How do we make learning central to our work?

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

From key results to learning goals in Europe

At the Centre for Public Impact, we believe in the potential of government to bring about better outcomes for everyone. In order for them to do that more effectively, we believe that governments need to centre learning and relationships.

But the mindset shift we are proposing for government isn’t easy. We know because we’ve been on a bit of a journey ourselves over the past year — experimenting with different approaches to guide and help us collectively evaluate our work as a learning partner to governments, public servants, and the diverse network of changemakers leading the charge to reimagine government.

“Setting key results felt more like outlining a plan of action, rather than a plan for action-learning.”

For several years now, CPI has been using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as our goal-setting framework. An OKR consists of an Objective, which sets the direction for the work, and Key Results which define the results you need to achieve to advance your objective. While OKRs did help us be more data-driven in our analysis — and applied some helpful rigour to our thinking — our team in Europe started to wonder if they were supporting us to be the best learning partner we could be. Setting key results felt more like outlining a plan of action, rather than a plan for action-learning: we were stating the steps up front that were needed to achieve a result, as if we knew them from the outset, and trying to hit goals rather than focusing on experimenting, learning, and adapting as we go.

So this year, our Europe team has been trialling a new approach: objectives and learning goals to enable us to explore how to be the best learning partner to government and public sector organisations that we can be.

Our starting point: setting our objectives for Europe

In Europe, we’re particularly focussed on supporting changemakers in and around government and the public sector to bring about a transformation in their thinking and practice. So to help us achieve this, in June 2021 our team set four objectives to orient our work as a learning partner. Our objectives act as both our north stars, stating the change we want to help bring about in the world, and as entry points for us to start our work with partners and each other.

1. We support changemakers to reimagine relationships between government, communities and the planet.
2. We support changemakers to redesign public services so that relationships are prioritised and people’s needs are put first.
3. We support organisations to build the tools and frameworks needed to optimise for learning and build learning environments.
4. As a team, we are continually learning and embedding our organisational values in our working culture, practices and programmatic work to build an environment that enables everyone to flourish.

Introducing learning goals

To enable us to make progress on these objectives, and because of how outcomes are made in complex environments, in early 2022 we took the decision to set collective learning goals as a team.

These learning goals are the things that it is critical that we learn about, understand more and explore together, if we are going to be able to make any progress against our objectives. We review these regularly in team meetings, and change and adapt these quarterly as a team and from there set our priorities for each quarter.

We defined six learning goals for our team and have iterated these over the last six months:

1. What does it mean to be an effective learning partner in practice?
2. What are we learning about an alternative paradigm for public management practice and how can we support a broader movement towards it?
3. What are we learning about our vision for government and the values and principles that are needed for a more effective and legitimate government?
4. What are we learning about the market in which we operate, what makes us distinctive and therefore what the best model for CPIE to ensure long term financial sustainability is?
5. How can we best apply what we’re learning internally, to ourselves as a team, and how can we best live our values and our global diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging priorities?
6. What else are we learning that might have surprised us?

For each project we run or work on at CPI Europe, we also set learning enquiries as project teams. These enable us to be clear together on what questions we are exploring on a specific project to enable us to advance that project and have impact with the partner. We often co-create these with partners, to ensure that our learning enquiry and what CPI wants to learn about from a project is in line with our partners.

“By organising our work around collective learning goals, and within projects learning enquiries, we are using learning as our management strategy.”

By focusing our work on learning together, we hope to create the infrastructure, processes, practices and culture to enable us to make progress against our objectives to the best of our ability, in the complex world within which we all operate.

It is important to say, we don’t think we have cracked the best way to enact learning as a management strategy, and actually don’t believe that anyone can ever crack it. But learning goals are enabling us to have different conversations than OKRs did. When we reflected on OKRs, our conversations tended to focus on whether or not we had achieved x key result in the abstract. Our conversations around learning goals, however, enable us to have conversations about what we are really understanding better about how to drive change in complex environments, where we need to go next, and what data would help us understand impact.

Our conversations with partners around our co-created learning enquiries for specific projects are generating the same kind of conversations too: which allows us to constantly focus together on what we are understanding about our efforts and how we need to change and adapt our work, based on what we are learning. This feels more right for us given the complex, relational, ambiguous nature of learning partner-ing and the sort of transformation our partners want to achieve: that of both thinking and practice.

What have we learnt from our learning goals so far

It’s still early days, but there are already some consistent themes that are emerging from reflections on our learning goals as a team.

• ‘Being’ AND ‘doing’: The importance of the ‘being’ is as central as the ‘doing’ of all learning partner work. Being a learning partner is a craft which takes skill. But it also takes humility, empathy, honesty, trust: a full partner in the truest sense of the word. How we show up as a learning partner is as important as what we do.
• Understanding starting points: Understanding a partner’s starting point — and continuing to understand where partners are — is key to being an effective learning partner. You can’t rush this kind of transformation — and you will alienate people or increase their change fatigue if you try to. Being a learning partner is about understanding starting points and enabling those within organisations to set the pace for change.
• The power of storytelling: Large scale transformation of the thinking and practice within public sector organisations is not easy, and there will be many stakeholders who need convincing to make it possible. It’s therefore important to help partners be able to tell compelling stories around transformation, so that they are equipped to make a convincing case to stakeholders. At CPI, we know that connecting those stories of change together can help create collective bravery for the kind of change that is needed for our vision for government to be realised.
• The importance of the mirror: Acting as a mirror to your partner and reflecting back to them can be an important way of helping create space to reflect and learn together. This is a key role of a learning partner, as through mirroring back, and bringing in case studies of other organisations at similar places in their journey, you can nurture the appetite for change and help equip organisations with the tools and examples they need.
• Diversity of perspective and experience: Having diverse teams acting as learning partners is essential to our work. Whilst acting as a mirror is so valuable, group think can also happen if the learning partner is too similar to the organisation they are trying to support. Diversity of perspective and experience is vital to enabling the learning potential of any organisation to be met.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

What’s next?

We are currently discussing how our objectives and learning goals can help us to orient what our areas of focus should be going forward — and where we believe we can have the greatest impact. We’re also building out our theory of change (or theory of learning?) that we hope to debut as part of a report reflecting on what we’ve learned across our learning goals at the end of the year.

As always, we are keen to hear from others about their practice of keeping learning central in their work and would love to hear from you about any approaches that you’ve found successful in helping drive change.