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5 ways to build a learning culture

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If you’re working in the impact sector, you probably understand the value of learning. And you probably also have things standing in the way of doing more learning. Chiefly, a lack of time.

At NPC, we’ve been thinking about what learning means in practice for impact sector professionals like you.

Across the impact sector, we see and know the value of learning:

Learning helps us evolve and improve our work.
Learning brings in different voices and challenges our thinking.
Learning helps us change complex and dynamic systems, where a ‘test and iterate’ approach is necessary.

But we also know that time isn’t the only barrier to making it happen. Fear of failure or a lack of comfort or familiarity with evidence can hinder learning. Or you may be learning, but struggling to translate that learning into change.

To do this, you need to build a learning culture.

We would suggest 5 steps to get you started:

Create different opportunities for learning.
Build a rhythm to learning.
Consider different evidence and voices.
Forge the right connections.
Use reflection tools.

What does a learning culture look like?

A learning culture is hard to define. It’s often intangible.

If you want to build a learning culture, the best place to start is reflecting on what an organisation with a learning culture might look like.

From our experience working with many organisations, large and small, we think some of the key features are:

A holistic approach. Learning is a part of all roles across the organisation, and takes place across teams or functions.
Valuing different voices and different kinds of evidence. Hearing different perspectives can help you to interrogate and make sense of what you are learning. Drawing on different kinds of evidence can help you capture different types of learning.
Openness, transparency and trust among staff, trustees, and external partners.
Curiosity and humility. Acknowledging we don’t have all the answers. This includes senior leaders and trustees.

How to strengthen learning in your organisation

What are the practical steps you can take to strengthen learning in your team? Here are a few suggestions. Some come from our recent guidance for funders on how to monitor, evaluate and learn with trust and equity.

Create different opportunities for learning.

Make use of different formats. From lunch and learns, to incorporating a space for reflection in regular meetings, or simply one-to-one conversations, different formats can help ensure different types of people feel comfortable to share and produce different insights surface.

Build a rhythm to learning.

We can’t pay attention to everything at once. Building learning around key reflection or decision points during the year can help. For example, this could mean reviewing different data sources or topics at different points in your annual cycle.

Consider different evidence and voices.

Measurement and evaluation of your work is an important source of insight, but there are many others. We think learning also means creating space to share everyday insights, as well as external perspectives.

And it means ensuring we’re hearing from different voices and reflecting on which perspectives we’re not capturing.

Forge the right connections.

Insights come from many different places. Some of these places can be quite far away from where the power to change things resides.

So we must ensure that we’re building the right connections so learning can be acted on. This could mean creating shared learning spaces across teams, or beyond our organisations.

Use reflection tools.

Tools can help structure discussions, surface assumptions, and translate learning into action. They can also be quite simply a good way to get started.

If you’re just getting started, try the What? So what? Now what? framework, or the triple loop learning model (as featured in NPC’s systems practice toolkit).