Image by Midjourney prompt by the author.

How we did it: turning learning into a part of the work not an addition to it

We treat learning as external to the work instead of part of the work. This makes learning less efficient and comes at a cost to the learning and the worker. How can we fix this?

We wanted to focus on three challenges faced by organizations needing to continuously upskill their workforce:

1. Learning is treated as something external. An event, ceremony, course .. something that has to be performed as its own ritual on its own time. coming at an additional cost to the workers.
2. Learning is performed separate from the work, which means the urgency to learn is lower. If we learn when we need to learn the urgency and application is much higher.
3. Sharing — a practice often used to stimulate learning is too expensive: almost no-one gets to share, it happens too seldom and in disconnected events where what is shared is usually the successful end-result (5% of what the team learned in the process), not the back and forth, struggles and insights that is a part of the process (95% of what the team learned).

At work learning is often treated as its own product, separate from the work, as if it’s not the same thing. And workers are often asked to learn on their own spare time or in additional hours to their own work / responsibilities.

The signals are clear: Our way of learning at work is outdated, but how could we change it?

Our project wanted to test two things:

1. Can we create an environment where learning and working happens at the same time?
2. Could we learn through transparency, not sharing?

Learning and working at the same time

This turned out to be remarkably simple. We took advantage of an online workspace environment like Miro or Mural and mapped out the way-of-working / templates / frameworks (we were upskilling teams on a new way-of-working). This gives plenty of space for the team and the work environment, but also the needed learning material which could be placed inside the frameworks available to the team when they needed it (what you need when you need it).

The learning became both relevant and contextual. If teams understood the work they didn’t need the learning, and if they got stuck or wanted to check the quality of the work the learning material was only a few pixels and a swipe away.

This proved that:

1. Traditional learning material doesn’t know if people are learning or not (because there is no feedback loop). It’s not designed to help people learn, but to move people through time consuming content. With learning being something the team activates when and if they need it the learning efficiency dramatically increases.
2. Sense of urgency greatly improves the perceived value of and the investment in the learning experience.
3. The learning was much more productive as the teams were immediately able to translate what they were learning into problems they were there to solve. They learned both the ‘why’ this was needed and also ‘how’ to do it.

Transparency vs. sharing

In the same online collaborative environment we put different teams next to each other. They were all learning the same way-of-working, but applying it to different markets and unique strategies. We found that even with little to no similarities in the strategies they were still getting great benefits from learning from each other or looking at each other’s work. If they were stuck or needed to know if their work was good they would just swipe left or right inside the online workspace to look at how the other teams had managed through the same parts. Immediately learning from each other and continuously improving on each other’s work.

What we learned:

• We proved that the way we learn inside companies today is mainly the result of learning being a separate function producing separate events, and programs as products of their own work. This does not make learning more efficient or effective. The content and the process of making learning becomes the proxy instead of the learning itself.
• We proved that learning integrated as part of the work is a low hanging fruit. It’s easy to get done and it’s very effective.
• We proved that transparency is a very effective means of learning from each other and that teams with very different strategies and projects, still having the learning in common can successfully learn from each other.
• We learned that the challenge is scale (which was solved by a different team a few months later), but in our project when the number of teams grew too large or the work became too complicated it was harder to stay in a shared environment with other markets (but again, this was resolved by someone else later).

In summary:

How we learn inside organizations is outdated and costly. There are far more efficient and effective ways to learn at work. We tested two hypothesis (learning as a part of the work and transparency instead of sharing) and quickly saw the benefits and improvements.

Learning at work is not as hard as we might be making it out to be if we have a fresh perspective and the willingness to make some changes.