On paper (or your screen) implementing the work of Emergent Learning might seem relatively simple. While the process and tools are fairly straightforward, it is often the shift in mindset and culture that trips up teams and organizations in understanding and embracing this work. This work requires individuals to approach and track their work differently, and to develop skills at asking questions, communicating openly, raising critique, making connections, and noticing when they are learning. It also requires teams to create open, communicative, and trusting cultures where there are strengths in sustaining feedback loops, facilitation, and helping team members see their progress (because solving complex problems can feel like a long slough.)
When I was first introduced to Emergent Learning back in 2012, the focus of the practice was on a set of tools – framing questions, before and after action reviews, learning logs, emergent learning tables and action hypotheses.
Back then, there was not as much explicitly being communicated about HOW to do Emergent Learning, it was mainly WHAT to do. This is why when I first wrote a blog post back in 2018 asking the question “What the heck is Emergent Learning?” I wrote almost exclusively about the tools.
Alison wrote the blog post asking and answering the question "What the heck is Emergent Learning?" in 2018.
While I still think that post provides a solid introductory overview to Emergent Learning and the tools. I’m thankful that today, there is also a lot more to be said about “the how” of doing Emergent Learning which enables a deeper exploration of an idea I used to close that previous post:
On paper (or your screen) implementing the work of Emergent Learning might seem relatively simple. While the process and tools are fairly straightforward, it is often the shift in mindset and culture that trips up teams and organizations in understanding and embracing this work. This work requires individuals to approach and track their work differently, and to develop skills at asking questions, communicating openly, raising critique, making connections, and noticing when they are learning. It also requires teams to create open, communicative, and trusting cultures where there are strengths in sustaining feedback loops, facilitation, and helping team members see their progress (because solving complex problems can feel like a long slough.)
In the years since I wrote “What the heck is Emergent Learning?” (and particularly the last year) I have had the chance to learn so much from other experienced and newer Emergent Learning practitioners and it has had a big impact on my own understanding and practice. And given that, it would be a wonderful time to add to supplement my 2018 with a new question “What the heck are the Principles of Emergent Learning?”
What's happened since the last post?
After nearly a decade of practicing Emergent Learning (EL) within organizations (in both philanthropy and government) and as a consultant to organizations, I was excited in 2021 when I learned that the consultants who developed EL (and taught me the practice) were transforming their work into a new hub for the growing community of practitioners to learn and connect in the Emergent Learning Community Project (ELCP). The ELCP aims “to support a vital, diverse and growing community of practitioners who, together and individually, are deepening their practice and creating the conditions for stronger thinking, action and results in the organizations and the larger systems in which they work.”
And after a number of years practicing Emergent Learning in my work without naming it as such to my clients and collaborators (what I like to call “EL on the DL”) I jumped back into more explicit work on Emergent Learning in earnest, first enrolling in the online cohort-based Emergent Learning training to get a refresher on the practice, then contributing a chapter to a community-created publication.
At the end of 2023, I gained my “Advanced Practitioner Certification” in Emergent Learning and soon after joined the faculty for the Emergent Learning training program that I took a few years before. In parallel, I have been working with clients to help them build their knowledge and practice and cultures of Emergent Learning in their organizations.
So, What the Heck are the Principles of Emergent Learning?
One of the most powerful things about becoming more deeply involved with a community of Emergent Learning practitioners has been seeing and learning how the practice has evolved in meaningful ways. These changes have included making things that my teachers did implicitly more visible and explicit AND opening the practice up to a larger community of practitioners with different identities, experiences, and roles and inviting them to bring their knowledge and skills and critiques to evolve the practice. This also seems like a fitting approach for a practice about emergence and learning!
One of the biggest evolutions has been the explicit development of 9 Emergent Learning Principles that provide important grounding for the “how” of the work alongside the tools which make up the “what” of it.
So, what the heck are the principles of Emergent Learning? Here’s a (very) brief introduction!
Strengthening Line of Site
This principle is about collectively creating and maintaining an unobstructed vision from a team’s current decisions and actions to our ultimate goals. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Ensuring Diverse Perspectives are at the Table
This principle recognizes that the more diverse the set of experiences and perspectives represented in Emergent Learning processes, the better a group will understand the larger system which they are seeking to transform, and thus the greater the potential for powerful insights and effective strategies to be developed. By inviting the most proximate leaders - who have an active role in transforming a system or who are most impacted by the system, to share their experiences and observations and interpret why things are the way they are, it not only leads to the development of richer set of hunches or hypotheses about what it will take to change things, but also will help build collective understanding and commitment to make that change successful. This principle is not just about who is at the table, but how their experiences are invited and ensured to be part of all conversations! (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Asking Powerful Questions
This principle is about how a well-timed, open-ended question can help individuals and teams explore and clarify their thinking, recognize shared experiences, consider ideas and possibilities that might otherwise be overlooked, and more clearly express their hypotheses and hunches for how to move their work forward. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Maximizing Freedom to Experiment
This principle is about trusting people’s experiences and perspectives and enabling them to choose the hunch or hypothesis they believe is most likely to make progress toward the ultimate goal. With that freedom comes the expectation that people will treat their decisions and actions as something they are trying out, honestly assess how it is working or not and why, and share what they is happening back with others. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Stewarding Learning Through Time
This principle is about embracing that learning practices have their greatest impact when they are done iteratively, over time, focusing on the questions that matter the most to a group. Stewardship does not mean doing the learning for a group; it means holding the intention and facilitating for a group to do its own learning and helping them build it into their regular way of working. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Holding Expertise in Equal Measure
This principle recognizes that expertise can come in many forms — from academic research and years of work to lived experience as well as indigenous, ancestral, spiritual, natural, and artistic forms of knowing. Powerful observations, insights, and hypotheses and hunches can and do come from anyone in the group if there is openness to hearing them. However, these ideas are more likely to be come forward when the culture of a group is steeped in trust, curiosity, and inquiry. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Making Thinking Visible
This principle recognizes the importance of expressing both “what” an idea is and the “why” or reasoning for why the idea will work. Doing this enables a a group to try out different approaches and strategies by communicating expected results. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Keeping the Work at the Center
This principle helps groups focus on how they can integrat learning into their work as a way to identify their goals and strategies. This allows learning to be part of advancing and accomplishing goals, rather than treating it as a separate, stand-alone activity. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
Returning Learning to the System
This principle focuses on how a whole team, organization, community, or other system learns from and acts on information, experiences, and insights to explore different paths to achieving their ultimate goal. Groups can do this work by creating rhythms and contexts for members to share their individual and collective knowledge, generate interpretations, insights, hunches, and hypotheses, and come together to learn in an ongoing way. (Illustration by Optimistic Anthropology & Elma Voloder.)
I’ve noticed that initially many folks come to Emergent Learning wanting to focus on the tools. I suspect because they are concrete and useful and pretty easy to understand and implement. In contrast, most folks aren’t drawn to EL because of the Principles because they seem more theoretical since they focus on building a culture of learning and making changes within ourselves and teams that requires more time and effort.
As I’ve spent more time learning about, playing with, and using the Principles, I’ve found that they provide a powerful and necessary foundation for building and sustaining a team’s learning culture focused not just on learning for learning’s sake, but holding a sense of possibility and curiosity, and connecting learning into action. Thus the Emergent Learning Tools and Principles used thoughtfully together can help transform the way that a person and a team can learn and work, strategize and act in order to advance their social change goals. And, I have found the Principles are not only useful in the context of practicing Emergent Learning, but also in other parts of life - from work and volunteer roles, to my relationships with friends, family, and my spouse.
Clearly, this is a just a brief introduction to the Principles of Emergent Learning. If you want to delve more deeply into the Principles of Emergent Learning, then you’re in luck! In 2023, members of the Emergent Learning Community created the first Guide to the Principles of Emergent Learning. You can download it for free here or order a hard copy from Amazon.
You can download the Guide to the Principles of Emergent Learning for free here or order a hard copy from Amazon.
