Interview: Fourth Quadrant Partners
Emergent Learning and Organizational Culture
It takes a light touch….
There you have it. No heavy hand needed - consistently show up, ask questions, and listen.
How can learning be valuable if it’s not directed?
Emergent Learning - emerges. You can’t predict what will ‘emerge.’ How do you plan for that?
I recently interviewed Fourth Quadrant Partners (4QP) Heidi Sparkes Guber, Marilyn Darling, and Jillaine Smith about the intersection of Emergent Learning and organizational culture.
Before joining the 4QP team, I spent 12 years as Operations Director (‘Culture Czar’) at Spark Policy in Denver. In this role, I learned a great deal about workplace culture, clear communication, the importance of humor, and addressing issues of work-life balance.
I have worked with 4QP for over the past three years, consulting on projects and serving as a faculty member on their Emergent Learners' Annual Cohort. I hear stories from fabulous professional colleagues who use Emergent Learning strategies with incredible social justice work that is both fulfilling and pushing the edge. They are working in philanthropy, consulting firms, and nonprofits. These organizations experience staff and leadership changes that have an impact on the culture of their organizations. Emergent Learning strategies can play a role in understanding and improving the internal organizational culture and external social justice project work.
Every new person to the firm, particularly among leadership, has the ability to change the culture of meetings, perception of time, the element of trust, and even the types of social events that are enjoyable. I have seen that while Emergent Learning may set out to solve a particular problem or advance a specific initiative, these two pieces - Learning and Organizational Culture - come together in unique ways, so I asked my 4QP coaches and mentors the following question:
When you’ve embedded learning into a group or organization,
is there a secondary gain to that group or organization's culture?
Three themes seemed to resonate as we talked and I listened to their stories:
A light touch
Leadership support and engagement
Find the fit for purpose
The light touch allows for emergence to occur. Problem-solving is often nonlinear, unpredictable, and messy. Think of all those fabulous personalities in your office. You know what I mean here. Love them all, and sometimes, oy, what a handful. The light touch of Emergent Learning creates conditions for everyone to share examples of their experiences. The insights are the results from ’talking amongst ourselves. We may not have otherwise been able to come to these insights alone - only once the experiences were compared together.
Leadership investment and engagement toward a shared outcome are necessary. Great organizational culture ideas can be thought through and then backfire at the eleventh hour if leaders disagree, did not feel included, or didn’t want to invest in that ‘soft’ skill. Does the leadership team hold a shared line of sight - of what to accomplish together?
Fit for purpose follows the Adult Learning Theory tenant of centering our experiences on what will be useful now (or risk not being applicable and relevant). We need to find a window where we can infuse our work to learn.
Here’s where the light touch comes in - essentially, remember that it’s all about your client.
The culture, norms, patterns of communication, and power within the organization will emerge during any change process; and it is critical to creating a process that goes with that flow and adapts along the way as that flow changes. As Marilyn, Heidi, and Jillaine shared their stories, I heard the theme of the “light touch” throughout.
Emergent Learning strategies are adaptive - to the changing social conditions externally and to changing organizational conditions internally.
Your organization’s culture should reflect the people within it and stakeholder groups being served by it. The staff is diverse and understandably has different perspectives and histories. Emergent Learning strategies in the workplace help us learn what has worked and what hasn’t in everyone’s opinion. While you may have a shared goal of improving your workplace culture, there are many opinions on how to get there.
What this means is that, by definition, we need an adaptable, iterative process to help us understand and make room for changes as they come. By establishing an ongoing process of capturing everyone’s experiences, over time, we can draw insights that emerge across all of those stories and adapt what we are doing based on those new insights and knowledge.
The light touch allows for the culture of your organization to modify organically. Emergent Learning also creates an environment where examples are shared, and insights are gleaned - insights that would not have otherwise emerged or even been predicted by any one person alone.
The 4QP partners shared multiple examples of their experiences with embedding learning and the impact that has had on the culture of the organization or groups they were working with. The partners shared that they often approach their clients with simple, open-ended questions, which models a learning approach for their clients. This approach created conditions for the client’s team to learn from one another over time; some noting that it was the questions themselves that were asked that opened up the potential for growth, discussion, learning, and evolution. It is a very different experience for members of organizations who were used to top-down change management approaches or leader-driven assessments.
The light touch of Emergent Learning gives staff room to share their personal examples and experiences, as well as their aspirations (of the initiative they are launching or of the culture of the organization). The process is fluid and results in great buy-in, as it sits firmly on a foundation of collecting the best thinking from the staff. The organizations rise from this exercise to co-create something they could not have imagined previously.
This light-touch approach (asking staff to share their experiences) allows the dynamics of the organization (formal and informal culture, norms, patterns of communication, and power) to emerge. Naming levels of power and staff’s perceptions of operational issues need to be the tools of the work, not something to work around. Emergent Learning always starts from where the organization is today - and grows from there.
How prepared is the organization to listen, learn, and change? Listening to staff, and truly valuing what they say will provide the small steps needed to find those places of readiness, and it is this readiness that gives birth to culture shifts from within the organization over time.
Here are some open-ended questions to get started:
“Describe a project that needed a course correction that worked out well”.
What was in place at that time that supported that change?”
“Tell me about a time you felt supported at work”
“What helped to make that possible…?”
This type of discussion removes assumptions and establishes a respectful approach to hearing different opinions, experiences, and motivations.
Leadership investment will propel and sustain inquiry and learning. The more open the leadership culture, the deeper this light-touch approach can travel through the organization. Inevitably, any effort at culture change, will not be successful if leadership is not on board with a shared vision. That’s for another blog….
Reach out if you’re interested in working together