Adaptive Learning Capacity: Why Some Organizations Learn Faster Than Others
This is part 1 of Adaptive Learning Capacity, a five-part series on how organizations learn while the work is happening.
If you run a program, you probably know what it’s like to have a quarter that looks fine on paper while something in the back of your mind says otherwise. You might not be able to point to anything yet. The numbers your report to your funder are where they should be, your staff are busy, and there’s no obvious reason to stop and look harder, especially when a dozen other things are already asking for your attention.
I want to tell you about a program I’ll call Linden Pathways. (It’s a composite, drawn from organizations I’ve worked with.) Linden trains adults for entry-level healthcare jobs in a mid-sized city where the hospitals can’t hire fast enough. For three quarters, everything they reported to their workforce board looked good. Enrollment was on track, completion was steady, and graduates were getting hired.
Then one afternoon, the program director stopped by a case manager’s desk to ask about something unrelated, and the conversation drifted. Denise, the case manager, mentioned she’d been having a harder time staying in touch with some of her participants lately, mostly the single parents and the people working night shifts. The people who had needed the most help getting in the door were leaving earlier than they used to, and the people finishing were more and more often the ones who probably would have been find without Linden. Nothing in the quarterly report was wrong, but it hadn’t been built to show them any of this.
What stays with me about this story is how close Linden came to not knowing. The director happened to stop by, and Denise happened to mention it. If either of those small things hadn’t happened, the numbers would have kept looking good for another few quarters, and the people Linden was created for would have kept slipping away without anyone ever deciding to let them go.
I think a lot of organizations are closer to Linden’s situation than they’d like to be. Most of the ones I work with aren’t short on information. Between grant reports, program data, participant surveys, staff meetings, and the strategic plan, there’s usually more than anyone has time to look at. The harder part is learning from it while the work is still happening, early enough that it can change what you do.
Your version might not involve drop out rates. At a foundation, it could be a grantmaking strategy that looks healthy in the annual portfolio review while grantees privately mention that the application has become harder to navigate. In a coalition, it might be a partnership that meetings every target on paper while two founding members have stopped coming to meetings. In a small organization, it could be a program that’s full every session, but with fewer of the people you had most hoped to reach.
Why a better process only gets you partway
When an organization wants to learn more, the natural move is to add a process: an evaluation, a reflection session, a learning agenda, a new question on the intake form. I help clients build a lot of these, and they help. Every one of them, though, has something in common with Linden’s quarterly report. Someone designed it before the work happened, based on what they expected to matter.
That works as long as the work unfolds the way you planned, and social change work rarely does. The people you serve change. The context shifts. A strategy works for reasons nobody predicted, or stops working for reasons nobody saw coming. Linden tracked completion because completion was what everyone expected to matter. Nobody built the report to ask who was completing, because when the program launched, that question didn’t seem necessary.
A process can only look for what you already knew to look for. Seeing the rest takes something else, and the word I’ve settled on for that something is capacity.
Skills belong to people. Capacity belongs to the organization.
Skills are things individuals can learn and bring with them from job to job: curiosity, careful listening, noticing patterns, separating what evidence says from the story you’ve already told yourself about it. Denise had plenty of these. She’d seen something real, and she could describe it clearly.
Capacity is whether the organization lets people use those skills when it counts, especially when they’ve noticed something inconvenient. Could Denise have raised her concern in a staff meeting without sounds like she was criticizing the program? If she had, would anyone have known what to do with it? Was there a regular moment when case managers’ observations reached the people deciding how Linden recruited and scheduled? Could anyone question completion as a measure of success when completion was what kept the grant renewing?
At Linden, the honest answer to most of those questions was “probably not,” and nobody there had done anything wrong. The program was built to deliver, report, and get renewed, which is what most programs are built to do. That’s why the discovery came down to a conversation by someone’s desk.
Try asking the same questions about your own organization. If someone on your team noticed something inconvenient this week, would they feel comfortable raising it? Where would it go, and who would hear about it? How soon could it shape a decision? You don’t need tidy answers. Most organizations find their honest answers are a mix: some paths work well, and some that depend on who happens to be in the room.
You can hire curious, perceptive people and still have an organization that struggles to learn, because learning needs somewhere to happen. What someone notices needs a way to travel. People with different vantage points need a chance to make sense of it together. And what they figure out needs to be able to change a decision. That combination is what I mean by adaptive learning capacity: an organization’s ability to learn while the work is happening and to use that learning as conditions change.
What adaptive learning capacity is made of
I think of it as three things people do over and over, and that the organization either makes room for or doesn’t.
The first is noticing what’s changing, often before it shows up in anything you formally track. Denise noticed. The open question for Linden was whether anyone was set up to hear her.
The second is making meaning of what you’ve noticed, together. Denise could see one piece of the picture. The program director, the other case manager, the participants, and the workforce board would each have explained the drop-off differently, and the “right” explanation probably needed more than one of them.
The third is responding: deciding what, if anything, to change, and being able to follow through. For Linden this is where it gets hard, because serving the people the program was built for will probably make the completion numbers look worse before they look better.
If you’ve seen the learning cycle I use with organizations, these will sound familiar. It moves from orienting to what deserves attention, to gathering evidence, making sense of it, adapting, and then embedding what you’ve learned into how you work. The cycle is a helpful map. Whether it works depends on the conditions around it, and building those conditions is really what embedding is about.
Where this series goes from here
Over the next four posts, I’m going to follow Linden through each of these. The next post is about noticing, and why the signs Denise saw took so long to reach anyone who could act on them. After that, we’ll look at making meaning, including the explanation Linden’s team almost settled on. Then responding: what they decided to do, and how they talked with their funder about it. The last post is about what it took to make all three of those things happen reliably, which is where adaptive learning capacity actually gets built. I’ll try to be honest about the hard parts, because I suspect many of you are living some version of them already.
In the meantime, here’s a question you might find useful, on your own or with your team. Think about the last time your organization learned something that changed how you saw a program or strategy. How did you find out?
If the answer involves someone happening to mention it, or a conversation that almost didn’t happen, you’re in very good company. That’s also exactly where the next post picks up.
The Adaptive Learning Capacity series:
Why Some Organizations Learn Faster Than Others (you are here)
Noticing What Your Reports Can’t Show You (coming 10/13)
Getting Past the First Explanation (coming 10/20)
Learning Only Matters If Something Can Change (coming 10/27)
Building the Habits That Make Learning Last (coming 11/3)
