When I relocated to Israel, pursuing a more meaningful life, I quickly discovered that I could not find high-value work in my culture consulting, top team and leadership development areas of expertise. As a result of this experience, a powerful and profound collision occurred between the necessity to earn a living and the possibilities I could see emerging from the creative, innovative and entrepreneurial environment I was living amidst. I quickly realized that to be successful, it would serve me well to develop learning agility. To adapt and grow by embracing the disruptive, diverse and different culture existing in Israel. This nation harnesses the collective genius of its people to innovate at the edge of chaos successfully.
Letting go to let come
This meant letting go of most of what I knew and practising adapting by learning new and different ways of being, thinking, and acting in almost every area of my life. It also meant becoming open-minded and adopting a beginner’s mind and a ‘not knowing’ mindset to create a space for new and deep learning to emerge.
It was not an easy task, and over the six years living in Israel, I made zillions of mistakes, seriously failed, and faced heaps of adverse people and situations. I also encountered several serious, monumental brick walls. What supported me were the eight major career and life changes I had already experienced and mastered. Also, I had invested a large part of my corporate life in continuously learning and teaching others how to learn. This gave me a deep foundation of core knowledge in transformational leadership, teams, achievement, and accountability.
Playing in the learning and development game
This meant that I was somewhat competent and had the capacity (and occasionally) the confidence to play further in the learning and development game.
I did this intentionally, by working on being proactive, constructive and non-defensive (even though it was often very hard) by:
- Not slipping into blaming and shaming others (even though it was often very tempting) when things went astray.
- I see myself as personally responsible for becoming the best person I can be.
- Perceiving it all as a set of significant “learning experiences” that would serve me well in the future.
Little did I realize then, and only through pausing to retreat and reflect on my experiences, which enabled me to integrate and assimilate them, that I had become, in practice, what we now call, at ImagineNation™, an “agile learner.”
This is now the basis for our global innovation consulting, culture, leadership, and coaching learning streams, which focus on harnessing people’s collective genius.
Developing learning agility
Sustaining success in today’s uncertain, unstable, and highly competitive business environment is becoming increasingly dependent on people’s ability to learn deeply. Yet most people and many organisations don’t seem to value learning as a performance improvement enabler. Nor do they know how people learn, never mind how to develop the learning agility to potentially sustain them in VUCA times.
Four new categories of work
BCG in their “Twelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organization Work Report” identified four key categories;
“The first two address changes in demand for talent, technological and digital productivity, and shifts in generating business value. The second two address changes in the supply of talent; shifts in resource distribution and changing workforce culture and values”.
These forces are revolutionizing the notions of “talent” and the way work gets done in companies. They are compelling leaders to rethink and relearn “even the most basic assumptions about how their organizations function.”
Being, thinking and acting differently
To survive, compete, and flourish in the face of exponential changes, it is crucial to improve people’s confidence, capacity, and competence in learning agile ways of being, thinking, and acting differently. However, people’s confidence can decline significantly, along with a desire to learn, when mental health issues occur. That makes addressing worker well-being and providing mental health support a must, no matter the size of the organisation or industry. A quality Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a confidential service to proactively support workers’ mental health, manage psychosocial hazards, and shift the company culture through education and training resources. Investing in an EAP makes sense for Australian businesses that want to grow, improve productivity, and do what’s right for their workers’ mental health.
This improves their well-being and enables them to be agile because they have developed an ability to make intentional shifts in changing contexts and to respond effectively and creatively to the unexpected and unplanned in big and small ways.
Benefits of learning agility
When we know how to embrace, adapt and continuously improve ourselves (and others we impact and interact with) through learning, we can create, invent and innovate real business breakthroughs. We can really make a difference in ways that are meaningful and add value to the quality of people’s lives. Learning to continuously create, invent, and deliver new products and services for customers results in “greater user experiences.”
Harnessing collective genius
In the case of Talent, when we know how to make work more meaningful, connected, and purposeful, we can better energize, catalyze, mobilize, maximize, and harness their collective genius, resulting in a more creative, engaged, and empowered high-performance workplace.
Improving organisational agility
In the case of organisations, we can learn how to increase revenue-generating products and services and to generate greater customer satisfaction (and advocacy). Organizations benefit by increasing their speed to market and the number of innovative projects that get delivered. They also benefit by improving operational efficiencies through developing innovative cultures and business ecosystems to collaborate and harness Talent’s collective genius.
Cultivating innovation agility
At ImagineNation™ we know that the corporate learning and development market is being seriously disrupted. Seeing this as a catalyst for re-inventing the corporate learning paradigm, we developed, tested, failed, learnt and adapted our competence, capacity and confidence to innovate, an agile menu of innovative learning pathways.
Where connecting happens through an implicit shared intention and experience, learning occurs through play, experimentation, and emergence, which enable people to see their worlds with fresh eyes and co-create new ways of being, thinking, and acting.
This enables Talent to:
- Discover, explore and generate simple ways of working and flowing with complex adaptive systems.
- Passionately and purposely create value by transforming business and user generative problems into innovative solutions.
- Creatively, courageously, compassionately and collaboratively respond to the unexpected.
- Give, take, and get permission to fail (with forgiveness) and learn by improvising, experimenting & doing.
- Provocate, punctuate, disrupt the status quo, and experiment with unconventional methods to get work done.
This enables organizations to use their resources creatively and effectively, sometimes at a moment’s notice in response to the unexpected.
It also prioritizes ways of being, thinking, and acting, creating the permission and safe space for people to move, reflect and respond authentically and effectively.
Developing the four “E”s of Learning at work
If you are seeking to develop innovation and learning agility, it is important to incorporate the “Four E’s of Learning” at Work: Education, Experience, Environment, and Exposure.
This involves supporting people to learn at work to upgrade their talent continuously; both their knowledge, skills, experience, and their motivation, and mindsets.
This is achieved by integrating technology and blending learning solutions that enable:
- Digital learning.
- Playful and experiential learning.
- Customized blended learning programs.
- Self-paced and team-based 24/7 learning.
In other words, making learning agile, available and accessible to everybody, at every time, across every modality and technology where people have the time to:
- Learn and feel that their new skills are valued.
- Retreat, reflect, explore, and discover new ways of being, thinking, and doing.
- Question, challenge the status quo, experiment with new ideas, fail without punishment, and learn from mistakes.
Develop macro and microlearning agile customized learning solutions
Designing and developing learning programs that facilitate both micro and macro learning processes to develop people’s competence, capacity, and confidence to adapt and innovate in changing contexts is important.
Macro learning involves learning a whole new domain, where people need to continuously inject new skills, information, moods, mindsets, behaviors and connections to;
- Move and speed up their learning curve until they become experts at innovation so that they can teach and coach others.
- Create space for learning “on-the-job skills” through practice, repetition, and continuous questioning about why something didn’t work.
Microlearning involves learning, viewing, or consuming what we can quickly. At ImagineNation™, we cluster microlearning activities to create customised, agile, macro learning, blended learning programs for our clients.
Creating new agile learning pathways
The following diagram illustrates our approach, which disrupts corporate learning by putting “The Agile Learner” at the centre and then offering a range of micro options that can be patterned into a macro customized blended learning structure. This meets our clients’ learning needs in terms of subject or topic depth and breadth and suits all learning styles, time, technology, and cost needs.
Flourishing in the new world of work
In the report “The Disruption of Digital Learning: Ten Things We Have Learned,” Josh Bersin reveals that employees are feeling “overwhelmed” and, in reality, only have “24 minutes a day to learn.”
If we want to seriously achieve 21st-century success and organisational sustainability, we must work harder at making learning and people matter.
We can do this strategically, systemically, and in intentional, meaningful, and purposeful ways by adapting more creative, innovative micro and macro, blended, and agile learning pathways.
This will energize, catalyze, harness and mobilize people’s collective genius.
He suggests that what matters is your culture, people’s career successes, and coaching. In ways where people feel safe, empowered and have permission to participate in on-the-job experiential learning. Where they can learn from mistakes, supported by effective performance data and rewards systems within a culture of learning. Organisations have re-tooled talent to win in the next decade.
At ImagineNation™, we provide innovation coaching, education, and culture consulting to help businesses achieve their innovation goals. Because we have already done most of the learning and actioning of new hybrid mindsets, behaviours, and skill sets, we can help your businesses do this by opening people up to their innovation potential.
Contact us now at janet@imaginenation.com.au to learn how to partner with you to learn, adapt and grow your business in the digital age.
