Sustainable Futures uses Learning Architectures with organisations, partnerships, Agencies and communities to resolve complex issues and develop new insightful skills.
Learning Architectures include the learning processes of coaching, mentoring, action learning, group and peer coaching, action research and a range of whole systems methodologies.
Transferring learning and the know how of complex skills and innovations is often notoriously difficult and problematic with traditional training approaches meeting with limited success. This is all the more so, where it involves organisational or partnership transformation and quantum leaps in performance.
A more contextualized approach to learning and knowledge transfer is emerging based on the Learning Architecture tools and techniques.
Sustainable Futures has been researching how Learning Architectures can contribute to sustainable development and the creation of successful communities and places.
We have recently completed a research project for the Environment Agency on ‘The role of learning architectures in developing and spreading good practice’; which examined the potential to use new ways of working and learning to support the design and development of the Agency’s work in the 60 poorest environments in England and Wales.
Our research found that attempts to transfer good practice frequently fail and that partnerships and Agencies are using Learning Architectures to provide a much more coherent and systematic approach to resolving issues and developing new insightful skills and knowledge.
The core of the problem rests on the surprisingly simple observation that complex skills and thinking are developed and crafted over years as responses to real, messy, often intractable real world problems.
These skills are honed and practiced in complex social webs of colleagues, customers and stakeholders. This accumulated know-how, know-what, know-who, know-that is often termed 'tacit knowledge'.
We believe that for the big breakthroughs to be made, on-the-job learning is key to the integration of theory and practice and tacit knowledge and 'knowing', that is so difficult to codify or write down is essential for good performance.
To read an outstanding example of the integration of theory and practice in this respect, please see our Publications Page and our paper entitled ‘Flooding at Stockbridge, Keighley October 30th 2000: A case Study of Response and Recovery’
The paper describes how one person led a brilliant flood response and recovery programme by getting very angry residents and key stakeholders in the room together.
The seeds of a radically different approach
The 'transfer of training problem' has been around for fifty years. How do you get learning from the training room into practice, especially where this involves skills in use in these complex areas, especially where these can involve groups of people learning together? Over the last fifty years a whole raft of different learning methods have been developed and evolved to address this issue. When practiced well, they focus on three key ingredients:
- A focus on on-the-job learning.
- Innovative ways of bringing theory and practice together,
- Developing processes where there are far more inpactful, open, trusting and honest conversations and where frequent feedback becomes the norm.
Learning architectures
'Relationships are the highways over which knowledge transfer takes place. Knowing whom to talk to about what, when one is in need, can be among the most valuable of competencies'.
(Hunt J. and Weintraub J. 2007, The Coaching Organisation. Sage. London.)
Coaching, mentoring, action learning, group and peer coaching, action research and other whole systems methodologies create coaching and learning cultures that foster high performing teams and partnerships.
When done effectively these learning processes or architectures create ‘highways’ that help to resolve issues and develop new insightful skills.
They work because they create and deepen relationships in the process of tackling the big, complex difficult issues. Each works for the resolution of the other. In turn they create accumulated social capital that builds the capacity and performance of individuals, organisations, networks and partnerships.
Each of these learning processes is focussed on the real problems of concern in the workplace, the community, the partnership, 'the system'. Each has its own structure and values to enable and 'hold' learning. These are the building blocks to create a learning architecture. However, the people who design and facilitate these with partner clients must have a similar depth of tacit know-how in their own repertoires! Sadly this is not always the case.
Learning Architectures have four key dimensions.
- They unlink learning from hierarchy and 'expertise'. Of course, both these have their place and are necessary. But they are not privileged. It is the people with the issue, their unique context, and the mobilisation of their resources that are the starting points. So the building of lateral networks - highways of deep connection is key.
- These networks are built over time so they connect past, present and future. They change and adapt as the present evolves into the future - the new present. They are always emerging and emergent.
- People in positions of formal authority and leadership can play a crucial role in creating the conditions that foster breakthrough learning and performance. But, for the most part, they can't do it by top-down programmes of dictat.
- Expertise and more abstract knowledge and techniques should be available 'on tap, not on top'.
Organisational and mental rewiring
As we now know from new understandings about how our brains work, new learning happens when we create new neural connections and networks and these become ‘hard wired’ into our behaviour. see 'Quiet Leadership' by David Rock, Collins, New York. 2006. We also know that this process is unique for every individual, seemingly requiring different connections for each individual for what is apparently the same bit of know-how. Research is indicating that we can start to literally rewire our brains when we are able (and often enabled) to give focused and aware attention to the complexity of the current situation. By creating these new trusting, feedback rich relationships and impactful conversations we are supporting the process new ‘hard wiring’. This applies to both new 'inner-world' unique neural networks of those involved and the new 'outer world' networks so often needed for transformations in performance.
The more we can learn about these processes, inner and outer, the more we can work productively with change. At the same time we are learning to learn, both self and self in community. The two are inseparable.