Learning Complexity

The Major Projects Knowledge Hub and Community has been live for almost six months. During that time, we have been observing how organizations and individuals learn about projects.

As a general rule, many organizations approach the issue from a perspective that is

1. Formal - knowledge is something that is captured and codified through the use of reports. lessons learned and knowledge repositories

2. Organizational - this capture process is organized according to taxonomies that match the organization's perspective of the project and consequently which tend to use structures and language associated with the project lifecycle, processes or governance

3. Explicit - project knowledge can be expressed in terms of physical models, defined processes, rules; all of which can be recorded in writing

4. Intellectual - we learn by reading or viewing, memorizing and synthezing new data, as an intellectual activity

There are advantages to this approach to learning. It works particularly well in a simple environment where there is a direct correlation between a stage in a process and an outcome; it is very pertinent for technical information - mathematical or engineering processes; the reflective and codifying processes associated with creating the lessons learned, can often lead to new insight in themselves; shared consistent knowledge about process encourages consistency and common language.

But there are also disadvantages. We live in an increasingly complex environment in which organizations may simply not know how to proceed; in which individuals need to adapt what they have learned continually to make it relevant to changing circumstances or contexts and in which there is often no direct correlation between a process and an outcome, at least none that we can identify until after the event.

This is a world in which a different form of learning is most valuable; informal learning through which we adapt ideas and concepts as we go and learn through trial and error; social learning, which implies learning through copying, communicating and interacting with our colleagues, learning as much from their behaviour and their perspectives as we do from our own; tacit learning, the kind of knowledge that enables us to understand complicated, social dynamics, such as the culture of the organization within which we work, without the ability to express this in terms of rules or instructions; and personal learning, which allows each of us the make sense of the same problem in subtly different ways, according to our background, education, culture and preferences.

You'll note that, even as I have explained the two approaches, I have used a different form of language to represent them; formal learning I intuitively expressed through a series of numbered, bullet points whereas, to express informal learning I used more expressive text.

The good news for any organizations that may struggle with informal and personal learning is that you don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water. The value of formal learning is as I have stated it. Nor do you need a bloody learning revolution; trying to 'force' social learning on an organizational culture that has grown up with the formal.

There are simple things that you can do to begin to develop a hybrid. For example:

1. Rather than simply rely on documentation and lessons learned to transmit learning from one project to the next; build a social process into the transfer. Invite representatives from operations or the team that will be responsible for the next stage of a programme into your lesson's learned discussons and encourage them to ask questions. Provide the time (and add the requirement) for members of the project team to be on hand following the handover to talk through the experience of the users or the next project team as they start to become familiar with what they have inherited.

2. Try using knowledge capturing techniques to record the personal insight and experience of individual members of staff and share it with others. Take a moment during project close out or lessons learned sessions to stop for a beat and record a particularly key 'soundbite' or personal perspective that emerges on video. Encourage your project teams to record their observations and personal perspective through diaries, blogs or by describing key stages in the project and their response to them in their 'stories'. Build techniques such as mentoring, randomised coffee trials and other personally structured learning and reflective events into the working week to provide space for individuals to learn from one another outside of the tyranny of the business-as-usual processes.

You can find more ideas for formal and informal learning in Chris Collison's wonderful Masterclass Interview on Lessons Learned and Knowledge Sharing which is available through the Major Projects Knowledge Hub.