Something strange came out of the recent ‘Learning about learning’ event, convened by Foundation Botnar in Basel. (If you haven’t already read my reflections on how the experience personally affected me, you can do so here.)
Often when you attend a good event, you come away with some really clear takeaways, lessons or messages that resonated that you really want to put into practice in your own context. I’m not saying that didn’t happen here, but I am saying that it definitely wasn’t the primary thing that happened.
Everyone left deeply reflective, with an overwhelming sense that it was going to take them at least a few days to process the experience we’d been part of.
Writing now, with three weeks’ hindsight, I’m still processing, still absorbing, the experience.
I’m honestly not sure what to say about this event which is currently seeming to defy description. It was definitely a profound learning experience for all who participated. It’s much harder to say why exactly, or to describe the conversations to people who weren’t part of them – just like the 60s "you had to be there, man."
But I’m going to make a muddled attempt to share some of the conversations that really resonated for me, in the hopes that they may resonate with you too.
Learning Doesn’t Have to be Codified into Reports.
We have a tendency to treat learning like it is disembodied, like it is data in as spreadsheet.
This is connected to the tendency to think of ‘the learning’ as a product or a series of products – the classic ‘report’ which typically takes massive effort to create – but that no-one actually reads and that changes very little.
Our group reflected that in any space where people are doing anything, there is massive latent learning happening all the time.
When we wrote four years ago that “learning is a luxury”, we were wrong - or at least half-wrong. Very few organisations manage to give dedicated time to learning and reflection so, in that sense, yes learning is a luxury. But the people in these organisations are still learning all the time, even if they don’t have the spaces in which to share and reflect on what they are learning with one another.
Learning and changing is happening even if it is not documented and not shareable. This is important because not everything needs to be codified, documented, and shareable. We need to learn to value and create spaces for tacit knowledge. We need to create more learning spaces where learning is shared and collective but where it is also ok for it to remain uncodified. This learning lives in the hearts and minds of the people who are part of it. It doesn’t have to be turned into a report. In fact, one observation that our group made was that often attempts to codify organisational knowledge accidentally trample on and crush the tacit, latent, learning that is happening all the time.
Paradoxically, doing all these reporting and measuring things to try to show that your organisation is learning might actually damage the learning already being done by the people. A lot of people have negative experiences of formal education, where they came to believe that they were ‘not good’ at learning. The more an organisation formalises its learning, the more these negative experiences come to the fore and can make people think that their learning is not valuable – worthless even – so they start to keep it to themselves and even disregard it altogether.
What if we could cast aside the great pressure to turn learning into products like reports or dashboards?
Learning is Not Necessarily Neutral
One of my fellow learners asked this vital question: “If you’ve created the time and space for learning, how do you equip people in a way that allows them to show up?” This question stemmed from the observation that even the language of ‘learning’ can be a barrier.
The word ‘learning’ itself can be off-putting, intimidating, and make people feel that they don’t know how to do it. Many people have had deeply unpleasant experiences of the formal education system, and this has left them feeling that ‘learning’ is something unpleasant, or perhaps that they are not good at learning. We reflected on how there can often be privilege attached to learning – that it is something for the ‘higher ups’ (perhaps while manual labour is for the ‘lower downs’).
We discussed how we need to make learning relevant for the specific people we are inviting to engage in learning, and we have to make sure it is easy for those people to engage in learning – which may sometimes involve not describing the activity as ‘learning’ in the first place. We have to consider what obstacles need to be removed to enable people to embrace learning activities. We have to think about how we can ‘provide cover’ to people to enable them to prioritise learning over other activities which the current system values more.
In terms of obstacles to learning, one of my colleagues made the wonderful observation; “Who I am depends on who else is in the room.” Their insight was that our capacity to show up and participate in collective learning depends on who we’re being asked to show up with. We all ask ourselves questions like, “Can I share an instinct with this group?”, “Is it safe to do so or will it be rejected as being “non-factual”?”, “Maybe I don’t want to compete with the loud white men or other power-holders in the room.”
We also touched more on how matters of power can affect and inhibit learning (“What if funders commission learning but don’t like what’s being learnt?”) but we noted at the end of our time together that this was a topic we felt we didn’t delve into far enough.
The Who of Learning
As I mentioned above, we have a tendency to treat learning like it is disembodied and depersonalised, like it is data in as spreadsheet. But for something to be ‘learning’ (as opposed to ‘data’), someone has to be learning. We all noted a common failure to consider the ‘who’ when talking about any form of learning.
The who of learning shows up in “Who I am depends on who else is in the room.” It also shows up in the fact that learning changes people, and that the changes that stem from learning are more likely to be changes to individuals than they are changes to organisations.
As an example of this, one of the observed ‘inadvertent by-products’ of things like leadership development programmes is that they tend to lead to participants leaving the organisation that paid to put them through the programme. That’s because the individual has learned and has changed through being part of the programme, but the organisation around them has not changed. This disconnect and cognitive dissonance is often too much for people to handle, so they start afresh somewhere new.
Our group spoke extensively about the role and place of relationships in learning. (One of our exploratory questions was, “What if rather than treating ‘data/evidence’ as the starting point for learning, instead we used ‘relationships’ as the starting point?”)
One of my colleagues spoke eloquently about communities of practice, saying that at their heart, communities of practice are about the people more than they are about the exchange of information. (The focus is on ‘learning with’ rather than ‘learning about’.) The ‘community’ part is really important because it is about people who are actively building relationships with each other, probing and seeking to understand one another, building trust and, through doing this, building the courage to challenge and be challenged.
We said that “Community gives you the hope to try again.” ‘Learning from failure’ is a bit of buzz-phrase these days, with little interrogation of what it takes to actually learn from failure, as opposed to simply failing. One part of what it takes is supportive relationships – relationships in which you feel safe, in which you trust – as these are the things that help you get back up off the mat.
Another great line, paraphrased by one of my colleagues was: “The quality of our thinking is proportional to the quality of the attention we are given.” In a nutshell, we think better and more deeply, and we learn more, when people engage with us and give us their full attention. When people listen deeply to what we’re saying, try to understand us, ask us provocative and probing questions, we learn more completely.
Learning isn’t something that happens solely to individuals in isolation. Relationships drive deeper learning. Part of the ‘space’ that we need to learn in is other people’s attention. To learn deeply, we need to do so within communities that support us (even if they disagree with us), we need to feel safe with the people with whom we are learning, and we need to give and receive high-quality attention to and from those people.
We also described relationships as “an antidote to power” and as “a source of joy”, which calls back to the topics of ‘learning and power’, and ‘learning as feeling (rather than information)’. All of which, we agreed, need more attention.
There’s something quite meta about all of this. In the event, we discussed how learning is often portrayed as or interpreted to be an ‘information transfer’ – but this is often not the main outcome.
People talked about how learning can be inspirational or deeply connective, the main outcome being a feeling or a relationship rather than data. We also spoke about how important these types of learning experiences are – learning that energises you and motivates you to act can be so much more powerful than learning that simply provides you with new information.
I think this is part of what we experienced together, an occasion of embodied learning that inspired and connected us – something so much more than ‘head knowledge.’ I am growing because of this experience, because I had the opportunity to experience for myself the type of embodied, connective learning that I facilitate for others.
The irony is not lost on me that I went to an event about learning ready to share these insights, only to have them gifted back at me in an experience that has facilitated my own growth and learning. A truly meta experience indeed.
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