Learning communities can be formed within or between “learning organizations” by redrawing boundaries to include the diversity of thought represented within each stakeholder group. The inclusion of diverse perspectives serves the whole community by broadening perspectives to frame the issue and help to evaluate the effectiveness of actions. The sense of wholeness inherent in a learning community is captured in the African expression “it takes a whole village to educate a child.”

A “community,” in this sense, is a group of individuals who freely choose to be and do something together in an ongoing way (as opposed to typical teams within organizations, where the choice to participate can fade behind the everyday routine of going to the office and receiving a paycheck). A member of a learning community is rarely paid to show up; they are there out of their curiosity and commitment to create something that they care about. Learning community members are connected by matters of the heart as well as the mind.

Developing a learning community requires mastery of a collaborative learning process. A stunning example of a community that has both embraced and mastered collaboration is the Association of Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain. The Mondragon Cooperative was founded in 1956 with funds raised from local townspeople to open a small paraffin stove factory with 24 people. Today, they have over 160 cooperative enterprises, employing more than 23,000 members. Their actions are based on a single guiding principle: “How can we do this in a way that serves equally both those in the enterprise and those in the community, rather than serving one at the expense of the other?”

Collaborative Learning

For collaborative learning to occur, there must be shared design about what to explore. Experimenting together with a willingness to reflect collectively can lead to new shared insights, and therefore enhance future design.

For such collaboration to occur, a habit of thinking, acting, and communicating openly must emerge within the community. Creating a structure that can support this interaction is the first step to sustaining learning within the community. The “Collaborative Learning” diagram shows a reinforcing structure that can promote such learning, through joint experimentation that leads to reflection, shared insight, and improved collaborative design of future experimentation.

Collaborative Design. Individual learning takes place, in part, through curiosity followed by experimentation. For collaborative learning to occur, shared curiosity needs to be present, which is translated into the choice of what to collectively explore. Members of the community need to make thoughtful and heart-felt choices about the journey of shared exploration they will embark on together.

Once the path has been chosen, designers who represent the whole system are selected. These designers — a diverse body of stakeholders with the potential for seeing things differently — cross many boundaries. The diversity inherent in these groups is essential to the design of a robust experiment.

Joint Experimentation. The designers are also the actors. Therefore, when collaborative design leads to joint experimentation, the experimenters know what they are looking for in terms of results and are genuinely curious about the outcome. Too often a set of people design an experiment and then ask some other set of people to go off and do it. This typically results in later questioning why the “implementation” failed and why the actors had no ownership in completing the “task.”

Public Reflection. This continuity of design and experimentation creates the possibility for a common experience that can be publicly discussed afterward. The possibility of open reflection is only realized if the ability and willingness to share and suspend one’s thoughts are also present. In my own work, I have found that the impact increases significantly when clients co-design interventions. After a meeting or offsite we speak candidly about what did and didn’t work, without placing blame on the “consultant” for not knowing better or the “client” for being too closed-minded to appreciate an outside perspective. Out of our shared ownership, we create shared insight.

Shared Insight. If people can openly share their experiences, assumptions, and beliefs with one another about what they thought would happen (what the design was intended to produce) and what actually happened (the results of the joint experimentation), the discrepancy between the two can be perceived and hopefully understood. This process can yield shared insight into the nature of the issue and, if recorded in some form of group memory, can inform future collaborative designs.

Capturing a systemic “picture” of collaborative learning in a causal loop diagram illustrates the importance of the process of interaction rather than an individual player or an elusive end-state. Areas of highest leverage, where a small intervention can significantly affect the health of the system, can then be made more visible, understood and implementable. The beauty of the circle is three-fold: you can start anywhere, it is never over, and there is no focus on individual blame (since everyone is responsible).

Causal loops can also help a learning community develop their ongoing commitment to the collaborative journey of thinking, communicating and acting. The Mondragon Cooperative has drawn the circle defining “we” as the owner-employees, consumers, bank depositors, and the community. Hence it has not limited its activities to business and banking; rather it has participated in nearly every realm of community development, building over 40 cooperative housing complexes, creating private day care, grade school, high school and higher education facilities.

Limits to Learning

A systems thinker knows nothing grows forever. Consequently the question arises, “What are the limits to learning as a community?” These brakes to learning come in several forms: fear of failure, denial or perception of failure, or the inability to deal with diverse viewpoints gracefully. What all of these limits have in common is the net effect of increasing defensive behaviors in the community (fight or flight) at the expense of open reflection.

As we begin to learn together, our expectations of success start to grow (loop B2 in “Limits to Learning”). If expectations are growing, however, it becomes harder and harder for us to meet them. Fear of failure tends to emerge quickly. Although the group is successfully leaping impasses in its collective understanding, each new gap can seem farther apart than the last one, and uncertainty begins to grow.

When insecurity starts to increase, the need to be defended also grows. People enact defensive behaviors to avoid threat, embarrassment, conflict and anything associated with being “wrong.” Since “the best defense is a strong offense,” people may even begin finger-pointing or blaming others as a means of escaping personal blame.

Defensive routines often appear in the form of denial, which quickly escalates from the personal to the collective (from illusion to delusion to collusion). At some level, I start telling myself, “Everything’s fine, I hope.” I begin to buy into this illusion and the need to believe everything is okay. If a community member and I collectively say that everything is okay (because we do not want to acknowledge any problems), we begin to delude ourselves about what is true. Consciously or unconsciously, we have collectively agreed not to question it. We collude not to inquire into the nature of our actions, and our performance becomes undiscussable. Unfortunately, our ability to reflect or collectively generate insights about the systems of which we are a part also deteriorates.

Yet another potential limit sprouts from the fertile ground of diverse stakeholders participating in the design phase. The greater the diversity of viewpoints, the higher the likelihood that people will interpret the different views as conflicting and shy away from exploring views and suspending assumptions. If conflict avoidance arises, open and honest reflection is undermined and the possibility of creating shared insight or learning dissipates (B3).

Another limit to learning results when an experiment is interpreted as a failure rather than another opportunity for learning. Once again, the need to avoid blame or justify money spent causes defensiveness to dominate over reflectiveness. Soon the collective learning breaks down as people begin to “posture” (sometimes politically) to look good. Information is no longer freely shared; in fact the willingness to look at the data is often undermined in the form of denial (B4).

The nature of the reinforcing loop (RI) is first virtuous, reflective and collective — “we’re in this together.” The balancing loops, however, represent distinctly protective, individualistic behavior which is more about looking good, even at the expense of others (sub-optimization). The virtuous circle becomes a vicious cycle. This is the land of the “hero,” “lone ranger,” or “rugged individualist” who can be counted on to pull it through in the end without needing help from anyone. Yet today’s world of rapid change and complexity is making it harder and harder for any one hero to save the day, and the need for collaboration is painfully apparent.

What all these limits to learning in community have in common is the deterioration of relationships, whether it is a relationship with oneself or others. The “capacity constraint” in learning communities is the capacity for truth in relationship to oneself or others. This inability manifests itself as a barrier to honest communication.

Emptiness

In M. Scott Peck’s book The Different Drum, his model of “community making” includes a stage that is not found in traditional team development models. He characterizes it as “emptiness.” At the individual level, emptiness is about letting go of whatever is getting in the way of one’s relationship to oneself or others. It may involve suspending assumptions, attributions, judgment or expectations. In order for this to occur, however, we must first realize we have these assumptions (or mental models). Appreciating and understanding emptiness is crucial for managers who want to facilitate collaborative learning in their organizations (see “Stages of Community-Making”).

A common dilemma managers face is “How can I facilitate collaborative learning if I can’t do it myself — if I’m not even sure it’s possible?” The temptation is to supply a ready-made solution. However, the real leverage lies in simply acknowledging that the dilemma is part of the journey; one of many that will be encountered along the path. To the extent this dilemma can be voiced, rather than hidden, it will enhance the community’s learning. The moment it is denied, groups retreat into chaos or pseudo-community.

Leadership in Learning Communities

Leadership in learning communities is shared; it moves freely as needed among the group members. This shared sense of responsibility is different from traditional teams, in which the leader is often held accountable by others if something isn’t working as intended. In a learning community, however, each person feels equal responsibility for the “success” of the community’s learning and is willing to look inwardly at what he or she is consciously or unconsciously doing to support or hinder the community’s learning. The commitment to open and honest reflection is internally funded and renewed by the choice to be an ongoing member of the learning community.

I prefer to position the leaders” of learning communities as facilitators or guides. Guides may make occasional comments on the journey, pointing out what is happening along the way, but they cannot lead a group into community—the group must choose for itself. What a guide can do is facilitate the emptying process by continually emptying him or herself and requesting the same of the group. Emptying in this case includes letting go of “old baggage” which may need to be discarded if it prevents members from truly listening or speaking with each other. For example, the most powerful thoughts and feelings I often need to empty are those of having to “fix” myself or others to make everything okay. Learning communities are thus born out of total acceptance of self and others — born out of trust.

Learning Communities

On the other side of emptiness is community, and the only way over is “into and through.” Emptiness is a time when the skills of dialogue are most needed (see “Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking,” Vol. 4, No. 3, April 1993). The ability to dialogue can offer a bridge to the other side. I believe open communication begins with being willing and able to see, hear and feel myself. Silence is an invaluable intervention in this stage; quiet is needed to hear the soul speaking through us. When groups learn to dialogue together, meaning moves through the individuals — learning occurs because individuals have emptied themselves and created room for perceiving and acting anew.

Peck’s definition of community goes a long way to define what learning communities could mean: “A group of individuals who have learned to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure,” and who have developed some significant commitment to “rejoice together, mourn together,” and to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.” To become masterful at these kinds of relationships is to build capacity for learning collaboratively, relieving the constraints of different limits to learning.

Peck goes further to state “there can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace — and ultimately no life — without community.” Nor can there be learning without vulnerability. If communities are a safe container for risk and vulnerability, then perhaps they will also be fertile ground for learning.

In many organizations I witness an oscillation between pseudo-community and chaos, where groups are caught in self-sealing vicious spirals. The undiscussable by its nature is undiscussable, which precludes open communication or relationships. If groups find them-selves in emptiness, typically somebody (often a traditional leader) steps in to “fix” or make it better. Although the move is well-intended, it is counterproductive. Yet this is not apparent unless an appreciation for emptiness is present.

Emptiness is a healthy sign of development. Unfortunately, it is not yet part of a popular model of development and not often recognized by facilitators. Too often the traditional facilitator leads the retreat back to pseudo-community (pretending things are better than they arc), or chaos (fixing people and converting them to a “right” point of view) because it is too difficult to be in a place of “not knowing.”

Developing the capacity to live with emptiness means developing the capacity to be in relationship with oneself and others in learning communities. Cultivating emptiness offers a field to discuss the undiscussable and to make the invisible visible in a more reflective way. The experience of giving voice to what needs to be said, and seeing what has always been there, is the experience of learning in community.

Learning communities are a place of truth-seeking and speaking without fear of reprisal or judgment. They are a place where curiosity reigns over knowing and where experimentation is welcome. Developing the capacity to live with “not knowing” when it naturally arises, to learn to be in relationship with oneself and to be reflective rather than defensive in nature is the leverage for learning, and the leverage for learning in community.

“Mondragon: Archetype of Future Business?” World Business Academy Perspectives, 1992, Vol. 6, No. 2, Berreu-Koehler Publishers.

Stephanie Spear, founder of In Care (Hatchvile, MA), is a facilitator of learning within communities. She regularly collaborates with clients in applying the disciplines of organizational learning. Stephanie welcomes others’ stories and perspectives.

The post The Emergence of Learning Communities appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Emergent learning practices turn these three biases on their head. The corresponding biases of emergent learning are:

• First, the essence of learning is the discovery and use of knowledge, and one of the best sources of actionable knowledge is that which emerges from people’s own experience.
• Second, a learning discipline should be woven into ongoing work, which integrates getting “real work” done with building greater capability.
• Third, learning is both possible and appropriate at a group level — by working and thinking together in certain ways, a work unit can build a real capacity for learning.

By weaving a disciplined process for learning through experience into the tapestry of ongoing work, an emergent learning practice helps people to use their own experience as a context for generating, refining, and validating knowledge, while enhancing their ability as a unit to “learn our way through” difficult and complex situations

The U. S. Army’s After Action Review

Twenty years ago, U. S. Army leaders began to develop an approach to using on-the-ground action as the crucible for learning; today, this practice is one of the best, and longest running, examples of emergent learning. They named it the “After Action Review” (AAR). Originally developed to support training exercises, the

One of the best sources of actionable knowledge is that which emerges from people’s own experience

AAR is now used within the Army for purposes ranging from improving operations efficiency to dealing with the impact of frequent assignment rotations. It is viewed as an expression of core Army values such as readiness and leadership

The most visible aspect of an AAR is that of a leader gathering his or her team on a frequent basis to address a series of questions about their actions. For example, questions typically at the center of an AAR session include:

• What was supposed to happen?
• What actually did happen and why?
• What are we going to do (the same or differently) next time?

The lessons that emerge shape the plan for the next similar event. This new plan, along with the action that occurs based upon it, becomes grist for yet another AAR session, and so on. When this rhythm of reflect-plan-act revolves around a central performance challenge, the practice begins to function as a competence-building machine: Over a number of iterations, the implicit and explicit knowledge held by the team about effectiveness in that particular domain evolves substantially. New practices and standards of excellence emerge. With enough iteration, the discipline tends to produce a distinct arena within which the group has honed its ability and confidence enough so that it is able to produce the results desired, regardless of circumstances — a so-called “island of mastery.”

Because the Army is a very large organization, there is considerable variation in how frequently the AAR is used — some officers rarely use it, while many see it as inseparable from how they do leadership. Overall, though, most Army leaders consider the AAR to be instrumental to the Army’s evolution as an institution. Its simplicity and broad relevance have helped it become part of the institution’s cultural fabric. How did a learning practice become so integral a part of this organization?

The Evolution of the Army’s Learning Practice

Following the unsatisfactory results of the Vietnam War, the U. S. Army was compelled to reflect on and adjust its assumptions and methods. The Army’s senior leadership hypothesized that if units could be trained in a realistic environment closely simulating real combat — in scenarios that troops must be prepared to face in the future — the competence, spirit, and confidence of the force would be re-energized. The simulations would also be appropriate settings for leaders to realistically test their units’ readiness.

Four specialized facilities were created to operationalize this vision. Collectively, the mission of these training centers was to prepare Army units to win decisively, beginning with the first battle of the next war. The first of these, the National Training Center (NTC), came on line in 1981 at Fort Irwin, CA. A rotation at the NTC featured 14 days of simulated desert combat against a highly skilled, uncooperative “enemy” force based at the center. The typical day might include reconnaissance missions starting near midnight, a full-scale battle erupting at unpredictable times, a series of AARs, preparation for the next anticipated engagement, and maybe four hours of sleep before starting the whole process again.

Early AARs at the National Training Center. In the early days of the NTC, reviews were conducted at the company level as a retrospective critique of a unit’s performance — a post-mortem. The expectation was that field units would visibly benefit from, and then quickly adopt, the rigorous level of critical analysis provided by the NTC staff. However, it soon became apparent that these critiques were not, in fact, producing the desired results:

• The formal critique format required a highly qualified officer, called an “Observer/Controller” or “O/C,” to dissect what the leader and soldiers had done wrong and leave them with a checklist to follow on the next mission. The emphasis on correction frequently led to an adversarial interaction and aThe Army’s senior leadership hypothesized that if units could be trained in a realistic environment closely simulating real combat — in scenarios that troops must be prepared to face in the future — the competence, spirit, and confidence of the force would be re-energized.

  focus on how well the unit had completed items on their checklist, and put unit leaders on the defensive.

• Handed a checklist, soldiers were not involved in teasing apart the elements of a problem, designing a solution, and determining how their actions contributed to the end result. Though they might know what to do, the why behind tactics remained elusive. In dynamic situations, they lacked the habit and tools to think together on their feet. Officers had no opportunity to develop an understanding of the effect their favorite tactics might have under unfamiliar conditions.

Changes in Mental Models. In a complex modern battlefield, the Army needed broadly skilled, thinking soldiers, not technicians with their faces in the rulebook. In systems language, the early approach to AARs shifted the burden of thoughtfulness and double-loop learning to an outside intervenor instead of to the active battle participants. To their credit, NTC staff successfully refined the AAR practice over the last 20 years, evolving their tactics and mental models in significant ways. For example, today:

• The O/C role is an expert facilitator of learning, rather than an expert providing criticism and answers.
• O/Cs typically meet with the officer whose unit they will observe — in advance of a battle series — to agree on the most useful types of data to collect. O/Cs then use this data to focus their facilitation of the subsequent AAR.
• O/Cs focus the troops on trends and key data points and ask them to explain and posit actions to sustain or improve.
• The AAR cycle encompasses the complete challenge, beginning with the logistics of leaving “home station” and arriving at the NTC prepared for battle.
• Most importantly, AARs start at the platoon level and work their way up the chain of command: At each command level, leaders and their direct reports engage in disciplined self-discovery, evaluating their own performance against goals and standards, ferreting out systems problems, and developing improvements to test the next day.

The NTC today uses a great deal of technology for collecting and communicating data so that each unit can know as soon as the battle ends precisely what happened and see how its role in the big picture played out. Army staff have discovered that rich learning for officers and troops alike comes from comparing the “commander’s intent” — stated at the start of the mission — with what subsequently happens. The vivid intersection between Army “doctrine” (standard practices sorted out by recognizable situations such as a “movement to contact” with an enemy unit) and direct battle experience allows espoused theory and actual practice to shape each other on a daily basis.

A Typical AAR. After a battle, platoon leaders typically conduct their AAR session right in the desert, which might mean drawing in the sand or using jeeps to hold flip-charts:

• • They focus on issues of local concern such as situational awareness, mechanical breakdowns, and communication.
  • They compare their stated intent with the results achieved and their actions with what Army doctrine prescribes. These comparisons lead to a sharper understanding of leadership challenges (e.g., the unit commander is simultaneously in communication with all of his units on the ground).
  • They elicit the thinking behind and underline the importance of following doctrine (e.g., why imprecise coordination between vehicle movements and supportive artillery can result in your killing your own people).

• To generate the insight needed to plan their next day’s action, they may also access other resources, including battlefield statistics, videos of pivotal moments, cuts of radio communications, and satellite-generated playbacks of the battle.
• The unit may even get a visit from the “enemy” commander to hear what happened from his perspective — his objectives, strategy, situational awareness, hypotheses, and real-time adjustments.

Adapting the Army’s AAR to Business Settings

The AAR was first introduced to the business world by ex-Army leaders, who brought the AAR with them into their new civilian work roles as company board members or staff. One of the earliest adoptions was in 1994: With retired general Gordon Sullivan on its board of directors, Shell Oil started using AARs during a transformation in its governance structure. But no matter the source, in every successful application, leaders have recognized the importance of adapting the process to fit their specific environment. Three companies’ stories exemplify the variety available in designing effective AAR practices.

Harley-Davidson. Ted Gee uses an AAR practice to prepare his people for new model introductions at

Harley-Davidson’s Kansas City plant. As director of manufacturing projects, Gee applied AARs to the build process to ensure that his team learned what it needed to launch a new product. After each pre-build, Gee conducted a series of AARs in which actual performance was matched against initial assumptions. Assumptions were then refined, standards were raised, and another prebuild was conducted.

Gee sees a double payback: Not only does the AAR practice produce performance improvements, it offers the onus of increased team knowledge and confidence during production planning. He finds that his people are excited about their increased knowledge of the whole operation and have gained strong planning and data-gathering skills.

Geerlings & Wade. Steve Danckert built an AAR practice to manage warehouse operations at Geerlings & Wade, a wine retailer and distributor. He conducts formal, quarterly AARs with his team by phone, focusing on one particular event that happened during the quarter. For example, the focus of a fourth-quarter AAR was a pre-holiday spike in orders. Although not a surprise to anyone, the situation gave the team a chance to look at how its systems work under stress. Danckert reports that these reviews not only improved performance in spike periods, they got everyone in the habit of analyzing successes and failures (and now it’s not left for the boss to do).

Dankert pairs his quarterly AARs with informal, one-on-one, 15minute “spot” AARs and finds the two reinforce one other. To build rapport with a new team in order to foster candor, he shows up at a warehouse in jeans periodically to pack orders alongside his warehouse managers for a few hours. He finds that over time his people have developed a mindset and a confidence that things will improve as a result of their AARs, and they take the initiative to call him with things to AAR.

Power Construction. Gary Shreiber, a vice president at Power Construction, recognized that the firm had grown too large to continue to rely solely on informal mechanisms to transfer knowledge and to problem solve. Every construction project is a complex undertaking requiring a close working relationship between multiple organizations — architect, general contractor, owner, subcontractors, and so forth — as well as a high capacity for on-the-fly adjustments.

POST-MORTEM VS. AAR PRACTICE

Schreiber created a series of “Lessons Learned Workshops” (LLW), modeled in part after the AAR, that bring the multi-firm project team together at the beginning, middle, and end of a large project. In a LLW, team members articulate their aspirations and expectations, and review plans and performance data. On a wall-sized timeline, they identify “bullets” coming their way and “defining moments” from past experience that they see as relevant to those challenges. Shared hypotheses emerge about what will work going forward, accompanied by action commitments. This process allows teams to reveal their underlying thinking and concerns, and increase their effectiveness in sharing responsibility for producing a collective success.

The AAR Is Not a Meeting, But a Practice

Those who would like to use the AAR in corporate settings need to recognize that AARs and traditional methods for reflection serve different purposes. For example, if a team needs to piece together in detail what happened during the course of a project, produce general recommendations to improve the process, or make technical corrections to a product, a post-mortem or retrospective can be an appropriate vehicle. However, a post-mortem is unlikely to be effective if a group needs to both make an improvement and self-correct in the future, or to effect a cultural transformation through local initiative (see “Post-Mortem vs. AAR Practice” on p. 3).

Unlike post-mortems, the AAR is a continuing practice that is focused forward, generating lessons to be applied in the immediate future by the same people who developed them. As the Army found, it is only through an ongoing practice — a connected series of forward-looking AAR meetings — that a team grasps the causality at play in their field of action, begins to self-correct, and builds confidence in their ability to do so.

Developing an Emergent Learning Practice

Leaders wanting to develop an emergent learning practice such as the AAR in their organization should consider four patterns that characterize emergent learning and are consistently found in successful AAR applications: localness, forward-focus, punctuation, and iteration.

Localness. “Localness” here refers to task proximity — the group that’s directly responsible for the task and the results. If responsibility for results lies with a person outside of the group, any new practice is likely to fade quickly under the pressure of everyday time constraints. In order to integrate an AAR into the rhythms and norms of their group, leaders must introduce the practice with a tight focus on a challenge — one that meets three criteria: It is compelling to participants; it is embedded in the group’s scope of work; and it is solidly connected to reaching core business goals.

Team members are encouraged to gather “ground truth” data for the next AAR session as they go. Learning through their own actions, they see the impact of their decisions and behavior. As they explore trends in their data in order to develop testable hypotheses about effective action in their domain, team members improve their ability to see and understand the interplay of factors that shape their performance over time. In this way, localness naturally leads people to develop a systemic perspective.

Forward Focus. “Forward focus” means looking toward the future first and spending as much time planning based on your lessons learned as you spend reflecting and identifying those lessons. This process involves scanning forward to identify your next challenge; recalling a past similar event; developing your insights; and looking forward again to plan an application of the lessons learned.

In each AAR session, participants identify up front a clear opportunity in the near future for them to implement, test, and refine insights that emerge from the session — an “opportunity field” for learning in action. For instance, a team might be about to begin a series of roll-outs of a new product or is looking at its effectiveness in a frequently repeating business process such as developing contracts or conducting quarterly meetings.

Punctuation. Much of our daily work experience seems like a blur metaphorically, one run-on sentence after another. Emergent learning practitioners develop the ability to “punctuate” the blur in their mind’s eye in order to find natural start and stop points and to derive units of action that repeat. They glean possible “opportunity fields” — arenas within which they might pursue iterative improvement. For example, the Army took the blur of battle and broke out certain repeating units of action; soldiers first learn to recognize when a “movement to contact” begins, and then to call up their knowledge of what to do in that context. Over a series of movements to contact in widely varying circumstances, this punctuation enables them to improve their effectiveness.

Once we learn to see and use them, such opportunities abound. For instance, Danckert saw the chance to iterate in his challenge to open 16 warehouses: “We’re not opening 16 warehouses. We’re opening one warehouse 16 times.” The first one he opened, in Texas, took six weeks. By using what it learned in an AAR after that event, the company was able to reduce the time it took to open its next warehouse, in North Carolina, to only two weeks.

Iteration. When is a “lesson learned” learned? The Army thinks learning has not occurred until an insight shapes actual behavior and is validated by results. Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, posited that learning requires the repetition of a recognizable situation or process, and that information resides in comparing, not in analyzing individual elements or events in isolation. Both perspectives support the idea that a lesson involves more than one learning opportunity — iteration

Iteration is the process of feeding information or knowledge from one instance forward in time into the next similar instance. Knowledge about a past sale, warehouse move, or project kick-off can inform the conduct of an upcoming one — but only if that data or insight is captured and fed forward. The AAR enables that capturing and feeding forward process to take place. For instance, much of the NTC’s potency in accelerating skill development stems from allowing people to engage in a high number of action iterations in a short time, coupled with dense behavioral-data feeds such as video.

Iteration has another positive effect when an emergent learning practice becomes “part of how we do things here”: As people grow to expect to reflect with their peers about their collective actions in terms of trends and goals, they tend to raise their individual level of performance and their ownership for seeking improvement.

Two Pitfalls to Avoid

Companies seeking to adopt an AAR practice must avoid two possible pitfalls. First, the current interest in knowledge management leads initiators of learning practices to make an easy mistake — placing an early focus on producing outputs for use in a knowledge base for the benefit of people outside of the team. The first and best customers of a learning practice must be those directly involved. If a team is asked to conduct an AAR solely for the benefit of capturing knowledge for someone else, they are unlikely to sustain the practice.

Second, if sponsors try to assess the AAR’s value with a single-meeting trial run, they will be disappointed. Why? Because much of the power of the AAR comes from iteration. Also, the AAR asks participants to talk frankly about their own and their leader’s behavior, so several cycles of learning and action are often needed to generate confidence in the process and trust in one another’s team spirit. As that confidence and trust develop, participants begin to bring more and more substantial issues to the table and act on them. Then, the kinds of visible improvements that are gratifying to themselves and the larger organization become possible, and a virtuous cycle sets in. In turn, the excitement participants feel — of collectively producing outputs that have a visible impact — gives an AAR practice a life of its own within a group. Therefore, before assessing the impact of a new AAR practice, sponsors should think in terms of at least four to five linked sessions as the baseline commitment (see “Three Benefits from an AAR Learning Practice”).

Bridging Thinking and Action in a Complex World

In a complex and dynamic world, every action plan, every strategic plan, every leader’s initiative is in fact a working hypothesis — our current best thinking about what will lead to success going forward. When a group develops an emergent learning practice, it is building a living, dynamic bridge between the world of thinking and the world of action.

The post Emergent Learning in Action: The After Action Review appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

The good news, according to Tony Wagner, former co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is that the key qualities necessary for innovation—curiosity, collaboration, associative or integrative thinking, and a bias toward action and experimentation—are skills that can be learned rather than being strictly innate. Nevertheless, in his latest book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (Scribner, 2012), he makes the case that most of our schools, at all levels, are failing to provide students with the hands-on, collaborative learning that fosters creative, critical thinking. Instead, they continue to prepare students in traditional ways for a career path that no longer exists.

Breaking the Mold

To illustrate that a different way of teaching and learning is possible, Wagner introduces several educational programs that are striving to break the existing mold, including the High Tech High network of K–12 schools in San Diego, California, Olin College in Needhaam, MA, the MIT Media Lab, and Stanford’s d. school. The essential difference between these programs and other, more conventional ones is that these schools promote:

• Collaboration versus individual achievement
• Multidisciplinary learning versus specialization
• Trial and error versus risk avoidance Creating versus consuming
• Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation

Wagner quotes Richard Miller, president of Olin College, on the college’s goal, one that is largely shared by the other leading-edge institutions Wagner studied:

We’ve trying to teach students to take initiative—to transmit attitudes, motivations, and behaviors versus mere knowledge. Today, it’s not what you know, it’s having the right questions. I see three stages in the evolution of learning: The first is the memorization-based, multiple-choice approach, which is still widely prevalent; then there’s project-based learning where the problem is already determined; finally, there’s design-based learning where you have to define the problem. That way of learning is part of every class here. We are trying to teach students how to frame problems versus repeat the answers.

To achieve this objective, schools require a new kind of educator, one who serves more as a coach and co-learner than as an authority in an academic subject. Wagner highlights two graduate schools of education that have developed new teaching models: the High Tech High Graduate School of Education and the Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, NH. In both of these programs, novice teachers spend most of their time working with a mentor in a school setting rather than sitting in lectures learning about education theory. In this way, these programs resemble the approach to teacher education used in Finland, a country that has produced outstanding results on international assessments. Interestingly—but maybe not surprisingly, give how entrenched traditional educational philosophies have proven to be—neither the High Tech High Graduate School of Education nor the Upper Valley Educators Institute has received accreditation from its respective regional accreditation agency.

Finding a Path

Given the scant attention paid to fostering creativity, it’s no shock that the young innovators whom Wagner features in the book worked hard to create their own opportunities. Kirk Phelps left Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford University without graduating, yet at 29 has already had successful careers at Apple working on the iPhone and SunRun, a leading home solar power company. Zander Srodes became an advocate for sea turtle conservancy, authoring a book, leading ecological tours, and earning numerous youth achievement awards and grants—all while struggling in the classroom. Syreeta Gates, who founded SWT Life, which provides New York City teens with entrepreneurial coaching and personal development training, dropped out of City Technical College of New York before finding a sense of purpose through volunteer work.

Virtually all of Wagner’s interview subjects benefited from the guidance of a mentor and participation in unconventional learning experiences. In many cases, the mentor’s efforts weren’t recognized or well compensated by mainstream institutions but instead were done as labor of love. Such is the case of Amanda Alonzo, who works as a science teacher and science fair faculty advisor. She spends as many as four hours a day after school mentoring 40 students a year on their science fair projects. For her efforts, she receives only a $1,800 stipend on top of her teacher’s salary.

Encouraging Creative Work

So where do we go from here? Wagner is aware that schools alone can’t shoulder the burden for developing innovators—parents and employers have a role to play as well. Based on his interviews with innovators and their families, he identified ways in which parents can encourage the “spirit of play, passion, and purpose that are the wellsprings for creative work.” Some of these include allowing plenty of time for play and discovery; encouraging reading; providing toys that encourage imagination and invention; limiting screen time; and allowing kids to make and learn from mistakes.

Wagner also interviewed business leaders, including Tom Kelley from IDEO and Annmarie Neal from Cisco Systems, about how management practices need to change for young innovators to thrive in corporations. Many of the characteristics they described as being vital—such as the free flow of information up and down the organization and trust— are reminiscent of the characteristics of a learning organization as described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline more than two decades ago.

The US Army is also aware of the need for a new organizational model. According to the report, “The Army Learning Concept for 2015,” “[T]he Army cannot risk failure through complacency, lack of imagination, or resistance to change.” The report recommends three steps for establishing a more effective learning model, including converting classroom experiences to collaborative problem-solving events; tailoring learning to the individual learner’s experience and competence level; and using a blended learning approach that incorporate simulations, gaming technology, and other technology-based instruction.

Staying the Course

Recognizing that change can take time, Wagner concludes the book with a letter to today’s young innovators, who may have to persevere in less-than optimal circumstances. To encourage them to stay the course, he quotes dancer and choreographer Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you will block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

The rest of us have an obligation, too, to give members of the next generation the tools they need to flourish. If we don’t, they will pay the price for our failure of imagination and foresight.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and managing editor of The Systems Thinker.

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