together into an "inherently unstable environment" of constant, yet unpredictable, change. And to cope with what Redding calls "discontinuous change," organizations and individuals must focus on learning.

"What you know now isn't going to get you employed in 10 years," he said. Individuals and organizations must expend their efforts and energy thinking about the capabilities that are going to be necessary tomorrow. "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage," he said.

Redding outlined 12 building blocks that are important to becoming a successful continuous learning organization: strategy and vision; executive practices; managerial practices; climate; organization and job structure; information flow; individual and team practices; work processes; performance goals and feedback; training and education; individual and team development, and rewards and recognition.

Redding made a number of recommendations to help the university in its efforts to become a continuous learning organization.

He said it needs to learn from its diverse experience and make responsibility for learning part of everyone's job. Advanced technology and computer systems, he said, are a vehicle for that learning. The university will need to support continuous learning by providing resources such as coaches and learning guides, training in "learning to learn," and assigning projects as vehicles for learning.

Leadership is crucial to becoming a continuous learning organization, Redding said.

Information and materials from the April 2 presentation are available on the Web at http://wings.buffalo.edu/HRD/html/events.html

A real-life example of how a corporation can be a continuous learning organization was detailed in the second portion of the program by Michael Waters, vice president of human resource planning and development at Xerox. Speaking from Xerox's experiences over the past 15 years, Waters said it's important that senior management sign on to the concept of being a learning organization. "Walk the walk," he said. "Senior teams must visually display what it is to be a learning organization. This system is about leadership, and learning is about leadership."