What we have learned about being a learning partner (5 new lessons)
In one of the most iconic scenes from the 1968 film Herbie, the Love Bug, the three characters, Jim, Carol, and Tennessee, are driving at great speed to win a race when the vehicle (Herbie!) begins to lose parts. At that point, our heroes must simultaneously drive the vehicle and fix it. A hilarious sequence in a movie that would also be terrifying in real life.
We see the role of a learning partner as much like helping someone to drive a car whilst fixing it.
As in the Herbie example, a learning partner is someone who helps you throughout the race, not just at pit stops, someone you can trust, and someone who can enhance your driving skills as well as the mechanics of your car. They’re along for the ride.
To put it more elegantly, it is a long-term trust-based partnership that focuses on improving learning quality to increase outcomes at the programmatic and systemic levels.
So what should a learning partner do in practice?
At its simplest, asking questions, building trust and offering solutions.
Asking Questions
Voltaire famously stated that we should judge people based on their questions rather than their answers. However, deciding which questions to ask and when is not always straightforward. In our experience as learning partners, we have discovered that timing, the When, was central to every learning experience.
Sometimes it was at significant junctures, such as strategy inflexion points, the advent of new programmes and new funding opportunities. It was also a matter of habit - the discipline of reflection. This was about creating open spaces that generated interesting ideas that could be followed up. There are also some more appropriate moments or contexts for working with a learning partner. We suspect that it is best at times of growth, transition or new ambition in an organisation. This may coincide with external turbulence or internal imperatives.
If these needs and conditions aren’t present, learning potentially changes from a developmental mode to a more summative one – checking how well things are working out against a more stable model and context. If that is the case, then a learning partnership probably isn’t called for. But where the questions are systemic, and we know we are part of the system, a critical friend can help.
Building Trust
The relationship behind the question becomes interesting. Trust isn’t built overnight, but it is important that both sides – the learning partner and learning organisation – have a strong enough rapport to debate, challenge and even disagree whilst believing in the good intentions of the other. We have sometimes found ourselves thinking about this as a continuum or choice between facilitation and challenge. Both are important. Facilitation requires good listening and sometimes helps an organisation recognise that there are different perspectives within the team, never mind its board or wider networks. Challenge isn’t just about playing devil’s advocate (although we are a fan of pre-mortems) but respectfully saying where evidence and intuition might be pointing in a different direction to the course currently being adopted. Trust is both required and built by revealing things that are unseen in a way that enables a positive response rather than a recoil – a balancing act we are still learning.
Offering solutions
The final part of the role - offering solutions – is less clear-cut. Some questions could be resolved with data analysis and exploration undertaken by us, including primary research with different stakeholders. Sometimes we could generate ideas or options for consideration.
Whilst questions don’t automatically keep us honest, it is possible to try to answer them even as we hold uncertainty and harness intelligence and intuition in pursuit of something audacious. We developed a list of questions to regularly revisit and sample from, covering strategic, practical, relational and content topics.
Case Study: Access - The Foundation for Social Investment - The Foundation for Social Investment
One of the learning partnerships we are most proud of is with Access - The Foundation for Social Investment. After almost five years of supporting them, we think they represent a good case study for our learning journey. In this short post, we can’t do justice to all the different pieces and phases of our work together; it’s more a case of dipping a toe in the water of reflection.
Access works to make charities and social enterprises in England more financially resilient and self-reliant so that they can sustain or increase their impact. They support the development of enterprise activity to grow and diversify income and improve access to social investment, which can help stimulate that enterprise activity.
We started work with them on a short piece of work to define what it might mean to be their learning partner in May 2017, and, following some work with their staff and board, we became that learning partner. We are now finishing this major project on good terms, and with some continuation work, as Access’s needs are now – not surprisingly – different to what they were then. It’s been a hugely significant relationship for us as an organisation, involving some experimentation, much learning and a bit of unlearning.?
One of the outcomes of the original scoping work was a list of three key questions:
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Even when the emphasis of our role changed, these three questions were a helpful guide. The first focused on impact measurement and the data to support it; the second on the learning journey and the internal culture; and the third on Access’s position in the ecosystem, including but not limited to social investment, and those that it might need to engage with.
Access’s Chief Executive, Seb Elsworth MBE , said that we were of particularly high value to Access when we were posing key questions earlier in their life and helping to answer them. But some questions can only be answered by Access, particularly around its intent, and other questions need to be left hanging and revisited.
How Access relates to its 10-year lifespan is a good example of this: it's changed over time, from thinking more about experimenting and initiating programmes, to learning, legacy and growing the amount of money available for blended finance. Here, a learning partner can offer a reflective mirror, ideas, or scenarios, but not an answer. To go back to the Herbie analogy, it would be like the wrong person trying to grab the wheel."
We can draw five important conclusions from our experience with Access.
Five things we have learnt
The partnership requires a critical mass of staff and trustee engagement. As with all relationships, there are changes that need negotiating over time; we’ve been around for long enough (five years!) to have seen people change on the team and board. Learning takes intentional time and who is learning has to include, we think, the whole organisation. Locating it in one person on the client side, however capable, feels risky. We’d congratulate Access for navigating this with us through the planned and unplanned, through Covid, parental leave, and personnel changes.?
It is also critical to encourage cross-functional staff time in order to bring different perspectives together, such as operations, finance, and learning. Some of this may be ad hoc, but once every few months seems reasonable. In addition, the entire team should set aside time for reflection at least once a year.
2.?Identify and nurture two Learning Champions
Having two points of contact on the board interested in learning is ideal – one champion is the minimum, but we think two really help for continuity, improving access to the board and breadth of interest. For instance, what about one board member leaning into the past and one into the future, to set up conversations between history and opportunity? These two people might be involved, say, twice a year outside of board meetings or an away day.
3. Make learning a habit
Making learning a habit and embedding it into organisational routines is as important as having some dedicated time for it. Much like a more introspective person weighing up the good and the bad of the year as it draws to a close, an organisational end-of-year reflection has a place. Unlike many of us, hopefully, any resolutions stick, although this is also part of the cultural challenge!
Furthermore, we’ve been learning about time cycles and developing a healthy appreciation of the calendar as a culture change tool. This might take the form of building regular meetings into the Chief Exec/MD’s calendar, say every 6 weeks - of course, they can’t and shouldn’t be at every meeting, but some of the best ideas came from informal conversations over coffee or a sandwich and, for the learning partner, these conversations act as a vital check on pressures and priorities.
4. Be adaptive, learning is not evaluation
We believe that being a learning partner entails using shorter AND longer learning cycles compared to evaluation. We’d go so far as to say if it feels like evaluation is the main learning need, an organisation probably doesn’t need a learning partner. Observing and proposing adaptations to work in progress is an important part of the brief, perhaps more than pronouncing it on completion.
5. Socialise data, insights and actions
We’d love to do more about socialising data, insight and action. Even now, several internal and external conversations stand out after a long period of working together. One of the experiences was working on “5 Lessons from 5 Years”. That was a good example of socialisation and action, as this included workshops with staff, stakeholder interviews, and, perhaps most exciting, an exploration of the ideas and opportunity for feedback with some of Access’s trusted partners, to test and refine emerging insights. We’ve always respected Access’s willingness to share data, including via its dashboards, and we’ve supported conversations with programme partners. Increasingly, we recognise the need for an internal and an external movement, with energy transferring between internal deliberations and shared socialising, something like a Newton’s cradle for learning.?
Bonus: Co-Design and Learning
We’d change the title!?
Having done several assignments as a learning partner, we’d rebadge it as a Co-Design and Learning Partner. Is design an essential part of the role? For us, it is.
We see a loop that an organisation continually passes around, with new insights feeding new experiments. Our ideal is a design and learning partnership where an organisation gradually turns itself inside out, learning and co-designing with grantees and other stakeholders. In saying this, we’re not casting ourselves as the primary designers; we’re not the primary learners, either! Rather, it’s that learning and design should both be collective activities. Co-creation, co-design, collaborative evaluation, and collective impact are just some of the ways of thinking about this – and the clue is in the first two letters. The real power in partnership is not the one between a design and learning partner and a client. It’s the partnership in and with other players that make up the broader system, as it’s this that gives the best prospects of systemic change. It’s a big ask, but we’d love to see several foundations with a shared intent appointing a design and learning facilitator for a system.
Conclusion
Although that’s the end of this reflection on learning about being a learning partner, we really wanted to end with some questions. These are ones that we don’t know the answer to – and which we think might need answering differently in different contexts:
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Social impact, systems thinking and innovation
2 年With thanks for the learning to Seb Elsworth MBE, Neil Berry, Sarah Colston, the Access team and board, and all of the partners who shared their thoughts and experiences with us!