The ability to learn is what individuals need to build sustainable and interesting careers. The ability to create learning agility at scale is the most important talent capability for organizations across all sectors. Futurist and my personal learning agility hero, Heather McGowan, argues that “we must begin with a foundation of learning agility, learning is now part of work and fueled by purpose (why) as the motivator, and the unit of value we produce is merely the byproduct or exhaust from our focus on increasing our capacity through continuous learning.” Communities – from families to classrooms to businesses – need to cultivate learning agility for us to adapt climate change and achieve happiness in our work and life. Here is an analysis of how to bring agile learning to your community.
The need for agile learning
According to McGowan, our world is changing so rapidly that the only way to adapt at pace is to unlearn how we think about education, work, and life. In her book, The Adaptation Advantage, McGowan and Chris Shipley predict that our work life “will be one of constant adaptation” and that every time we “hand off a skill to technology” we will need to create more capacity with different human and technical tools in our toolboxes.
What is agile learning?
Agile learning breaks down learning and doing into incremental steps so that we can blend learning with completing work nearly in real time. The model below shows how learning a particular discipline (or a honing a few areas of technical expertise) and then applying this knowledge to a career does not match the emerging needs in a world of work that will be disrupted, augmented, and supported by sophisticated technology.
For communities of all sorts, learning needs to be personalized and relevant within this ever-changing global context. Stakeholders are already demanding learning that is modular, flexible, and applied to what is needed for the future of work. Such principles and tactics are more important than ever as the global economy reshapes and rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic while grappling with the fact that the vast majority of workers expect an adaptable work from anywhere future.
No one organization, team, or academic institution will be able to design and deliver all the learning for everyone, which will require novel and creative collaborations through which universities, colleges, and community partners work in new ways to educate learners around the world as economic sectors settle, die, and emerge post-pandemic. Whether you run a small business, global non-profit, or simply want to embed more learning agility among your friends and family, these are the human skills and technical tactics that will help you add capacity to your work life arsenal.
Achieve psychological safety
People learn from each other and at scale when we feel safe to make mistakes and ask hard questions. “Psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking,” says Amy C. Edmondson (who also coined the term). “People feel able to speak up when needed — with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns — without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid.”
From cultivating dissent to celebrating failures, leaders can build psychological safety with vulnerability, asking for participation, and responding to people productively. As Edmondson notes, psychological safety is like “taking off the breaks” so your team can move fast, but great learning and exceptional performance will only happen when safety is balanced with clear, high standards and folks are given the support they need to reach them.
Cultivate a growth mindset
When we approach work and life with a growth mindset, we are more likely to see the potential in people and the creative solutions to complex problems. In our work life, a fixed mindset culture means that we believe that our traits and abilities cannot be changed. A growth mindset culture means that we believe in the potential to increase talent, ability and even intelligence through curiosity, learning, and discipline. In a community with a growth mindset culture, people enjoy a challenge; they strive to learn and they see potential in themselves and in others, which is why these folks inherently know they can develop new skills.
Drawing peoples’ attention to their strengths, talents, and track record of learning new things is a straightforward way to build some foundational pieces of a growth mindset culture. Focus your community on the pursuit of better.
Find cooperative co-producers
Human beings learn best from each other. Whether your organization produces a great employee experience through peer-mentoring or the families in your neighbourhood share ideas for keeping kids active during COVID, research shows that peer-to-peer learning is an effective (and free) capacity-building tool.
When employees, classmates, and friends want to learn a skill, turning to colleagues for help is often the first thing they do. Should you create a formal program, or simply socially connect likeminded alumni or a network of new employees, be sure that learning is tied to real-world situations and problems so that participants can apply the skills they’ve learned quickly.
In the spirit of cooperation (or coopetition), organizations can share people and systems to facility collaborative learning and, I think, a trend that will continue is post-secondary institutions partnering with industry to co-produce customized learning experiences for employees and other stakeholders so that folks can learn, unlearn, and relearn continuously in alignment with changing economic and community needs.
Personalize the experience
While the science of learning styles has been re-thought, it is true that people prefer to learn in ways that best match their preferences (not to mention how much time, money, and/or energy we have). Personalization isn’t about a menu of infinite edtech options that track behaviour and perpetually nudge us with digital learning solutions. According to Fast Company’s Ainsley Harris, for schools that have adapted seamlessly to the remote learning world of the pandemic because of previous investments in agile learning, personalization means learner-agency, not technological-proliferation:
The key difference between their approach and the popular narrative around personalized learning is that these educators have built their schools around the idea of student agency. In other words, their students are not passive recipients of personalized learning but rather active initiators of it.
It’s an important distinction. With remote learning likely to continue in some form at least through 2021, a greater degree of independence is being forced on students by structural necessity. Perhaps it’s time for schools to look anew at personalized learning, a model that in its best incarnations is not algorithm-led but student-led.
People are more likely to realize their potential when we provide people with the tools they need to learn at pace and the expectation that they will own their pursuit of getting better.
Learn in the flow of work
Learning happens everywhere and all the time when we reflect on our experiences. This is especially true when culture and systems enables folks to, as Josh Bersin describes, learn in the flow of work:
Consider applications like sales training (every company does this), safety training (every manufacturer or distributor does this), leadership development (a $14 billion market), and all types of technical training for engineers and technicians. What we ultimately want to do is embed learning into the platform in which they work, so the systems can coach and train you to be better on the job. And this is where all this digital learning is likely to go.
Every day we are met with needs or we discover a knowledge gap – “in 20 minutes I need to have a difficult conversation with a vendor” – and learning in the flow of work means that we can find the short video or blog post that addresses our need easily, consume the content, and then address the challenge or opportunity by getting to work.
With this approach, learning is no longer a destination, it’s something that comes to us when we need it. Bersin and Marc Zao-Sanders suggest that “through good design thinking and cutting-edge technology, we can build solutions and experiences that make learning almost invisible in our jobs.”
Get educated in community by community
One of the great lessons that I received from leading organizational learning at Vancity Credit Union was that the cooperative’s vision and values were best taught to employees by members of the community, not by a member of my staff delivering a PowerPoint presentation in a corporate training room. Vancity’s Orientation Immersion program took new and existing employees into the communities where the credit union’s members live and work to share food, engage in powerful dialogue, and hear stories of impact from stakeholders.
Taking a community engaged learning approach builds agility in all sorts of ways. For educational institutions, students put their academic subjects in community and professional context by working with non-profit or social enterprise partners. Employers have their models and ideas tested by students who bring their lessons and skills into the community.
Create human activities
To make learning happen everywhere and all the time, communities must strive to make it easy, cheap, and fun. While digital platforms that gamify or beautify learning absolutely help with everything from engagement to knowledge retention, the greatest results come from focusing on human skills, such as empathy, listening, and curiosity.
In his book Think Again, organizational psychologist Adam Grant finds that deep listening and powerful questions, such as “what evidence would help change your point of view?” or “how would your perspective be different if you grew up in another city, or in the 1700s?”. McGowan and Shipley agree, finding that investing in human capabilities, such as empathy and curiosity, will help individuals, teams, and communities to cultivate learning agility.
Some agile learning hacks
These are simple, everyday mindsets, behaviours, and activities that can be implemented to build learning agility in your community.
Teams
- Ask more, tell less. That’s it. Stop telling everyone what to do and ask folks what they think ought to be done.
- Pick one or two (no more than two) skills or behaviours that your team needs to build or improve. For around 9-12 weeks, spend 25 minutes a week consuming content about the skill, such as a video or article, and then discuss it together (the content is included in the 25 minutes). Nominate new facilitators of the discussion every week.
- Practice improve because it builds everything from trust to adaptability
Classrooms
- Empower students to co-produce learning experiences. My son’s grade teacher supported a few students who delivered a puppet show to their class. Adam Grant leaves a portion of his syllabus blank so that his students can co-create the content.
- Cultivate questions and creativity, not answers and technical precision.
Organizations
- Invest in gamification with simply tools like Kahoot!. Create fun coopetitions across the organization and reward the champions with a meal they can share with senior leaders or creative influencers in the firm.
- Build whatever “the Netflix of learning” means to you.
Families
- Embrace risk-taking and make it okay to break stuff.
- Invest in side-hustles, like art stands, clean-up services, and community performances that blend collaboration, creativity, and an entrepreneurial spirit.