Treating “build a learning culture” as a standalone project is the shallowest way of dealing with a hugely complex undertaking. Yet many organizations do exactly that.
What could be the most impactful and exciting project for a learning and development team is condensed to orders: “Change the LXP.” “Run more training sessions.” “Drive more people to the learning library.”
But no senior leader in their right mind thinks of training attendance and high LXP usage as key performance indicators of a learning culture’s success.
Peter Senge, author of “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” describes a learning organization as “an organization where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.”
Nowhere in this definition do you see the words “training,” “LXP,” or “attendance.” What Senge describes is an organization where people, their thinking and their ways of working together continuously shape each other. For stakeholders, it’s the ultimate learning culture. But the gap between what they want and what they ask for is where most learning culture initiatives go to die.
L&D teams cannot “own” learning culture alone. Its most important role is helping leaders and stakeholders define what learning looks like, map the conditions shaping those behaviors and identify the leverage points most likely to create lasting change.
Getting clear on learning
“Learning” has become this overused word that we never take enough time to understand. But by not doing so, we make way for misalignment and poorly designed initiatives.
A lot has been written about the behaviors we should be seeing in a learning culture, and we can always turn to existing research to inform our judgment: Workplace and adult learning researchers Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins have written extensively about informal and incidental learning. Amy Edmondson has explored the impacts of psychological safety on team learning. And Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger preach on the importance of knowledge sharing through communities of practice.
When a learning culture project lands on an L&D team’s table, one of the easiest ways to immediately provide value is to help stakeholders define what they’d like to see more of. Short, facilitated sessions with different groups can reveal that learning can mean sharing more feedback, reflecting at the end of each project or quarter, experimenting with new ways of working, seeking out different perspectives, among others. The point is to agree, on an organizational level, what learning means for you.
This clarity can help with recognizing learning that’s already happening or giving managers something concrete to model and reinforce. Most importantly, it helps with mapping the conditions that block or enable learning, and creating specific initiatives that go beyond training sessions and buying a new LXP.
Mapping your own learning culture
Once learning behaviors are clear, the next question to ask is, “Why aren’t people engaging with these behaviors?”
This question is hard because it can be very exposing. If people aren’t engaging in learning behaviors, the root causes often reveal uncomfortable truths about the conditions that are missing: conflicting incentives, a lack of psychological safety or poorly designed processes. That’s exactly why it’s tempting to avoid the question altogether. It’s much easier to acquire the newest technology than to look directly at what the current context is teaching people to do.
To make this a more objective exercise, we can use a tool from systems thinking called “causal loop diagrams,”a visual representation that shows how different factors in a context affect each other over time and create wanted or unwanted behavior.
Start with one behavior—say, reflecting after each project and quarter—and ask, “What impacts how often our teams reflect?” Perhaps it’s whether they have time between one project ending and the next one starting, whether it’s safe to admit what went wrong or whether past reflections ever changed anything. Draw arrows from each of these toward reflection. Then continue your line of questioning about these new factors: “What impacts whether reflections lead to change?”
Maybe it’s whether someone owns the follow-up actions, whether the team has the authority to act on what they learn or whether insights reach the people planning the next project. You can stop asking questions whenever you want. And you can run the same exercise for multiple behaviors and see how they influence each other. You’ll be left with a map of your current reality: individual behaviors, systemic conditions and the links between them.
This exercise will also reveal what Donella Meadows calls “leverage points” in her book, “Thinking in Systems.” Leverage points are places in a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes across the whole system. Meadows explains that people inside a stuck system usually sense where the leverage is, yet they push in the wrong direction. The places with real leverage are the ones we avoid because they’re costly, political or outside our mandate. That’s why our role in L&D is to facilitate these conversations, which, although hard, can be the most revealing.
Putting a causal loop diagram on paper is an exercise that works best in a group. Culture is a shared phenomenon, so mapping it on your own usually produces a partial picture. Facilitating the conversation in a larger group helps you compare experiences and surface assumptions.
This exercise should ideally involve sponsors. Many of the strongest loops are created by decisions about levers that sit outside L&D’s control, like priorities, incentives and resourcing. If sponsors aren’t at the table, the mapping exercise can still be valuable, but acting on what it reveals will be harder because the factors that matter most will likely remain untapped.
Even if solutions don’t yet surface, you’ve still created a shared understanding of your reality and uncovered potential leverage points.
The conditions that shape learning
Oftentimes, it’s easy to blame people for not doing something instead of keeping the system accountable for the behaviors it produces. Author Molly Graham makes a similar observation in “How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model.” Drawing on decades of working inside companies like Google and Facebook, she argues that one of the biggest leadership traps is blaming people for structural problems. Her advice to leaders facing underperforming teams is to start by examining the system before examining the person.
To avoid answers such as “because they don’t want to reflect” when building a causal loop diagram, it’s good to understand the different systemic conditions that lead to people behaving in certain ways.
The most discussed condition this decade has been psychological safety. Edmondson’s research is at the heart of this: “Are people safe enough to [BLANK]?” Fill in the blank with any learning behavior you can think of, and you’ll quickly see where the popularity of the concept comes from. In truth, most learning behaviors require psychological safety.
What the organization rewards is another condition worth exploring. Incentives are the signals that tell people what matters in your organization. Some of those signals are formal, like performance ratings, compensation, promotions and goal systems. Others are informal and more immediate, like what gets praised in meetings or who gets trusted with important work. People learn what matters most by looking around them and seeing what gets rewarded.
It’s not enough to say you’re valuing learning if your incentive structure communicates something different.
Procedures and processes, although rarely brought up when it comes to learning, matter as well. They are the operating rhythms and routines that embed learning into daily work. They can be formal, like project retrospectives or feedback sharing sessions. Or they can be informal, like sharing lessons in Slack, quick debriefs after meetings, or a habit of documenting decisions. These routines determine whether learning becomes rooted in culture or remains an activity pursued only when time allows.
The structure of your organization, how information flows and whether people are expected to exercise judgment or follow established processes all influence learning behavior.
Organizations truly invested in shaping their learning culture will be interested in looking closely at these conditions and spending time understanding how they’re creating everyday behaviors. The most effective L&D teams don’t drive learning culture themselves; they help the organization recognize the patterns and conditions shaping it.
