Why learning should be part of doing
I recently read Emily Chappell’s experiences as a London Courier. Cycling is such a straight white male sport that it’s great to get such a vivid description of life as a cycle courier from an LGBT woman. Hearing different perspectives is so important, particularly as female cyclists are almost twice as likely to be harassed or subjected to bad driving than men. Which is just ridiculous.
I was really interested in how the rules and culture of the profession come together.
”There are just as many rules in couriering as in any other industry. It’s just that no one tells you what they are, so your first challenge is to find out, and only then do you learn how to follow them…. Here you learned by listening, by watching, by trial and error, by f**king up and being yelled at, the embarassment a firm deterrent against making the same mistake again.”
Linking learning to change
I touched on normative change and learning in my post on Community Organising.
There are three different models for change according to the theory. There’s coercion, where failure to comply is punished. When rational means are used for change, we use theories to explain, such as education or training. When we use a normative method, thinking is changed through action. This post on systems thinking and scrum by Sami Lilja uses a helpful (but painful) metaphor:
“Imagine a 3 year old child learning that fire can be dangerous. Coercive learning would be telling him that touching the fire will result in punishment. Rational learning is telling him that fire is hot. Normative learning is that he sticks his finger in the fire, immediately changes his assumptions about safety of fire, cries a little and learns a lot.”
Normative learning leads us to better understanding of a system. A coventional training course can give food for thought, but leaves the challenge of implementation firmly in the camp of the trainee. Normative learning allows people to take ownership of the change and the learning and understanding within the system. Fred Collopy outlines this in his criticism of Systems Thinking:
“Rather than accepting a new idea because we must, we like to try it out. A new skill is most likely to interest us if it contributes to both short-term and long-term learning objectives. And the easier it is to try out parts of a theory, the more likely we are to jump in.”
Seth Godin’s post on the Learning / Doing gap is a great critique of coventional methods of learning. It breaks down the standard approach and offers a useful alternative.
“The alternative? Learning. Learning that embraces doing. The doing of speaking up, reviewing and being reviewed. The learning of relevant projects and peer engagement. Learning and doing together, at the same time, each producing the other.”
What does this look like in practice?
The main thing for me is that learning and understanding become part of what we do, not an occasional event.
If needed, learning and reflection can be kick started in a few different ways. I love our Change Projects at Research in Practice, where a group of participants come together with research experts and explore an issue over 8–12 months.
Action Research promotes change through the simultaneously taking action and doing research. And peers come together in Action Learning Sets to share their experiences and support each other as they put their learning into action.
I also really like the Frontline Futures events that Melys Phinnemore and Jo Carter from the Satori Lab put together with the Chartered Institute of Housing. By involving the organisation in how the learning is implemented, they were able to encourage real change in service delivery.
Complexity
The uptake and application of learning is greater when using normative methods. There are other advantages too, particularly in a complex environment where there isn’t one way of doing things. Normative learning builds in an understanding of the environment in which the work is taking place.
We learn so much through experience. By focusing on supporting people we can create a learning environment where we don’t just have an explicit guide, we can also give people access to the tacit stuff. It allows us to look at how the change is implemented and the organisational blockers to it. It offers opportunities to develop supportive peer to peer groups and to ask deeper questions around change within teams and organisations.
Rebecca Godar put the programme together for our Leaders’ Forum, and she spoke herself on the use of data with Oli Preston. Rebecca made a great point around the role of compassion in change. Compassion and kindness bring people with us and develop the organisations that we we want and the services that people want.
If we can model kindness and support in our learning, we can embed it in our work. And if we can embed it in our work, then we will be providing caring and compassionate services that make a real difference to people’s lives.
