Across the world, we look to how other countries have tackled the pandemic and what our government could have or should learn from them. We shouldn’t just learn after an event has taken place, but use learning in action so that we can rapidly change how we work to respond.
I blogged how can we use what we’re learning to shape the future in terms of:
- How can we learn lessons to help prioritise how we work in the future?
- How can we challenge our unconscious biases to imagine new ways?
- How can we learn from what we’ve built with people to tackle the future?
- How can we turn learning into action now?
As a council, we’ve use learning to take immediate action as well as to forecast how we tackle different scenarios. Councils work with a variety of different organisations and sectors — if we are to take a “test & learn” approach, we should be getting a sense how they’re using learning to change the way they work, so we can better collaborate in the future.
That’s why I hosted a session with Nerys Anthony and Adam Groves to share their learning journey working at The Children’s Society.
What emerged from the discussions between people working in public services and civil society was thinking about
- how to use learning spaces to encourage people to provide peer to peer support to tackle practical issues
- how to create a space for those teams on the edges of the organisation who are inventing their own reflecting practices to be able to share those with others
- how to be humble and acknowledge that these spaces don’t include the public and they need spaces to share their learning too
- how to balance using learning to inform new practices in the short term versus strategy in the long term — these require different rhythms, audiences and sign offs
- how to adapt the methods you use to help your organisation learn, from surveys, to service data, to weeknotes, participatory observation and agile coaching
What has worked well (or less well) from how you’ve used learning during the pandemic?
Discover more about the content of what the Children’s Society learnt
The next session is this Friday on the different roles we can play as public services, do sign up!
