Emergent Learning

In a changing environment, there are no right answers…at least not for very long. There are only hypotheses that represent your current best thinking about what it will take to succeed.

“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.” – Jack Welch

Emergent Learning builds the capacity of your organization or network to adapt to achieve the results you want. In the midst of rapidly changing realities, sustained success requires shaping an internal environment for people to learn how to learn.

First, Emergent Learning is learning that emerges from your own work in the course of doing your own work (in contrast to learning that happens in a classroom setting away from work).

Second, A great deal is known about how we learn individually, yet leaders are continually vexed by the challenge of instilling learning in and across larger units.

Signet's research and consulting expertise focus on solutions to the challenges of learning at the larger-than-individual level — teams, business units, entire organizations and multi-enterprise projects.

Third, Emergent Learning is pragmatic. It is focused on learning through experience as a practical means to continually raise the bar to effectively overcome core challenges. For a network of grant-makers, that challenge might be a generational change in leaders. For a plant manager, that challenge might be quality-schedule-price dynamics. For a CEO, managing capital allocations. For a police commissioner, understanding and fighting crime. There are no simple solutions to these challenges. They require discipline, ongoing attention, collective action, and learning through experience.

Emergent Learning is "emergent" in three ways:

1. Learning emerges from the work itself. This means building learning directly and intentionally into the flow of your work.
2. Know-how emerges and gets refined through iterative discipline. Over time, a real proficiency emerges through repeated comparisons between intended results and actual results in a dynamic interplay between theory and practice.
3. By taking on each new challenge with the intention to learn and track results, success starts to accumulate in one setting after another, creating a positive track record and a forward-leaning confidence that invites larger challenges. Organizations that rigorously track and adjust to their environment outperform those that expect to find the “right” solution to each challenge.

What is an Emergent Learning "Discipline"?

Think of an Emergent Learning discipline as implementing a strategic learning plan. This means taking a disciplined approach to building capabilities critical to your organization’s success by using existing challenges and opportunities as the grist for developing skill, knowledge …and well-earned confidence in your people’s ability to adapt quickly and improve results.

Every leader faces ongoing challenges for which there is no one right solution. These ongoing challenges often live close to the core mission of the organization. Such challenges need to be addressed by building greater and greater mastery in the way people think and act, and are the “practice areas” where an Emergent Learning effort typically adds the greatest value.

Some examples:

• A national network of philanthropists agrees that sustaining seasoned leadership in the organizations they fund is critical to their respective missions.
• An executive team determines that merger and acquisition activities will be critical to its success over the next 2-3 years.
• A plant manager decides to tackle complex, long and hugely expensive machine maintenance turnarounds.
• An R&D organization realizes, if history is any indicator, that the upcoming deployment of a series of new technologies could fragment its focus on its core mission.
  

Having identified the challenge worthy of the focus, leaders can build a learning plan to consciously prepare to learn from each cycle of action — each grant cycle, each capital transaction, each turnaround, each meeting with government counterparts, each wave of deployment. This leads to the team or network taking insights from action to action and see the results of its learning in improved results.

Here is where Emergent Learning tools such as EL Maps and the Action Review Cycle help people work together to:

1. Step into the situation with the clear intention to learn.
2. Articulate the planning assumptions and metrics.
3. Pay attention during the action and gather data on what happened.
4. Reflect on the interim results in order to adjust your planning.
5. Do this over and over again.

Success is measured by people’s ability to name a performance target and hit it, regardless of what situations they encounter.

EL Map is a trademark of Signet Research & Consulting, LLC.

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