Systemic Learning Enablement: A Missing Piece in the L&D Puzzle?

I’ve been trawling through a lot of job adverts for Learning & Development (L&D) roles in the digital sector lately. Almost all the roles I’ve come across sit under HR, outside of delivery, and they all seem to follow a similar formula. Role-related activities are typically associated with one of two things: supporting career progression, through the implementation of processes and learning pathways; or with efforts to achieve high-level organisational goals through strategic learning interventions, typically involving the analysis and ‘treatment’ of skills gaps. At least that’s my interpretation, and I’m very happy to learn of examples that don’t fit this mould!

This has led me to wonder if there’s a piece missing from the corporate L&D puzzle — at least where the delivery of software is concerned — and it’s this missing piece that I am really interested in.

Where’s the piece that talks about enabling continuous, autonomous, and systemic learning?

This piece should be of equal importance to organisations seeking to adopt modern software engineering principles and practices associated with fast flow (see footnote).

Who is taking care of this? Because it doesn’t seem like L&D have it on their radar.

In this article I want to make the case for adding this 3rd piece to the L&D jigsaw. Or maybe it’s not an L&D thing at all? Maybe it belongs in the delivery space, or it’s a role that’s co-owned. I’m interested to hear different perspectives on this. I’d also like to cheekily point out that the third section in the article is essentially a description of the work I’d ideally like to be doing — just in case anyone reading this gets inspired!

The corporate L&D jigsaw puzzle, complete with missing piece.

Why continuous, autonomous, systemic learning?

The word ‘systemic’ describes what relates to or affects an entire system. Therefore, when I refer to systemic learning, I’m referring to learning that either impacts or arises from interactions in a complex sociotechnical system — be that system an individual contributor, team, product, or the wider organisation.

In complex systems, failure is inevitable, and can’t always be predicted by observing components in isolation. For systems to be resilient and ‘self-aware’ in the face of problems and change, we need to build systems that learn. Not just individuals who learn, but whole systems who learn from and with one another. This makes systemic learning a critical enabler for fast flow.

However, this kind of learning is not a linear, predictable process that can be controlled and administered; it is emergent. Therefore, we need to give attention to the environment and interactions between parts in the system in order to enable that emergence to happen by itself — autonomously. Moreover, it cannot be practised sporadically or scheduled at convenient intervals — it’s a muscle that needs to be flexed continuously; a capability that must be woven into the fabric of the system.

To enable autonomous learning that is emergent, we need an approach to L&D that doesn’t just focus on tweaking individual components in the system to better fit a predefined capabilities blueprint. We need to be prepared to think and act at the whole systems level — which can’t be crafted according to a static blueprint — it evolves over time, in the same way that software architecture, team dynamics, and customer needs do.

So how might we foster continuous, autonomous, systemic learning?

One possibility might be to introduce a systemic learning enablement function, which might sit within or adjacent to an existing L&D function. At this point, we’d need to consider the functional activities that can enable systems to learn continuously and autonomously. I’ve listed a few below, along with references to some of my favourite resources, though I’m sure there is more we could add.

Many of these activities could be within the remit of a learning enablement person or team with particular expertise in areas such as coaching and learning, though they might also fit elsewhere. It’s important to underline that most of these activities rely on collaboration and partnership with community (e.g. team) members and other key stakeholders — ‘help’, ‘enable’, ‘support’ being the operative words. Indeed, I find many parallels between the practice of learning enablement and that of Technology Stewardship, as defined by Wenger et al. [1].

Example activities:

• Coach learning behaviours, such as reflective practice, pairing, feedback, resilience, experimentation, generative learning techniques etc. [1–2]
• Educate and enthuse communities about the value and practices associated with social and systemic learning [4–5].
• Enable teams to self-identify their collective strengths and weaknesses.
• Empower individuals to own their own learning and development, with awareness for the needs of their community or team (e.g. [6]).
• Find and enable access to a broad range of suitable learning resources and formal learning opportunities, and make these discoverable.
• Enable and support the codification of knowledge, where appropriate, and help set standards for this.
• Help to create an environment where individuals feel a sense of responsibility for shared learning goals and will proactively seek to fill gaps in collective competency.
• Help maximise opportunities for informal learning, such as observing others and in-situ mentorship, through continuous collaboration.
• Help create opportunities for knowledge exchange and curiosity-driven learning (i.e. the kind of fun, exploratory learning that feeds motivation and innovation.) [7–9]
• Engage the help and support of influencers who can model positive learning behaviours.
• Recognise and reward people for stepping up and filling gaps in collective competency.
• Support the ‘systemification’ of progression processes. For example, encouraging questions like, ‘how have you helped your team grow?’ — not ‘which of this long list of boxes can you tick?’
• Evaluate the learning culture over time, considering both social and technical practices associated with continuous learning.
• Collaborate with other enabling teams and internal Communities of Practice (CoPs) to enhance the quality of their learning provisions.
• Continuously engage with communities to understand their needs and identify meaningful goals around learning enablement. In doing the latter, avoid vanity metrics and focus on what needs to be learned in order to enable others to succeed with learning. For example,

Less of this: “We will achieve 50% certification” — which has the potential to encourage pressurised individual learning.

More of this: “We will learn what this community needs to become certified” — tackling a question like this through collaboration and experimentation could be so much more valuable and effective in the long-term. For example, we might learn that completion rates are higher when a group goes through a certification process together.

• Continuously communicate around learning and learning enablement, highlighting successes across the organisation.

How might we measure the ROI from systemic learning enablement?

Admittedly, for a role or team that exists to enable systemic learning, ROI is difficult to measure directly. However, this has always been the case for L&D, however much we might pretend otherwise. The only way to evaluate ROI with any real integrity, is to observe the successes, failures, and small improvements of the systems they serve. In doing so, we should be mindful not to neglect valuable qualitative metrics such as developer experience. Evaluating the learning culture in our systems over time may also provide valuable insights into the impact of learning enablement teams.

Of course, when it comes to enabling and scaling technical learning, a learning enablement team may find itself collaborating with other enabling teams, to support growth in areas such as SRE and software architecture. If you’re interested in gaining more practical advice and tips on the enabling teams approach, I highly recommend Manuel Pais and Eduardo da Silva’s online course on Effective Enabling Teams. There’s also some great case studies about the effectiveness of this approach in [10–12]. Admittedly none of these cover the L&D use case, though I do believe this is a model that L&D can learn a lot from.

Summary

In summary, I’ve made a case here for why I think enabling continuous autonomous learning at the whole systems level is an important and often neglected area in corporate L&D, especially in organisations seeking to optimise for fast flow.

I’ve also shared a kind of role description for a learning enablement person or team.

If you are curious about the ideas shared in this article, please get in touch via my website or on LinkedIn. I’m really eager to find willing collaborators to experiment with. Together, we can learn more about effective learning enablement, and how it can be leveraged at scale.

Footnote

For those who may be new to the concept of fast flow, here is a short explanation from Chris Richardson’s blog:

The key idea of fast flow is that an organisation’s structure, culture and work practices along with its application architecture should be such that it delivers a continuous stream of valuable changes to its customers. The underlying metaphor is of a river flowing fast and smoothly, with no blockages or bottlenecks. [13]

For more on fast flow, the interested reader is referred to the works of Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, Chris Richardon, Susanne Kaiser, Dave Farley, Nicola Forsgren and many others.

References and further reading

[1] Etienne Wenger, Nancy White & John D. Smith (2009) Digital Habits: stewarding technology for communities. CPsquare.

[2] Donald Schon (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. Ashgate Publishing.

[3] Logan Fiorella & Richard E. Mayer (2015) Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies that Promote Learning. Cambridge University Press.

[4] Chris Blackmore (ed.) (2010) Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice. Springer.

[5] Peter Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. Random House.

[6] Sorrel Harriet (2022) A Lean DevOps Approach to Learning & Development. In Proceedings of LeadDev Berlin 2022.

[7] Emily Webber (2016) Building Successful Communities of Practice: Discover How Connecting People Makes Better Organisations. Tacit.

[8] Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton (2018) Internal Tech Conferences. Conflux Books.

[9] Sorrel Harriet (2023) Impactful Cross-functional Learning Events. Medium.

[10] Nick Tune (2024) Forming an Architecture Modernization Enabling Team. Medium.

[11] Pierre Vincent (2024) How to get big results with a small SRE team. Tech Beacon.

[12] Team Topologies (2023) Effective Enabling Teams — Case Study — Bol.com. @TeamTopologies on YouTube.

[13] Chris Richardson (2024) Dissecting ‘architecting for fast, sustainable flow’. microservices.io