EL Map™

Best uses: Launching a disciplined learning practice, and growing know-how within or among organizations

"EL Maps are more than a tool. They are a blueprint for how living systems learn, and reflect recent research findings in neurobiology and cognitive science. "

Emergent Learning helps a network or team improve the quality of its thinking about the key challenges it faces, and build a strong link between what it is thinking and what it is doing in practice. As the backbone for a collaborative learning discipline, the EL Map is a tool that helps the team articulate its best thinking about what will make it successful, develop a plan to test it out, track results, and produce a body of higher quality lessons learned for the organization. The simple structure of the tool makes it scaleable for application across multiple situations, such as those experienced by a network. EL Maps have stood the test of application in a wide range of organizations:

• Launching a team by bringing everyone’s experience and best thinking to the table
• Using lessons from a past project to inform planning for the next one
• improving the quality of “lessons learned” by identifying trends across multiple projects or events
• Building the business case for a course of action by collecting and comparing past successes and failures

EL Maps may vary in format — from a map sketched on the back of an envelope, to big rolls of paper on the wall, to virtual maps for global networks. The visual structure of EL Maps helps groups think through what they already know about a core challenge based on their experience to date and translate that knowledge into a testable hypothesis. Sometimes the biggest aha comes from realizing that they are asking the wrong question. Read more about the principles and structure of EL Maps.

This cycle of thinking and action sets a natural evolutionary process in motion. As a team’s thinking is tested, refined, adapted and reapplied, it forms into robust knowledge about how to tackle a particular challenge that affects the team’s real work results.

The inevitable result is improved performance, and the creation of an "engine" which, over enough revolutions, builds real confidence in the team's ability to learn their way through any challenge. Learning from experience becomes learning through experience.

For knowledge sharing meetings across teams and organizations, EL Maps create a common structure and language for sharing insights and looking for patterns across projects, functions and geographies.

A universal complaint with “Lessons Learned” is that the lessons really aren’t learned. Why? They are difficult to communicate, the quality of lessons “learned” varies, and not everyone agrees with what the real lessons are. The EL Map format helps organizations transform piles of “Lessons Learned” documents into a strategic learning plan that will assure production of robust knowledge around the most important work of the organization.

Signet provides design consultation, facilitation, training and coaching to help our clients build their capacity to learn using EL Maps as a foundation. Click here for a printable fact sheet on Emergent Learning and Signet's EL Maps.

"EL Maps provide a structured thinking process that enables a clear understanding of where and why action needs to be taken to address a problem. It also provides documentation so that new people can understand why certain actions are being taken."

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