Page 185 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

174 HBR Leader’s Handbook

partners approach problem solving and product development in new and
different ways. McNerney worked with his successor Dennis Muilenburg,
who became president in 2013, CEO in 2015, and chairman of the board
in 2016, to identify the internal capabilities Boeing needed to compete and
win in its second century. (The company began operating in 1916.)
To foster this new capability, senior business leader Pat Dolan was ap-
pointed to work with the businesses and with Human Resources to teach
managers and engineers how to differentiate between incremental change
and step-function change, and how to handle the latter more effectively.
Dolan explained to us that for incremental changes, the company had
plenty of subject matter experts who could develop solutions. But for chal-
lenges that hadn’t been faced before, they didn’t necessarily know how to
approach them—there were no detailed plans to execute. “Instead,” Dolan
said, “we need to empower people to learn as fast as possible so that they
can be successful. The key is not fast execution, but fast learning.”
To develop his organization’s learning skills, Dolan and his colleagues
brought teams of Boeing people together for multiday workshops to tackle
real, intractable problems that required substantial change. The outcome
of each of these sessions was a “learning plan,” rather than a detailed plan
of what would be done. Dolan explained: “We keep it at a high level so they
don’t get lost in details too early. They have to figure out the path that they
are going down first and not lock in too quickly.” Once they had this
learning plan, the teams were asked to return to their businesses—working
with other functions, suppliers, and partners—and actually make progress
against the problem. They then came back for another workshop several
months later to reflect on what they accomplished and learned, and how
they approached the problem differently.
Dolan believes that this process represents at least a four-year jour-
ney toward developing new capabilities and strengthening the company’s
culture. After all, the previous culture took 100 years to create. After sev-
eral years, Dolan and his team have sponsored approximately forty of these
workshops with an average of fifty people at each one—and with continued
reinforcement from senior company leadership. As a result, nearly 2,000