The link between learning agility, Balclutha and swimming...

18 years ago I graduated with a degree in Management and HR Management. I hadn't done either of those jobs before, and my degree in all honestly didn't (and couldn't) really teach me how to do these jobs day to day... What my expensive education taught me was how to learn, using concepts, frameworks and research.

Today, I still use these frameworks, concepts and principles to help me make sense of things around me. More importantly and valuable however is how often I find myself in situations where I need to employ these sensemaking tools.

Learning agility however isn't just a 'tertiary education thing'. It is open source...

Learning agility describes our ability to choose, practice and eventually confidently throw ourselves into anything, apply our existing skills to a range of situations and successfully swim - or float - and ideally not sink.

Learning agility is the foundation for growth, making it THE most important capability you can possess and practice in work and in life.

A case study in learning agility

I don’t prewrite my musings. I write about the things that come up when I chat to people about life and work.

My hubby doesn’t know it, but he’s both my case study and muse for this blog.

When we left our permanent jobs and careers back in February 2023 in pursuit of our own version of freedom, we left behind all the things that we knew for a life of things we didn’t really know. It was equal parts scary and exciting.

Learning agility became key.

Before we did this, hubby (aka Pete) worked, lived and breathed medicine. He toiled away day to day applying his medical degree, knowledge and experience in a hospital. Each day he practiced what he knew in the same place, doing the same job requirements, using the same systems and processes, and worked alongside the same people. Sure, changes take place, and there are different patients and whānau with different ailments, but a lot of his world wasn't too different, day in day out.

Since leaving permanent employment, he has chosen to take up several short term (2 to 6 week) stints, to practice applying his skills across a range of new and different environments, and get comfy being uncomfy. So far, he’s worked in Hawke’s Bay hospital during the cyclone and national state of emergency, at a smaller local hospital in Whakatāne, at a larger hospital in Tauranga, and now at a private, rural hospital in Balclutha in the deep south.

As his doting wife, dedicated travel agent and live in chef, I have travelled with him to live temporarily in different towns and places I’d never imagined living in. And it has been in one word, awesome.

Last night, as we explored our new temporary home, ‘Clutha, by foot, we chatted about his first day at the new job. Pete started off telling me about the feelings of overwhelm that came with meeting new people, and learning the new workplace, systems and processes while doing the mahi. All valid and true.

I then asked what all of these seemingly uncomfy new things revealed to him about what he did know... His reflection shifted and he talked at length about how his first day had revealed a lot about the transferability of his skills, including learning a new IT system, and how much easier it was applying his skills in his new workplace, given his recent practice and growing comfort with regular change (aka. learning agility).

Learning agility – the root cause and the solution

Cliché but true, we live and work in a world where change is our one true constant. Despite this, few of us really dig change.

The continued tension between the long established and well maintained paradigm of office based work and the challenge of a new paradigm of remote and flexible work being an ongoing example of this.

When you boil it down, it is about agency. Regardless of whether you’re an employer, a leader or a worker, we all have an underlying desire to live a life where we have agency – ownership of and influence over our own choices, decisions, actions and ultimately outcomes.

Hence, the passion around flexible and remote working practices... We want individual ownership and influence over how we work, but more importantly, how we as adults manage the interface (and impact) between our work and life. You could simply say that the desire for remote and flexible work is simply a symptom of wanting greater agency. ??

Food for thought, however this isn’t an article about remote and flexible working, or agency. It’s about learning agility.

Here’s the connection... Remote and flexible work require us to accept, own and adapt to change. Learning agility is both the challenge and solution to navigating big change.

For organisations, it is the ability to evolve and adapt their operating models and leadership to accommodate and leverage evolving ways of work in pursuit of already proven engagement and productivity gains.

For individuals, it presents as the ability to confidently unleash our skills to maximum affect in different scenarios and environments.

When these things happen in tandem, our focus shifts from:

• Seeking direction, management and task completion to agency, leadership and problem solving.
• Seeing change and uncertainty as a temporary threat, to an opportunity to practice our ability to apply, finesse and evolve our skills.
• Practicing skills that remain largely unchanged irrespective of our changing surroundings (mastery of a job or career), to practicing and evolving skills that enable us to successfully land, assess and apply ourselves to any situation (adaptability and transferability of skills).
• Learning through high cost, low yield courses to self-identifying specific skill gaps to address through just-in-time learning and incremental continuous improvements.
• Doing and embedding, to thinking and improving.

These shifts are what success looks like in a changing world.

The skills dilemma is a learning agility dilemma

Executives repeatedly express the availability of new and critical skills as a critical barrier and enabler to business continuity, growth and success. Similarly, workers are worried about the longer term value of the careers that they’ve spent years curating, and how to remain relevant, employable and ultimately employed.

We all need to continue to learn to new skills. We always have done, and always will need to.

Like most problem solving however, we typically look first to the obvious – the low hanging fruit. Right now, we’re largely focused on tangible skills such as learning new and different technology. While critical in everyday life and at work, I’d argue that the less tangible, less sexy and often overlooked skillset of learning agility is the critical piece to the skill puzzle.

This week in the news... Scientists used AI to help substantially narrow down possible solutions (from over 30 million) to address looming lithium shortages. Lithium is necessary for EV batteries. EV batteries are necessary for EVs which are in turn critical to reducing carbon emissions.

With AI, the task took 80 hours. Without it, it would have taken a projected 20 years – a time frame that would render our international climate change response efforts useless.

AI tech was critical, for sure. It was the tool... But the effectiveness of the tool in solving the problem, was down to the learning agility employed by a team of people in a new situation, who figured out how to employ new technology alongside existing knowledge and skills (aka learning agility) to maximum impact.

The old adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks is dated.

Old dogs with a desire to learn new tricks, will learn new tricks. The more these old dogs practice new tricks, the more they learn and the better they get at learning in general. They become an old dog, with an agile mindset.

Suddenly, this old dog starts to employ years of untapped knowledge and turns tricks that give young dogs a run for their biscuits!

We have the cultural genetics to be naturals at learning agility. Afterall, with a little bit of number 8 wire and a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, we can figure out how to do just about anything, right? A metaphor for problem solving, grounded in learning agility.

With this in mind we still have to choose big change to practice learning agility.

When we adopt get the latest i-phone as an i-phone user, we are practicing life long learning. When we learn how to harness AI in our day to day work as a newbie to AI, we are practicing learning agility.

It's relative. Learning agility is more than moving with change or incremental change. It's about putting ourselves out there for big change. Trying things that are new, different and often kind of scary... It's where we don’t know the answer, solution or sometimes even the problem.

It’s the idiom of ‘jumping into the deep end’.?We have to figure out what we know, what we don’t know, and to look at our existing skills and experience and assess what and how to apply what we have to the situation. It’s the precursor to problem solving, the necessary ingredient for skill transferability and the garden bed for growth. ?

Moments of big change

The moments of big change, provide the greatest opportunity to practice learning agility.

For me, these included:

• A career change to management consulting, where I regularly faced hard, but important problems across systems and workplaces I hadn’t worked in before. The learning agility presented as coming up with plans of attack without the beauty of time, loads of information, previous examples or a chartered playbook on what to do next.
• Going to therapy at regular intervals in life to look deeply at what I believe about myself and the world around me, and how this shapes my choices and actions. The learning agility was in choosing to practice new and different behaviours to get new and different outcomes.
• Regular travel, exploring new and different cultures and places. Immersing myself into the discomfort of difference in people, place, language, life etc. Learning agility is figuring out how to navigate my way across Sweden after missing a ferry, with language barriers, time constraints, and no internet or map, but knowing that I can figure it out.
• Regularly adopting creative hobbies or enrolling in study as an adult in an area outside of my career for the sake of learning something new. Learning agility is knowing that I have the skills, to learn and succeed.
• Leaving my home and work for a year of unknowns, adventure and self-exploration. Learning agility is knowing that the things that helped me feel secure were also the things that kept me secured, and that I would be ok if I let both go.

It is no surprise that the greatest moments of learning agility are synonymous with significant, accelerated growth.

Swimming lengths of the pool is great. I love a good laps session... But will it help you in a moment of panic, say, in an ocean rip? Not necessarily… Your survival in that moment relies on your ability to create calm, set a strategy and employ a series of your existing skills, of which swimming and floating are two, to get out without panicking and sinking.

And this is the connection between learning agility, Balclutha and swimming... And why learning agility is the most important skill you need to practice.