Building to learn
Cate McLaurin is a Senior Director at Public Digital, and on June 16th she’ll be joining us on the Stronger Things Big Ideas Stage for our ‘Building to learn’ session. Ahead of that conversation, drawing on her work with clients, Cate shares how learning can be genuinely embedded in place-based working.
How do we go about creating the right conditions for learning in our public organisation and place-based systems? Conditions in which people can learn together about what works, what doesn’t, and what can be done differently to address our biggest challenges? And crucially, how those approaches can then be scaled up to have more impact, more quickly.
Becoming a ‘learning organisation’ is an admirable and common goal I see in many clients’ strategies and corporate values. It sounds simple but it’s really not, and it’s not a ‘nice to have’. If people can’t learn together and adapt in response to that learning, they’re not going to be able to work together to tackle some of the UK’s most complex social issues. Covid gave us many examples of where, in a crisis, we were able to do this well, for example how people in different parts of an organisation and system came together to learn what was really needed to collectively look after people who were shielding.
Why isn’t it simple? Well, for a start, the act of being curious, testing and learning is deeply counter cultural to how most of our public sector organisations are set up. Instead, our organisations are structured to demand certainty, be right, be expert (and infallible), all in order to reduce risk. Ironically, of course this actually increases the risk, evidenced by large project and programme failures across government, and strategic outcomes not being delivered. We’ve written about this at Public Digital, in a short book called The Radical How, that explains why we believe that radically changing the way we work is how we will deliver better outcomes, reduce risk, save money, and rebuild public trust. That means testing ideas early, learning what works quickly, and being able to act on that learning to improve services.
There are many points in an organisation or system where you can start to create those conditions in which people can learn – here’s three that I talk about most with clients:
The power of ‘I don’t know’
I learnt first hand of the power that being able to truly say ‘I don’t know’ gives during the cyber-attack crisis at Hackney. As a leadership team, we knew that we and our teams had the skills and capabilities to respond effectively, but that we could not know all the answers upfront. That’s liberating as a leader.
Being able to say ‘I don’t know’ enabled us to show up more confidently, effectively, and empower our teams to work openly together to find solutions. But humble leadership is unusual, and most leaders find it very hard not to be the one in the room who knows all the answers.
Leaders who can say ‘I don’t know’, create the space for others to not know/feel uncertain, to be wrong, or to say that they’re making (evidenced) assumptions that need to be tested. That’s how you build a learning culture. Equally, leaders should celebrate stopping things that don’t work. Stopping early is successful learning – saving time and money and potential reputational harm.
Shortening the feedback loop
If there’s a long gap between deciding to do something, doing it and then working out if it worked, then you’re not going to be able to learn effectively. But that’s what organisations do. They demand lengthy business cases, create many decision layers, expect big bang launches, and put up with data that’s not real time feedback and filtered through layers of organisational reporting.
We’ve all had the pain of business cases predicated on guesses that haven’t worked out in reality and projects and programmes we seemingly can’t stop, even though we know, deep down, that we need to.
Test and learn is about shortening the feedback loop, setting teams up to be able to quickly find out what works and what doesn’t, iterating to reflect that learning, and speeding up that loop towards a service that remains adaptive and responsive.
Paying attention to ‘Cinderella services’
‘Cinderella services’ are those that provide the essential framework and structure for an organisation to function. That’s HR, legal, procurement, and finance. They’re often called enabling functions and they are, potentially, a powerful set of levers that can help build those conditions in which the organisation can learn and adapt.
Too often they’re acting as an opposing force. We don’t pay them enough attention – and that’s a mistake. Procurement and legal professionals should be asking “how might we contract safely with others in a way that allows all of us to collaborate and learn as we go?” HR can support us with ‘how might we stretch and develop our people in roles that enable them to learn’ and thinking about how we hire for the qualities we need to be able to learn well, such as curiosity and openness, and ensuring that we identify those qualities across people with many different backgrounds? Finance holds many levers because how money flows absolutely dictates how people behave. If it’s almost impossible to get funding to try something new then it’s very human to hold tight to what you’ve got. But that means you can’t really learn, because true learning means also being able to show what doesn’t work, change tack, try something new, and then grow it quickly.
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