02.09.2024

How learning agility can give you the edge

Article by:  Sona Sherratt, Professor of Practise – Leadership at
Hult EF Corporate Education and Sacha Luthi, VP, People & Organizational, Growth at GRUNDFOS.

Are you learning agile? Over the last two decades, as the pace of change has accelerated, it has become progressively clear that leading through this complexity requires more agility. We believe that learning agility is the catalyst that transforms potential into performance.

In this article, we would like to unpack the term learning agility and provide the reader with food for thought about what it is, why it is increasingly important, why it’s difficult to do and some ideas of how to become more agile in your own learning. Given the breadth of the topic, we will primarily focus on the individual dimension and explore the organizational perspective for our talk at the Traefpounkt conference in September.

Why is there a buzz around learning agility?

Although the term learning agility has been around for a long time, it was popularized at the turn of the century. Now embedded into the business environment, it is defined as the willingness and ability to learn from experience, and effectively apply this learning to perform effectively in new or unfamiliar situations.

Acronyms such as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) and more recently TUNA (Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous) started to emerge as digitization changed conditions under which decisions had to be made. Information no longer had prognostic value because markets and environmental factors were changing very quickly and because data was available much more widely.

Most of us agree that the current pace of change is unprecedented, amplified by a mix of complex geopolitical events, global skills shortages, technological advances, and global warming. Leadership today means more risk-taking and the ability to connect quickly with new knowledge. This is why, now more than ever, learning agility should underpin all leadership activities and act as a key metric for organizational behaviour.

What makes some people more agile in learning than others?

While we acknowledge that Learning agility is influenced by numerous factors - life events, genetics, and corporate culture to name just a few - there are factors that we can impact as individuals – specifically, our ability to understand how our feelings, behaviours, and values impact others and our environment. Importantly, learning agility also supports our ability to understand how others see us. Working on raising our self-awareness is essential to unlocking our ability to improve.

• Beyond self-awareness, the quality and outcome of the learning process also matters. We might learn a new cooking technique but still produce a poor culinary dish.
  
  
• The pace with which we expose ourselves in testing and trying out a new skill in the real world is key. Learning something new is difficult for us all, so pushing ourselves to learn consistently can feel daunting. Here, keeping a focus on the purpose, ‘the why’ you have chosen to learn that new skill and then iterating often can be helpful.
  
  
• Finally, while learning any new skill is valuable, in an organisational context, relevancy matters.
  
  That sounds straightforward and yet we all, at times, experience challenges in staying learning agile. Let us explore some of the elements that might hold us back.

What gets in the way?

If learning agility is rooted in experience, then the only way to improve it is to test and try it in the ‘real world’ Let's explore potential barriers to improving our learning agility.

1. If it’s perfect, it's too late. In almost any situation, there is an element of risk. But often, we hesitate to try out something because we do not see ourselves as being good enough. This starts a deficiency spiral, because we cannot learn if we do not give ourselves a chance to do so, and we therefore reduce our opportunities to learn from experience.
   
   
2. The Experience monster: There is a risk that the more experienced we become in a field, the less open we are to reviewing our perspectives or knowledge in that field (cognitive entrenchment). The more experienced we get, the higher the likelihood that we will become unaware of the experience monster.
   
   
3. I know it all. While there are similarities with the experience monster, the ‘Know-it-all’ syndrome occurs when a person who has never been in a situation listens to a presentation and thinks that everything is known and that there is nothing new to uncover. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how the less you know, the more you can overestimate your own competence, and the more you know about a subject area, the more you realize just how little you know within a vast field of knowledge.
   
   
4. What will others say? Keith Johnstone, a leading figure in theatre, improvisation in particular, discusses the fear of being seen as Mad, Bad, Wrong by others (Johnstone, 1979). This fear often stems from societal and educational conditioning that teaches us to avoid mistakes and conform to norms.
   
   
5. The Inner critic: how often do we have that nagging internal voice that constantly criticizes, belittles, and judges us, resulting in negative self-talk? This results in unnecessary harshness towards us or also to self-censorship, worrying about others might say or think about us. Chapman (2014) calls the latter our ‘Internal PR department.’
   
   
6. Stifled by rules. Most organizations want to minimize risks and set up control systems to achieve this, which can overload employees with regulations and processes. Some of those are necessary, but how can we act with agility when something unexpected happens? If we over rely on rules, we lose our ability to experiment and learn on the go.
   
   
   

Ideas to foster learning agility

Organisational culture plays a key role in promoting an agile learning culture, so there is no one size fits all recipe. However, we believe people have agency and can be agents of change for themselves and others. Here are some ideas to help overcome the barriers to developing learning agility that we describe above.

1. Make friends with your inner critic. Our inner critic is a powerful barrier to creativity and experimentation. While we cannot silence it, we can learn to deal with it. Would we be as harsh with our friends as we are with ourselves? Imagine you are speaking to a friend. How might that change how you react to your own imperfections?
   
   
2. Gradual exposure: Start by testing your skill on a smaller scale. It sounds logical, yet we often avoid testing something with a colleague, a friend, or a team. Exposing ourselves early in the learning process is critical to gaining early reactions from others, allowing us to alter our course as needed.
   
   
3. Kitchen Table confidant: Who is the person who will give you honest feedback? Who will ask the questions you do not want to hear? This becomes especially important as you gain status and power in your organization and more people give you feedback, they think you want to hear. The Kitchen Table confidant is the person that does not let you get too comfortable.
   
   
4. Think like a scientist: One way to challenge your assumptions and beliefs is to treat them like a hypothesis. This forces us to be curious about options we would otherwise not consider and, most importantly, to experiment, which is critical to developing learning agility.
   
   
5. What if’ questions: These are great questions to open ourselves up to unconventional perspectives. They are an effective way to stimulate creativity and escape the certitudes and beliefs that hold us back. [For example??]
   
   
6. Fear setting: Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur, and host of the Tim Ferriss Show podcast, introduced the “Fear Setting” tool (Ferriss, 2017). Following this idea of pushing yourself to think through worst case outcomes often makes us realize we can (and should) take more risks with our learning than we currently do and encourages us to experiment.
   
   
7. Don't just ask for feedback: "Give me feedback" is also not specific enough to encourage most people to give you genuine feedback. If you want to hear about improvement or potential flaws to an idea or behaviour, be specific. ("Tell me about the two behaviours that you believe have the most potential to improve my performance." ‘What is one thing I did well in that meeting and what is one thing I could do better?’)
   
   
8. Question rules and conventions: Rules often live on their own. Ask yourself (or your team), what are some of the assumptions which (often unconsciously) are being applied to a situation, team, or even to organizational ways of working. Then, for each of the unwritten rules identified, ask yourself (or the team), "Whose rules are they?” “Do we still need this for our future ambitions?” and “What might we want to do instead?” What we observe is that often, these norms or assumptions have been around for some time, but no one really questions them.

 

Learning Agility as a meta-skill?

MacBeath (2009) writes about learning ‘in captivity’ (within organisations, negotiating within cultural patterns of trust, power, and authority) and learning ‘in the wild’ (for yourself, furthering your own interests and areas of passion). We argue that both types of learning are necessary for us to flourish in a world with an increasing pace of change. We can no longer rely on extrinsic motivators. Instead, we must see learning as its own reward, using hope and self-belief to fire neurons in our brain which predispose us to learn. We believe individuals and organizations must encourage an ‘everyone as learner’ mindset. After all, motivation and goal orientation are shown to be a greater predictor of achievement than just experience or cognition on its own (Schmidt et al 2017).

References
Chapman, S. (2014). Can scorpions smoke? Creative Adventures in the Corporate World. London: LuLu.
Ferriss, T. (2017, April). Why you should define your fears instead of your goals [Video]. TED Conferences.
Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. Theatre Arts Books.
MacBeath, J. (2009). What do we know about learning? In J. Macbeath & N. Dempster (Eds.) Connecting leadership and learning: principals for practice (pp. 4-19) London: Routledge.
Schmidt, J. A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-cam, H. Z. (2017). Does mindset intervention predict students’ daily experience in classrooms? A comparison of seventh and ninth graders’ trajectories. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(3), 582–602.

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