Learning at scale

A.k.a A community of practice acts as a living curriculum

Don’t get caught on the hamster wheel of delivery

I spoke at the last Learner Experience Design (LXD) meetup on the challenges of learning at scale, along with my colleague Kara Kane who is the community manager for user-centred design. This blog is based on that talk.

We are both facilitate cross-government communities of practice. Which is in itself testament to the fact that government is trying to be a learning organisation.

Broadly we do this for 3 reasons:

To make knowledge and ideas more networked and open, and less siloed.
To encourage people to have a learning mindset, not a fixed one.
To help people to learn with peers, and not on their own.

Some of the things that happen at the Government Digital Service (GDS) to help learning at scale:

The first national framework of job roles and associated capabilities. So when I say ‘service designer’ anyone in government will know what I mean, broadly what they are able to do and how to hire one.

The GDS Academy trains professionals in Agile methods, so that government can be less, well, government. And more nimble in project development.

There are learning programmes such as the data science accelerator which gives someone a mentor for 3 months, to work on a business critical challenge. The results of which are already saving millions across government.

And there is the famous GDS ‘post-it note’ culture. Which means that we work in the open, share with colleagues, always ask questions and appreciate learning as a core part of the job.

Some of the things that happen in a community of practice to help learning at scale:

Large scale learning festivals, where community members populate an empty schedule with their ideas and hundreds of people spend the day learning from each other. (See previous post on how to design a learning festival).

Design training, where user-centred design specialists create workshop activities for learners to understand what they do and how they work.

Online forums where colleagues from across government post and answer queries.

Mass design crit days, where 50+ people come to share their work in progress and get ideas and support from others.

Now on to the challenges…

1. Government is not a single organisation.
   People are based all round the UK in organisations with different cultures and attitudes to learning. So the communities work on the law of attraction. We do our best to be visible, and you find us. And it’s working, as the communities are growing and becoming more active. This unlocks a new challenge… multi-disciplinary teams. As more people across government collaborate across organisations, professions and projects. People need to learn a new way of working well together.
2. No clear learner journeys for professions.
   Most of the design professions are new to government, and so is the support for them. It isn’t always easy for someone to know what they need to know, and where to go to learn it. My team is reviewing the current offer for content designers and looking for ways to make the journey clearer. But even then, it will unlock a new challenge. As the profession matures, innovation is happening all over government. We will need a curriculum and learning experience methods that are flexible enough to respond to this and include new knowledge from across the network. We cannot design it all from the centre.
3. Repeated knowledge and siloed learning.
   Government is vast. People are often trying to tackle the same issues over and over. The design community has the Design System, which logs tried and tested design patterns which anyone in government can use. Which (surprise, surprise) unlocks a new challenge. How do you manage contributions to a shared design pattern library? What are the processes for this?
4. An over-reliance on classroom based training.
   Government (as with most established organisations I bet) largely think that training = learning. Put people on a course and tell them things. Job done. But we know that people only remember 20% of what they hear, maybe 30% if you have slides or a diagram. Compared to 80% of what they experience themselves, and 90% of what they teach to others. So we are busy designing and testing a range of different learning experiences to see what works well in government (peer learning, mentoring, shadowing, crit days, field trips, meetups, online modules..)
   Which creates a new problem. How do you convince people that the new learning methods work? Even though there is little evidence often for the efficacy of training, there is a strongly held belief that it works. So it can be a challenge to change the status quo. And how much fun can you have when learning? Is a fieldtrip too frivolous? Discussion over a meal? Does learning have to look serious for people to believe that it work?
5. Measuring impact. We are moving beyond counting bums on seats, to try and measure the effectiveness of different learning experiences. There is no new challenge here. It’s the same one, it continues… Pre and post surveys, quality checks, self report journals. We’re doing what we can to prove impact. 80% of people who came to the last learning festival learned something new. And 94% said they would use it in their work. That’s something. But how do you know when you’ve learned something?

Summary

In order to achieve learning at scale, we are move away from being a do-er who delivers everything (remember the hamster, you cannot ‘train’ everyone).

To a multiplier, who design more opportunities for people to self-direct their learning, or learn from peers. And who creates a permissive and open culture where people can flourish.