When the subject is bringing agility to business, we look at Cynefin and think: “The scenario is complex, we need emergent practices, hence, agile methods are the best alternative”.

However, when we move the subject to learning, this is forgotten, and we keep investing on learning initiatives aligned with simple and complicated scenarios.

This doesn’t make sense at all!!!

Practices only can emerge, if the learning can emerge together.

It is learning by an emergent way, based on real events, that we can find best way to lead with a complex situation.

Due to that reason, there is a high in-satisfaction rate inside organizations related with investments realized on trainings and other learning initiatives during past years.

We need to move from a PRESCRITIVE way of learning to an EMERGENT way of learning in order to bring business agililty. This follows the same logic we used when we moved from using PRESCRITIVE practices and processes to EMERGENT practices.

The learning happens, when reaching the understanding of the subject, we realize the new knowledge makes sense and we are able to aply that with new atitudes.

Prescritive learning is based on knowledge and skills that are pre-determined to the learners. It is not related with sharing learners knowledge and skills. This is the shift most organizations are missing!!!

The knowledge is already inside the organization!!! They only need a mechanism for this knowledge to be spread and bring benefit to the entire organization!!! This is what we are experiencing in Latin America and bringing great results!!! There is no need for high investment!! We are doing this with volunteers inside the organization. People love not having to follow specialists and consultants and being valued per knowledge they have!!! It is being a tremendous experience seeing the impact this brings to business agility!!!

Emergent learning is auto-organized. Facilitators provide assistance in the learning PROCESSS. Not in the learning PRODUCT. The learning PRODUCT comes from collaboration between people that have knowledge and experience in the subject. The learners!!! Not from a single expert!!!

Only with an emergent mechanism of learning within the organization, we can make sure that as long as we bring innovation, our employees will be able to have appropriate knowledge to deal with that innovation.

Only with an emergent way of learning, velocity of learning will be higher than velocity of innovation!!! Otherwise, even being on top of innovation we won’t be able to achieve successful business agility because people won’t be ready to follow innovation.