iF Quarterly

Do you have a learning strategy?

The art and science of gaining new insight

Co-written by iFsters Gedney Barclay and Catherine May

One of the perks of working with Intentional Futures is the recurring opportunity to learn. On every project, no matter the sector, our team usually leaves a project with a deeper understanding of a complex problem space, and a few fun facts for parties. But learning for impact is quite different from learning for school. Because we’re doing it all the time, iFsters are conscious of how important it is to have a learning strategy, at a micro and macro-level, so that we help our clients learn in ways that position them to make an outsized difference in the world. Without a learning strategy, research can all too easily become yet another report or white paper that sits on a shelf collecting dust.

To avoid learning obsolescence, and go beyond fun-facts for cocktail mixers, iF has learned it can be helpful to differentiate your learning strategy by scale. Whenever we tackle a project, we have distinct strategies that help us learn quickly and deeply as individuals, as teams, and as organizations.

INDIVIDUALS — Reflect, take stock, and cast a wide net

As professional learners, one of the most important things we can do as individuals is take accurate stock of what we already know, and where our blind spots are. Individual learning is also the first of many junctures at which we must check our assumptions and potential biases.

To do this, we guide our research according to three main avenues:

• Name assumptions, then check them (Reflect):While we come to projects to learn, as professional generalists many iFsters know just enough to be dangerous about a lot of different topics. To make sure our assumptions or prior biases don’t steer us wrong, we begin by naming assumptions we have to ensure that verifying (or disproving!) those assumptions is a part of the process. This is an especially important step for driving an equitable learning process, in which we make sure we’re not focusing exclusively on privileged or dominant narratives, and bringing in the voices that have the most lived experience and/or highest stake in the learning outcomes.
• Name your obvious gaps, or IWIK (Take stock). IWIK, or I Wish I Knew, is a crucial activity we do with all our clients at the beginning of a learning journey. Sometimes what a client wishes they knew is actually knowledge already contained elsewhere in their organization, sometimes it’s research that’s readily available. But other times the “I Wish I Knew” points at not just a gap in knowledge, but a white space in connection, imagination, or solutions waiting to be discovered. In addition to unchecked assumptions, filling in gaps in knowledge is a key step to an individual deep dive on a subject area.
• Ask all the questions, even the seemingly obvious or straightforward ones (Cast a wide net). Along with naming assumptions we want to make sure any and all questions are on the table, even ones (actually, especially ones) where we already kinda feel like we know the answer. What is an HVAC system? What’s the difference between a CMS and an LMS? Are robots really the reason, or the only reason, manufacturing jobs are on the decline?

TEAMS — Focus for impact, tap internally, and think orthogonally

• Focus for impact: While this comprehensive inventory of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns can be very effective on an individual level, it can start to become inefficient with greater numbers. Our internal teams at iF will spend significant time brainstorming all the possible questions we have, with no question too big or too small. But when working with clients, we examine this master list to figure out which questions are key to their success, and which are viewed as ‘nice to have.’ When we were working with the World Bank, for example, on potential technology investments, we made sure to focus our learning journey on the specific models of community involvement that would really help them advance their goals in global development.
• Tap internally: In addition to focusing for impact, we often find that teams can have complementary knowledge gaps and areas of expertise. On most occasions, our clients have a wealth of knowledge under their belt before the onset of a project. While we do our fair share of desk research, we often find our job is about tapping into internal assets a company already has, and pulling out crucial insights from a team in such a way that everyone else can hear, acknowledge, and internalize. When teams are structured in a hierarchical or even siloed manner, it can take an outsider with a strategic eye to unearth all that internal knowledge. For us, this usually culminates in team-wide, anonymous surveys through our tool Hilo, in order to map agreements, misalignments, and net knowledge so that everyone can move forward with a shared appreciation of just how much they know and understand collectively. Tapping internally also helps make a more inclusive and equitable learning journey: the strongest learning includes a multiplicity of voices, and this helps ensure everyone is heard in their perspective and insights.
• Think orthogonally: Another way in which having a learning strategist can help is in drawing connections to other domains, histories, and data that seem distinct, but are actually quite significant to an organization’s impact . Choices made in the agricultural sector have impacts on the nutrition sector. Same thing for education and workforce development. The neat lines we draw around problem spaces to focus our attention do not truly exist in the world, and we must acknowledge that before we accidentally launch solutions created in a vacuum. At best, these can be neutral in the world, but unintended harm can easily be connected to well-meaning intentions and ideas. To that end, we view our role for clients as elevating cross-disciplinary research that helps them understand where they sit in the ecosystem. How does another discipline conceptualize the same problem space? What solutions are they pushing for, and what does that mean for you? Seeing the interconnectedness is crucial to create a strategy that is truly human-centered, and best-positioned for impact. When we worked with the Pathways for Prosperity Commission, our research quickly revealed how many different domains and sectors were implicated in bridging the digital divide, which had a fundamental impact on the report we created.

ORGANIZATIONS — A learning culture, a common language, and structures for long-term agility

• Cultivate a learning culture. For learning to shape your strategy, it has to be central to your culture. At an organizational level, learning is simply not worth the investment unless you’re willing to translate that into actionable strategy. With a world that is changing now more rapidly than ever, learning will be key to helping organizations survive volatile disruptions and meet the needs of their stakeholders in a responsive, resilient way. Changing the way people work is never easy, but it certainly can’t happen if you don’t change their minds first. This is why a learning culture is just as, if not more important, than any single learning initiative. You have to cultivate a culture of continual learning through building it into the rhythm of your every day operations, not just as one-off or annual events. Our most successful learning sessions are with clients who have annual learning sessions, some folded into their board retreats or other strategy reviews, so that everyone is accustomed to the rhythm of learning together on a regular basis.
• Insist on a common language. One of the most consistently valuable benefits of enterprise-level learning is establishing a common language. If you think of the vast quantity of insights teams often have buried within, imagine the knowledge locked within entire organizations. But so often that knowledge fails to translate across departments and teams. There is a real business case for making it easy and efficient for subject matter experts to be able to communicate quickly and easily across departments, and with C-suite leaders.Working across organizations to understand how people talk about their roles, responsibilities, and ideas for improvements usually reveals that even when folks are aligned, their language is wildly divergent. Mapping out common terminology and meanings, identifying key trends in a sector, and providing the opportunity for different functional areas (eg. research, administration, leadership) to voice their ideas in the same space does miracles to get folks to the same place. This is both an internal and an external exercise. Do your people have the same understanding as the field? Where does your insight differentiate you from your competitors? How does your entire staff communicate that in a way that is informative, engaging and concise to external audiences? Establishing that common language is often the first step in unlocking unprecedented collaboration and innovation. When tackling initiatives like equity, diversity, and inclusion, this is a vital first step, as we found in creating our Equity-Centered Design booklet for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Everyone at the organization was invested in equity, but needed common terms and understandings to put those values into action more comprehensively.
• Organize your teams for long-term agility. As learning experts, we don’t often weigh in on organizational structure or processes. But we’ve found that the companies and teams that do the most with the learning we provide are the ones that are built for it. With the workforce becoming more fluid, the lines between traditional roles and skill sets becoming increasingly blurred, COVID provides a bittersweet reset moment to reconsider your organization’s hierarchies, communication channels, and processes to see if they’re equipped to handle change, or if they’re equipped to maintain a status quo. The more your team is prepared to constantly be learning and pivoting to meet spontaneous opportunity and unexpected challenges, the further you’ll be able to take new learning and insights in stride and readily put them into action.

LEARNING–An all too human and never-ending journey
Strategizing on the best learning journeys is different for individuals, teams and organizations, but we ultimately recognize that at the heart of all these levels are people: complex, curious, imaginative humans. It is with humility that we take on the challenge of knowing what we know, knowing what we don’t, and figuring out ways to give ample voice to those who can teach us. The more effective and efficient we can help our clients become on an individual, team, and organizational level or learning, the greater able we are to help them advance their mission and grow their impact.

Every quarter, Intentional Futures puts out a long-form piece on what we’ve been up to, and what we’re thinking about.

If you’re interested in getting the iF Quarterly directly in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter here.