3 ways to systematize continuous learning

Continuous learning is often misinterpreted as a fully ad-hoc and informal process and used as an excuse not to document any insight.

But to make sustainable change, we still need insight about three things:

1. The problem we're solving: Why is change needed in the first place?
2. The solution to the problem: What "new thing" could work to take us where we want to go?
3. How to change: How can we help people adopt that "new thing" in their everyday work?

In classic change management, collecting this insight is formal and up-front. There are workshops, analyses, surveys, and perhaps interviews.

In more modern approaches to organizational change, complexity is acknowledged, and non-linear, exploratory, and experimental methods are used to achieve "continuous learning".

In the old paradigm, structure and documentation rule. In the new one, we celebrate continuous learning but “process” is frowned upon. This leaves a gap between the old and the new when it comes to capturing insight about organizational change.

But continuous learning doesn't have to be abstract, invisible, and ad-hoc. Here are three ways to fill that gap, and systematize your continuous learning:

1. Make insights available and transparent. Share insights in a way that makes them available for anyone, and make it a basic right to get to understand and question them.
   
2. Use central, organization-wide insights in local contexts, and context-specific insights centrally for pattern-finding. Sharing impactful experiments helps find solutions to problems and ways to help people adopt them.
   
3. Challenge insights regularly! Insights that are documented and communicated single-directionally are quickly made obsolete. Invite the people involved in the change initiative to do recurring sensemaking to understand, build upon, and challenge current insight.

Continuous learning is not an excuse to skimp on documenting insights about change!

Anders Wengelin
CEO, Partner and Management Consultant