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Removing barriers and encouraging collaborative learning at GCHQ

Background


Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a Civil Service department engaged in intelligence and security operations. Some 4,700 staff are employed; almost all work at the new, purpose-built high-security site at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire - housing one of the biggest computer complexes in Europe. Staff are engaged across two main areas. First, GCHQ produces signals intelligence to protect the vital interests of the nation - in line with government requirements, and within a regime of clear legal guidelines. Secondly, the organisation is the national technical authority for information assurance - helping keep Government communications and information systems safe from hackers and other threats. This includes assistance in the protection of information networks supporting critical national infrastructures, for example electricity and water supplies, against hostile activity from whatever source and in whatever form.

As well as terrorist threats to institutions and individuals, GCHQ is concerned with fighting serious crime - ensuring, for example, that the financial sector is protected from fraud or illicit movement of money through 'hacking'. GCHQ staff must be leading-edge in terms of applications and their abuses: this knowledge extends beyond the obvious areas of technology and the Internet.

To fulfil these objectives GCHQ employs highly intelligent staff who are capable of absorbing and applying information very quickly. These professional staff do not need to learn how to learn. Many are fluent in a wide variety of languages - almost 100 separate languages were spoken at GCHQ at the last count. More mathematicians are employed than in the average university faculty, and GCHQ staff invented the cryptographic concepts later used to make the Internet secure.

The GCHQ Learning and Development staff operate within a knowledge-intensive organisation. This requires a very different sort of intervention from the traditional classroom-based training model and different skill-sets from the learning and development professionals.

Changing the culture


The Learning and Development team have a critical role to play in supporting organisational objectives and, in particular, the change management process that is underway at GCHQ. The changing nature of the external threat - new and more complex challenges to national security - requires a different approach to problem-solving. As Julia Cusack, one of GCHQ's management and development training consultants, put it:

"The emphasis throughout the organisation is on solving problems by combining expertise through cross-functional working. Knowledge sharing and collaborative learning is critical to our success. This is not consistent with a didactic approach to the delivery of training. We must deliver our management and interpersonal skills training in a way that is consistent with the business objective and vision"

It should be emphasised that such collaborative approaches to learning receive clear and powerful support from the top. They are consistent with the GCHQ Blueprint - a rolling five-year corporate vision - which sets out a shared aspiration for the way GCHQ will do business in terms of process and culture. The Blueprint, which was compiled on the basis of wide consultation with staff, emphasises innovation and flexibility.

Organisational agility achieved through collaborative learning is seen as critical to success. In May 2004 for example David Pepper, GCHQ's Director issued a message to all staff on coaching, in which he argued

" We should all see coaching as a natural role - not as an additional chore - and seek to improve our coaching skills. We all have our own objectives to achieve, and we rely on colleagues to achieve them. If we improve each other's performance we can take some load off ourselves and get more done as a team."

This sort of reinforcement, expressed in these terms, is of critical importance to the Learning and Development team. It is, in Julia Cusack's words, seeing the development of management skills as an essential part of the job - not an optional extra.

Combining expertise within GCHQ teams is critical. Much of the professional/technical updating can only take place in-house - as frequently the subject matter expertise is greater amongst GCHQ staff than anywhere else in the country, if not the world. Although, outside speakers and informal updating lunches are encouraged, it would be very hard, for example, to envisage an external tutor-led course on cryptography as a feasible way of extending staff skills.
As a result a particular job has been identified within the teams responsible for information assurance - that of development manager. The post-holder here is responsible for scanning the horizon for latest developments and sharing them with his or her colleagues - this is a full-time role.

The physical environment for learning


Knowledge sharing is seen as an integral part of learning, and the new GCHQ building is designed to encourage this. All offices are open plan and equipped on a standard pattern to allow, in response to changing business requirements, the immediate and easy formation of cross-discipline teams in new locations. There are breakout areas with comfortable furniture at convenient locations and a 'street' running round the building to facilitate encounters and exchanges. There is a conscious policy to shift away from strict 'need to know' to 'learning through sharing'.

Course delivery


Given this philosophy, the Learning and Development team stress the importance of bringing groups of people from different functions together for management and interpersonal skills development. However, this does not mean that there need be a taught element on courses.

A continuing major initiative is called Lead 21. This is more correctly described as an organisational development than a training initiative. The aim is to promote and practise (with the emphasis on the latter) the characteristics of the new desired culture for GCHQ. This stresses a more participative style of management and more team working and improvement at every level. The interventions, designed and delivered by GCHQ Learning and Development teams in conjunction with an external consultancy, International Training Services (ITS), The initial phase, launched in 1998,involved a series of off-the-job workshops. Facilitation was used but the emphasis is was on self-managed group work. Each workshop consisted of some 18 people, and action-learning groups comprising some 6 participants would meet between the workshops. The current phase sees the Learning and Development function encouraging 'support and challenge' groups. In this way individuals also manage their own development and learning outside the training interventions.

In Julia Cusack's view the following are the key elements of any initiative intended to promote interpersonal skills. People should be brought together in self-managed groups. There should be an aim to promote self-awareness (through the use of psychometric instruments and 360° feedback). Modules should be short and learning groups such as action learning or support and challenge used. Where an intervention from outside the group is required it should be facilitatory rather than directive or didactive.

In many ways members of GCHQ's Learning and Development team are in a strong position. They have support from the top, deal with committed and capable individuals and work in physical conditions which are almost uniquely conducive to knowledge sharing. Their challenge is to work in a way which is consistent with and models the ethos of the organisational and cultural change programme.

 
 
 
 
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