How can we build a culture to centre learning in a sincere and people-led way?
In the previous post, we explained the essential learning values of RNP and why. Now let’s look at our strategy to embed these values in our organisation.
Written by Gautam John, Director — Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies
First, we defined the values that Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies’ (RNP) leadership and people consider most meaningful in driving our mission: Trust, i.e., providing social support for and confidence in the intentions and abilities of peers in a safe space. Empowerment, i.e., enabling an internalised feeling of agency over decisions and actions freely exercised if desired. Deep learning: gaining knowledge and expertise, blending it into a mental model of personal meaning, connecting with people and problems using these as a reference point.
Articulating our values and desired behaviours clearly — intentionality — is only the first step towards culture building. Their demonstration is an essential next step, or rather a continuous exercise. This includes the communication strategies and language RNP uses internally, the skills and knowledge we actively practice, and the physical environment of safety and experimentation we create around our people and partners. It starts with simple things like celebrating team members’ success openly around the office, asking people their opinion before giving our own, and promoting inquiry and dialogue around subjects rather than definitively stating answers. As a result, we have seen small but meaningful steps change the way people feel about learning and growing with and around their peers.
No organisational change is sustainable unless values are systematised in policies and procedures, ensuring that commitments are passed on inter-generationally. We are actively deliberating many questions, including how many days a month or year do people get for dedicated learning and professional development activities? What tools and materials can RNP facilitate access to for its people? How do we reward experimentation and growth by team members or grantees as part of our contract? While we don’t have all the answers yet, the process of internal consultation around these topics is helping us demonstrate our intention to trust and empower our people and get our teams to codesign an environment that enables them to become expert learners.
Now can we get down to actual learning at RNP?
It’s important to note that we don’t seek to separate learning within our organisation from the learning our people experience outside of it. On the contrary, we consciously aim to bridge that artificial learning divide in most professional organisations. This means effectuating the oft-overused “bringing your whole self to work.” What people learn at RNP should apply to their function as members of their community and broader society as it should be in their specific job function. Similarly, people’s experiences in personal lives should be given space to be expressed in the workplace. Below we illustrate a few examples of how this works:
This approach makes people think of learning less through the narrow lens of professional growth and more as a tool of personal capacity building — the result is better, more capable convenors and problem-solvers.
“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
At RNP, we firmly believe that the best learning happens through a mixed-methods approach and is strengthened by constant application and testing of skills and insights. A mixed-methods system combines Learning by doing, Learning by Observing, and Learning by receiving. Let us illustrate using examples that we see in our work:
- Learning by doing: want the team to become better communicators? Ask them to take turns presenting a topic of interest in front of the organisation.
- Learning by observing: want the team to understand how work funded by RNP is progressing and how it makes its stakeholders feel? Support learning visits to follow grantees’ work and surface learnings, innovations, best practices, and failures.
- Learning by receiving: want the team to become better storytellers and data scientists? Enable access to and time to consume world-class journals and media outlets, MOOCs and other on-demand training programs, and curate a list of thinkers, educators, and experts in their field and access to their work (especially on social media platforms like YouTube).
The skills and insights learned through these methods are only as good as their utility in the real world.
“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Organisations must provide avenues for their people to apply and test what they learn. This could be through rapid small experiments in our daily work or significant trials. Lessons on success or failure can be scaled widely (like funding a completely new, untested approach, technology or service through our investees). Whatever results, we are determined to share them.
A great test of RNP’s success in promoting a learning agenda is to see how it can dilute information and power from traditional areas of ownership to decision-makers and actors on the ground.
Speaking of sharing widely, we are convinced that storytelling can be an effective way of democratising knowledge away from narrow technical fields to a pool of commons. We in the development sector have watched far too much insight get lost in long-form reports and presentations that rarely speak to the people who need to use this knowledge most, least of all the communities from where these insights are generated. At RNP, we actively experimented with new multimedia engagement methods of sharing what we learn, including blogs, stories, videos, and podcasts.
We must, in this instance, call out the example of an organisation that has expertly combined crowd-sourced storytelling and professional learning in the field of agriculture — Digital Green.
What a good organisation does best is confront its failures. All of natural and human history is built on a foundation of failures, whether in evolution or scientific advancement. At RNP, we don’t let our failures define us, but we let them guide us.
These posts are but one in a series of self-reflection on our path forward — watch this space for stories on the mistakes we make on this journey!
*We would like to inform our readers that RNP is a small-sized organisation of under 10 employees. Being a learning organisation is a constant work-in-progress at RNP. In this piece, we have articulated our intent and ongoing effort, and this is by no means a case study of any form of achievement.
