In this post, we reflect on learning agendas as a tool to reframe what the sector considers to be “success” and how to avoid embracing the language of change without changing the behaviours that produce the same unsatisfactory outcomes time and time again.
Everything today promises to disrupt, do it differently, diverge from the status quo and actually change things for you, your organization, society. We do it here at DARO too, and to be honest, it’s often difficult to actually talk about ourselves as a “different” organization, because proving that you are, in fact, different, is more of a case of show than tell. Most words used in “showing” have been co-opted by branding opportunities and an attempt to create a narrative around organizational identity. This, and the fact that “different” is often not as sexy as it seems makes real difference hard to see; actual, substantive change is often tedious and invisible until suddenly, remarkably, it isn’t.
It’s not lost on us that this is the same flavour of problem that most of our clients face – both in deciding to work with us and in creating their own narratives, whether it’s for grants, donor outreach, conference presentations, or various other communications in which we attempt to prove ourselves as distinctly worthy of funding, accolades or attention. The system all organizations exist in – public, private, nonprofit – requires it, and we’re constantly fighting against a flattening of complexity. The question is how to get the information you need to make real, impactful choices, while addressing the requirement of having a coherent and compelling narrative.
Learning Agendas
Learning agendas are one attempt to reframe “success” away from a narrow focus on metrics that reflect what organizations are able to count but don’t communicate impact very well. Caroline Fiennes has described this as sales over science and we’ve written about this issue here.
Learning agendas are a real potential solution to this problem of misaligned incentives. They attempt to address the actual issues and create a mindshift away from limiting definitions of success. The shift is important and creates a starting point; we are in need of a culture change around how we conceive of success, failure, and evaluation. But, like with most things, the execution matters just as much as the initial thinking.
A recent article in SSIR by Michael Brown called “The Unfinished Work of Choosing Well” effectively explains this struggle, arguing that while more organizations are embracing learning, the ability to translate that learning into meaningful decisions requires a different kind of discipline. The article points to a decline in strategic practices that connect resources with goals among family foundations, even as learning becomes more institutionalized.
But the challenge goes beyond deciding. Organizations can embrace the language of change without changing the behaviours that produce the same unsatisfactory outcomes, time and time again. You can accumulate learnings all the time, but the gap can still exist in how to use those learnings. How to address that gap depends on the specific dynamics at each organization – the politics, relationships, size, roles, etc. so there is no rulebook or set of steps that will work in every scenario.
What we can say from our experience is there are two guiding principles that are true in almost every case:
1) Understanding what’s being decided and why is critical
What assumptions are you making and what are the tradeoffs of making a decision, or even more importantly, not making a decision? Choosing to not make any changes to a program or organizational structure is still a choice.
So much of effectively applying what is learned is in understanding the starting point and acknowledging where you have limitations.
For example, reporting for funding requirements, for donors, or various other reasons, is part of the world we live in. Acknowledging the realities of these requirements – and their limiting factors – opens up possibilities for reporting structures that allow you to fulfill these needs while also generating other information.
We make choices by default all the time. Time is short, resources are limited, and it’s easier to continue on a path already in motion. This doesn’t mean that any of the choices made in these contexts are the wrong ones. But, if you’re not aware that they are choices and that there are tradeoffs that go with them, then it gets more and more difficult over time to see what choices led to what outcomes and easier to mistake symptoms of problems for the actual causes.
2) Organizations can't wait until they can definitively measure long-term impact before deciding whether to act, adapt, or persist. They need ways to make informed choices along the way.
The timelines organizations operate under rarely align with the timelines of the changes they're trying to achieve. But not being able to measure impact yet doesn't mean you can't recognize meaningful progress and it’s important for momentum. But, there's a difference between demonstrating that activities have taken place and identifying whether those activities are actually changing how an organization operates.
This is where finding ways to test assumptions and make things tangible early on can be valuable. We often work with minimum viable projects (MVPs) to create something concrete that can be tested, questioned, and improved before committing to a larger approach. These are often used in technology projects, but they can apply just as easily to processes, governance, or how information is used to make decisions.
The challenge is making sure these smaller indicators of progress don't become new definitions of success themselves. Their purpose isn't to replace long-term outcomes, but to help organizations make informed choices while those outcomes are still uncertain.
Neither of these two things are easy
Like anything, the more you practice, the easier it gets. Applying both of these principles as often as you can starts to change your approach to projects and to what learning can look like. It’s not revelatory and it’s not some magic tool – it’s often difficult work that requires time and space to think about, discuss, and document things, as well as regular, structured conversations within your team and across departments.
But these remain critical to the valuable implementation of learning agendas. Otherwise, we can follow a similar pattern as before, where organizations become much better at talking about learning than at allowing what they learn to change what they do. This problem persists because of how difficult it is to change and the systems and constraints we work in. They allow for very little dedicated time to take stock of operations while they are also underway and require constant accounting of activities.
An outside perspective can make it possible to question decisions that have become so embedded in an organization's operations that nobody recognizes them as decisions anymore. Even when a learning agenda is well designed, the questions can be constructed to address areas an organization is already comfortable with or reinforce assumptions. It can be helpful to have an external view that pushes to question the status quo and helps situate you within a spectrum of organizations, rather than only relying on your organizational history as a benchmark. This kind of work can help create resilient and flexible teams who are better equipped to incorporate unplanned learning into an already established learning agenda.
Again, none of this is easy, but there are ways to do this work that help organizations both accumulate and act on learning. They just often aren’t a big fancy disruption but a series of intentional and deliberate decisions and actions. They involve recognizing hidden decisions, accepting trade offs, challenging entrenched behaviours, and sustaining effort without immediate evidence of success.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we tackle these things, reach out.