Activating Learning at the Enterprise Level

I'm spending a lot of time right now focused on helping organizations develop learning cultures --- essentially moving beyond focusing on the individual learner and instead

making all individuals accountable for the learning of others. There is a powerful rationale for this approach, and especially powerful research from CEB proving the business case for it.

But the question always posed to me is "how do you actually do this?"

Well at a high level, the answer is first, actively curate your archive of learning content so that the right learning, and only the right learning, can happen.

Second, embed learning behaviors into both the design of your learning experiences and into the very technology platforms used to distribute them or support them.

And third, then hold people accountable for deploying learning behaviors themselves and supporting them in others. Again, some brilliant research from CEB underscores the best practices that can make this happen effectively.

But even then, I get asked, "yes, but how do we really do that?". Meaning, dive deeper!

With that more granular focus in mind, I've given some thought to some very specific steps we can take to support learning across our organization. This will feel exceptionally low-level and finely crafted, but it's supposed to. These are things we should quite literally be asking people in our companies to do every day.

Are you ready?

1) Dissect a project you've been working on to uncover what you did differently on it, and what you learned from it. Then share those "findings" with a peer or manager.

2) Mentally leap forward to upcoming projects or roles and envision potential development opportunities in those projects and roles. What do you need to learn in order to be effective inn those projects, what do you hope to learn in those projects, and what will you do to capture that learning?

3) Start team meetings with a ten-minute, positive re-cap on what is going right ---ask someone involved to describe the behaviors that are driving the good outcomes.

4) Ask questions instead of telling someone what to do. Ask how you can support their approach and follow thru.

5) Ask for help yourself. Take the advice. Share what you learned.

Given time, I could go on. But I am sure that if you took a few minutes yourself to reflect on this, you could identify at least five things you're already doing and an additional five that would productively support learning in yourself and others.

And as wisdom tells us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.