Cense

Innovation to Impact

Evaluating Learning for Innovation

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Learning is at the heart of innovation. Our definition of innovation is contingent upon it:

Learning transformed into value, by design

Traditional approaches to learning tend to focus on two things: recall and performance. Thus, we look at knowledge-based tests (consider most of what we took in grade school and college or university) or performance assessments (reviewed accomplishment on a specific task or problem set).

What is often absent from both of these is a consideration of the context and the learner themselves. It’s one thing to be exposed to information or demonstrations of how to do something, yet it’s entirely another thing to actually learn it.

Assessment of Learning: Questions to Ask

Our assessment of learning is inspired by this approach and informs the questions we ask about learning:

  • Exposure. What level of exposure did we have to the material or experience? How did this exposure treat our sense of understanding of the problem and the context? What salient information did we attend to during this exposure? How (or were) we attentive to what was presented to us and what was the context in which this was presented?
  • Connection. How is what we are exposed to related to what we’ve already experienced? In what ways does this new material fit with what we have previously learned? Where does this material or experience fit in shaping my goals, intentions, or general direction for myself or my organization?
  • Reinforcement. What activities allow me to apply what I’ve been exposed to in new ways and in practical ways repeatedly (including fitting with what I already know, whether a theory or practice-focused material)? What systems are in place to allow me to integrate what I’ve been exposed to into my current understanding of the situation? What activities have been set out to enable recall and re-visiting materials in the near and longer-term?
  • Application. What opportunities do I have to apply what I’ve learned into shaping a new understanding of a problem or steps toward addressing it? What opportunities are present to reflect and integrate this application of knowledge or skill into my existing repertoire of practice or understanding?

Without these, there is a decent chance we will undergo some form of performative learning — doing activities that look like learning but aren’t really effective. Taking workshops on topics that are not relevant to your work or set up too distant from the problems you’re seeking to tackle is one way. Filling your days with reading articles, watching webinars, taking courses, listening to podcasts, and viewing videos on some material without a means to organize and integrate that into your experience.

You will retain some, but probably not enough to warrant your time and energy. Furthermore, this kind of ‘filling’ of your attention actually serves to decrease the likelihood that you’re able to use this because of the sapping of energy from your brain. The more we expose ourselves to, the more energy is required and eventually we’ll be depleted enough that things won’t stick.

Ask yourself these questions above next time you’re looking to really, truly learn as an individual, team, or organization.

If you’re looking to learn more, do more with what you have, please contact us and we’d be happy to discuss ways we can help you be a better learner and innovator.

Better learning comes from better systems, by design. we can help you build them.

Do You Need a Chief Learning Officer?

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Innovation is learning transformed into value, by design.

– Cameron Norman, Cense Ltd.

Organizations develop c-suite level roles because of a recognized need for focused strategic action and attention toward a particular aspect of their operations. Finance, Operations, Technology are just some of the areas that have developed into C-level roles and offices in many businesses and non-profits.

What about learning? As with many c-suite portfolios, learning touches everyone in an organization and serves as the fundamental mechanism for resilience, flexibility, and innovation. It’s curious that this role doesn’t exist, which is why we developed it ourselves.

A Chief Learning Officer is someone who is responsible for advancing your organization’s understanding of itself, its innovation activities related to its strategy, and its impact.

Why a CLO?

If your organization is substantially affected by changing markets, social and cultural changes, environmental and health threats, or shifts in human or technological resources, you need a CLO.

Learning is about ensuring you’ve got the sensory capacity to take in what is going on around you to monitor activities inside and outside your organization and within the market. It blends together monitoring and evaluation (M & E) with strategic foresight so you can see what you’ve done, where you are, and where things are going.

A CLO is responsible for not only ensuring you have M & E and trend data but that you use it. The CLO ensures that evidence is brought to the table to guide strategy and support innovation — which is learning transformed into value, by design.

Combined with foresight data, this also means ensuring that your organization calibrates its strategy to suit its needs, changing conditions, and ensures its operations and direction is aimed at the future, not the past. As ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said about why he was so great at his game: he skated where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

The CLO role focuses the organization on these insights.

Building on Strengths

Lastly — and just as importantly — the CLO is responsible for fostering a culture of learning within the organization. This involves ensuring that the talents and skills within the organization are recognized, that staff are provided with the opportunity to share what they know to increase the capacity of the organization as a whole, and that new knowledge, skills, and insights are brought in from the outside.

This job is about knowledge and skills integration. It’s about getting the return on the investments made on people, processes, and innovation as a whole. It’s getting the very best from your best.

Best of all, any organization can do this and create this role for themselves and place learning on the same level as other c-suite priorities as we enter an age of transformation and change. Be ready.

If you want to establish a CLO office in your organization or want a fractional CLO to serve in this role, contact us. Our CLO service is designed for this and is aimed at supporting organizations in becoming their best through learning.

7 Questions to Evaluate Design Thinking

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Design thinking is much more than sticky notes, whiteboards and creative exploration. It’s impact can be felt in the outputs and outcomes tied to actual product or service and much further if we allow ourselves to focus on that.

Here are 7 questions that we ask of design thinking that focus on the learning outcomes and uncover the true impact of creation, design, and execution, which is a big part of what design thinking is all about.

By asking these we can better tap into the true return on investment of design thinking as a transformative approach to learning, not just product or service design.

  1. What do people learn in the process of engaging in design thinking?
  2. What new skills to people acquire, develop, or refine through design thinking?
  3. How are the lessons from engaging in design thinking applied to other subsequent products?
  4. What is the effect of design thinking on the mindset of those involved in a design-oriented project?
  5. How does the co-design process influence team development, cohesion, creativity, and innovation performance?
  6. What role does design thinking play in shaping the innovation culture (e.g., creation, execution, delivery, and evaluation) with an organization?
  7. How does design thinking contribute to the implementation of innovations?

Evaluating the impact of your products or services is always important, but if you focus only on that you will miss some of the biggest benefits that design thinking offers your organization when done well.

If you need or want help in learning how your team learns and amplifying the effects of design thinking, contact us and we’ll help you out.

Note: This article was inspired by a recent post on our sister blog, Censemaking, which focuses on ideas, commentary and issues tied to innovation.

Dive In Process

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Much attention is paid to tools, methods, models, and other artifacts as a means to support learning and innovation while much of what makes real change happen is actually a process. It is doing, not thinking. It’s diving in to the pool rather than focusing on the fences around it.

Today we look at one of the most simple, powerful means for creating change in complex systems: the diving-in process.

From Confusion to Coherence

Uncertainty is troublesome and often prompts a pause. When the situation is murky and situation complex, the strategy forward is to generate coherence where there isn’t any. That comes from taking action with a commitment to evaluation and learning.

By taking action we start to affect the situation around us creating a pathway forward. By paying attention and learning as we go ahead we can quickly determine whether the coherence we create is beneficial or not and start adjusting as we go until we are able to generate a stable situation where the path forward is clearer.

Diving in to a situation is not being reckless when accompanied by strategic learning through evaluation. Capturing data on what happens (e.g., observations, quantitative, etc..) will provide you with something to focus on amid the confusion and that will lead to seeing patterns, which is where coherence emerges.

Application

Diving in is as it sounds: take a leap of hope. First, make a conscious, deliberative strategic decision to pursue a path of action without expectation for an outcome, only for learning.

Build a set of metrics that are simple, have low ambiguity, and can be applied readily to capture feedback from your actions. These might be sales numbers, website traffic, number of clients or patients seen, occurrence figures — anything that is tied directly to your actions. It’s about creating that smallest visible system. These can be observational, numerical, or something else.

Next, commit to attentive, reflective sensemaking. This means capturing and examining your data regularly and often to look for patterns. Where you see patterns — and preferably, where your team sees them (this is best done as a group) — start reflecting on what it might mean. Is it positive? Negative? Too soon to tell? As patterns emerge, you follow them and document what actions you take in response to those patterns.

The last step is to adjust your strategy as necessary and repeat until you’re moving into a place of greater certainty and clarity about what to do.

This will generate coherence and enable you to take a wise action next.

It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty altogether, rather this approach allows you to avoid being paralyzed by it and potentially create positive benefits in the process of reducing it.

If you want help with finding pathways forward through uncertainty reach out and contact us. We can help you see opportunities and design strategies to take you away from confusion to coherence, safely.

After-Action Review: Learning Together Through Complexity

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Complexity science is the study of how systems behave when under conditions of high dynamism (change) and instability due to the number, sequencing, and organization of actors, relationships, and outcomes. Complex systems pose difficulty drawing clear lessons because the relationship between causes and consequences are rarely straightforward. To illustrate, consider how having one child provides only loose guidance on how to parent a second, third or fourth child: there’s no template.

An After-Action Review is one such way to learn from actions you take in a complex system to help shape what you do in the future and provide guidance on what steps should be taken next.

The After-Action Review (AAR) is a method of sensemaking and supporting organizational learning through shared narratives and group reflection once an action has been taken on a specific project aimed at producing a particular outcome — regardless of what happened. The method has been widely used in the US Military and has since been applied to many sectors. Too often our retrospective reviews happen only when things fail, but through examining any outcome we can better learn what works, when, how, and when our efforts produce certain outcomes.

Here’s what it is and how to use it.

Learning Together

An AAR is a social process aimed at illuminating causal connections between actions and outcomes. It is not about developing best practice, rather it is to create a shared narrative of a process from many different perspectives. It recognizes that we may engage in a shared event, but our experience and perceptions of that event might be different and within these differences lie the foundation for learning.

To do this well, you will need to have a facilitator and a note-taker. This also must be done in an environment that allows individuals to speak freely, frankly, and without any fear of negative reprisals — which is a culture that must be cultivated early and ahead of time. The aim isn’t to point blame, but to learn. The facilitator can be within the team or outside the team. The US Military has a process where the teams undertake their own self-facilitated AAR’s.

To begin, gather those individuals directly involved in a project together in close proximity to the ‘end’ (e.g., launch, delivery of the product, etc..). As a group, reflect on the following three question sets:

  1. The Objectives & Outcomes:
    • What was supposed to happen?
    • What actually happened?
    • Practice Notes: Notice whether there were discrepancies between perceptions of the objective in the first place and where there are differences in what people pay attention to, what value they ascribe to that activity (see below), and how events were sequenced.
  2. Positive, Negative, and Neutral Events:
    • What created benefit / what ‘worked’ ?
    • What created problems / what ‘didn’t ‘work’?
    • Practice notes: The reason for putting ‘work’ in quotes is that there may not be a clear line between the activities and outcomes or a pre-determined sense of what is expected and to what degree, particularly with innovations where there isn’t a best practice or benchmark. Note how people may differ on their view of what a success or failure might be.
  3. Future Steps:
    • What might we do next time?
    • Practice notes: This is where a good note-taker is helpful as it allows you to record what happens in the discussion and recommendations. The process should end with a commitment to bringing these lessons together to inform strategic actions going forward next time something similar is undertaken.

Implementing the Method

Building AAR’s into your organization will help foster a culture of learning if done with care, respect and a commitment to non-judgemental hearing and accepting of what is discussed in these gatherings.

The length of an AAR can be anywhere from a half-hour to a full-day (or more) depending on the topic, context, and scale of the project.

An AAR is something that is to be done without a preconceived assessment of what the outcome of the event is. This means suspending the judgement about whether the outcome was a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ until after the AAR is completed. What often happens is successes and ‘wins’ are found in even the most difficult situations while areas of improvement or threats can be uncovered even when everything appeared to work (see the NASA case studies with the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters).

Implementing an AAR every time your team does something significant as part of its operations can help you create a culture of learning and trust in your organization and draw out far more value from your innovation if you implement this regularly.

If your team is looking to improve its learning and create more value from your innovation investments, contact us and we can support you in building AAR’s into your organization and learn more from complexity.