Growing through effective learning loops

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Milan to share some relevant insights from my practice with the Enterprise Design community.

Inspired by a recent conversation about learning how to learn, I decided to share some ideas about an effective learning loop that helps me grow professionally:

Conversations, Q&As and progress from practice generate new questions.

I’m bringing these questions in the communities of practice I’m part of, which usually triggers new conversations and sharing of resources with peers.

These conversations and resources indicate new trails to explore through further study, which triggers inner conversations, using critical thinking, making sense of and synthesizing the new concepts for using them as new insights in practice.

Then new questions arise leading to new trails, which generate new insights and the loop continues.

I want to share with you two examples of how this works practically:

Milky Way mapping
The exploration started as a new question that emerged from one of the org. effectiveness programs: what visual tool can you use to better align the business model, the operating model and the organizational model?

I remembered that the Enterprise Design community has many tools for visualizing the different aspects of an enterprise, so I asked this question on the Slack group of the community.

Annika & Milan shared that I might want to look into Milky Way mapping, along with some relevant resources about this new type of capability mapping.

Following this trail, I’ve studied further and I’ve practiced this mapping on my own to make sense of it and the process around it, before bringing this into my practice.

Viable Systems Model
My curiosity was triggered by the EODF Book Club about the Fractal Organization, Gabi kindly sent me the book as a gift and I’ve read it as a preparation for the book club discussion. Couldn’t attend the discussion back then, yet I resonated with the Viable Systems Model described in the book.

Following this trail, I’ve connected the model with many use cases from my current & future org. effectiveness practice. I’ve shared the synthesis of the concept with one of my clients, who resonated with it and wanted to incorporate it in one of the current programs.

Through applying VSM and making sense of the organizational insights it brings, new questions emerged, which led me to discover a new professional association — Systems and Complexity in Organizations, which has a wealthy archive of talks and other resources about applying systems approaches to a wide range of organizational issues.

This came with new trails to explore and triggers for further study and synthesis.

Of course, the diagram above is a simplified version of what goes on in reality.

Something closer to reality would look like this maybe:

Insights, questions & new trails emerge between all the elements in reality.

If we were to consider the other elements that contribute to the learning loop, we’d have a more detailed picture, like this:

Some other elements that constantly bring me insights, questions & new trails are:

• Customer discovery talks
• Immersion in a few client organizations
• Conferences
• 1:1 talks with peers
• Social media streams
• Newsletters
• Exploring bodies of work from practitioners across disciplines
• Interactions with newsletter readers
• Newsletter analytics
• Talks with my partner
• Writing
• and Contemplation

An excellent question I’ve received during the Enterprise Design community gathering was: “How do you enable this type of learning loops in your client organizations?”

This helped me become aware that I was intuitively doing some things to help create a similar loop for the teams I’m working with. From now on I will be more deliberate about this:

• When interacting in the programs, inviting people to reflect on new questions they discover, hosting Ask Me Anything sessions
• Inviting people to various communities of practice that might benefit from and be able to contribute to. Inspire them to launch internal communities of practice and grow them sustainably
• Sharing curated resources directly or through the weekly newsletter etc.

This is an interesting new trail triggered by the question from the community gathering, which aligns with my aim of helping the people that I work with to become more autonomous in their sensemaking and continuous learning.

I’m fascinated by how all these things connect and can fuel professional growth and being able to evolve to create more value.

Hopefully reading this will spark your curiosity and help you ask new questions, follow new trails or discover new insights. What learning loops could work for you, in your own context?

Lots of inspiration,
Bülent