Adaptive Learning Capacity: Getting Past the First Explanation
This is part 3 of Adaptive Learning Capacity, a five-part series on how organizations learn while the work is happening. New to the series? Start with part 1.
In the last post, we looked at how Linden Pathways, a composite workforce program that trains adults for healthcare jobs, missed months of early signs that the people it was built to serve were dropping out. By the time the program director pieced it together, the pattern was hard to ignore. Single parents and people working night shifts were leaving earlier and earlier, and the people finishing were more and more often the ones who needed Linden least.
If noticing is the first move in adaptive learning capacity, making meaning is the second. It’s the part where a team takes what it has seen and works out what it might mean. It’s also the step organizations most often rush, because it can feel like you’ve already done it the moment someone offers an explanation.
The program manager did what most of us would do. She pulled the numbers together, put an hour on the calendar, and brought them into a room.
The executive director was there, along with Denise and Marisol, the program’s two case The program director walked everyone through what she’d found: overall completion was holding steady, but it had stropped sharply among participants who came in through the family shelter or who listed childcare as a barrier at intake.
The executive director spoke first. “We’re seeing people with a lot more going on in their lives than we used to. Housing, childcare, transportation. We can’t solve all of that in 16 weeks.”
It was a reasonable thing to say, and probably partly true. People nodded. Someone suggested looking into childcare stipends, and someone else mentioned a transportation partner they’d talked to once. Within 15 minutes, the conversation had moved in to what to do.
It felt like the team had learned something. They’d looked at the evidence, talked it through, and landed on an explanation. I’d still want to ask whether they had made sense of what was happening, or whether the first plausible explanation had simply won.
What happened, what it means, and what to do
When a team looks at new information together, three different things tend to happen in the same breath. Someone describes what they’re seeing, someone offers an explanation, and someone proposes a fix. At Linden, “completion is dropping among participants with the most barriers” was an observation. “People have more going on in their lives than they used to” was an interpretation. “Let’s look into children stipends” was a response.
Each of those is worth saying. The trouble comes when they collapse into a single move, because then you end up acting on an explanation nobody examined. One of the most useful things you can do in these conversation is widen the gap between what happened and what you think it means. It doesn’t need to be a long pause, just long enough to notice that you’re making a leap.
It also helps to notice how an explanation is framed. “They have more barriers” puts the problem with the participants. That might be right. It’s also, understandable, the explanation that asks the least of the program, which is a good reason to hold it a little more loosely.
Fast agreement is worth a second look
Most of us feel relieved when everyone agrees, especially at the end of a long week. When the work is complex and an explanation arrives in the first few minutes, though, pause and check whether you’ve examined it or just landed on the most familiar story.
The simplest thing you can do is ask, before settling on anything: Does anyone else see this differently?
At Linden the program director asked. There was a pause long enough that she almost moved on.
Who’s in the room, and who gets heard
Marisol spoke up first, a little tentatively. She’d noticed months earlier that fewer referrals were coming from the family shelter and more from the community college’s career center. “I’m not sure the people coming in have changed that much,” she said. “I think we’re getting fewer of the people who need the help most, and the ones we do get aren’t staying.”
Then Denise added what she’d been seeing: missed Thursday sessions that lined up with the night shift rotations at the hospitals. “Some of them really want to be here,” she said. “The schedule just doesn’t work for their lives anymore.”
Neither of them had said any of this in the first 15 minutes. Why not? They were the people closest to the participants, but they were also in a room with the executive director, who had just offered her own explanation. Disagreeing with someone who has a say in your job takes nerve, especially when you’re not sure they’re right.
Being invited into the room is different from feeling able to speak in it. If you lead these conversations, it helps to ask for other readings before you share your own, and to make it clear that a different interpretation is a contribution rather than a challenge.
There’s also the question of who wasn’t there. No participants were in that meeting, current or former. The graduate who mentioned that most of the moms in her cohort had dropped out knew something none of the staff did. Not every conversation needs everyone, and a quick team huddle is different from a strategy retreat. Whenever you’re trying to make sense of something important, though, ask yourself whose perspective you need in order to understand it well. That’s a different question from who needs to approve the conclusion.
Marisol and Denise had the skill to interpret what they were seeing. Whether they could use it depended on something outside them: a program director willing to ask, and a room where a different reading felt safe to offer. That’s the difference between an individual’s skill and an organization’s capacity, and in sensemaking it often comes down to a single moment like that pause.
The meaning isn’t sitting in the numbers
I spend a lot of my working life with data, and I believe in it. I also know that the numbers Linden’s program director brought into the room couldn’t tell the team why completion was dropping. They could only tell them where to look.
Each person in that room saw the same pattern from a different place. The executive director saw a changing population, because that’s what she heard from funders and partners. Marisol saw a shift in referrals, because she handled intake. Denise saw a scheduling conflict, because she was the one getting texts at 6am from participants who couldn’t make it. Where you sit shapes what you can see.
That doesn’t make every interpretation equally right. Evidence still matters, and some explanations will hold up better than others once you look closely. Different perspectives are how you come up with the full range of possible explanations in the first place, and evidence is how you find out which ones hold. A team that skips the first step usually ends up resting on the explanation it already believed.
When you can’t agree
By the end of the hour, Linden had three explanations on the table, and the team didn’t fully agree on which one mattered most. Maybe participants really did face more barriers than before. Maybe the referral pipeline had shifted toward people who needed less help. Maybe the program’s schedule had stopped fitting the lives of shift workers.
It would be lovely if every sensemaking conversation ended in shared understanding. Often it doesn’t, and waiting for agreement can become its own way of staying stuck. What’s worth noticing is that each of Linden’s explanations pointed toward a different next step. If the main issue is barriers, childcare stipends might help. If it’s referrals, the relationship with the family shelter needs attention. If it’s the schedule, an evening or weekend option could change things.
That turns the disagreement into something useful. Instead of arguing about which explanation is right, the team can ask what they could try, or what they could look at, what would help tell the explanations apart. Some of that is quick: pulling referral data by source takes an afternoon. Some of it will take a real experiment.
Linden didn’t leave the room knowing the answer. They did leave knowing what they didn’t know yet and how they might find out, which was a very different place from where they’d been 15 minutes in.
What this might look like for you
Linden’s meeting was an hour with four people, but the same dynamics show up almost everywhere. At a foundation, it might be a program team reviewing a set of grantee reports and deciding within minutes that a cohort “lacked capacity.” In a coalition, it might be a steering committee explaining low turnout at community meetings without asking anyone who didn’t come. On a small team, it might be a quick debrief where the first explanation wins because it’s 4:45 on a Friday and everyone wants to go home.
Two small habits help in almost any of these settings:
If you’re leading the conversation, share your own interpretation last, after you’ve asked others what they see. People are much more likely to offer a different reading before they know what the person in charge thinks.
Before the conversation turns to what to do, say the possible explanations out loud, or write them where everyone can see them. It sounds simple, but seeing two or three explanations side by side makes it much harder for the group to slide into the first one without noticing.
This doesn’t have to be a retreat
Sensemaking can sound like an elaborate process involving sticky notes and a three-hour block on everyone’s calendar. Sometimes that’s the right call (and I do love a good sticky note). More often, it fits inside things you already do. Ten minutes at the end of a team meeting can be enough to ask what you’re seeing and what you think it means. A short debrief after an event can compare what you expected with what actually happened. A quarterly conversation can bring several months of evidence together around a learning question that matters. The scale should match the question.
A few questions to try
The next time your team is looking at something new, whether it’s a set of numbers, participant feedback, or a moment that didn’t go as expected, you might walk through these before deciding what to do:
What are we actually seeing?
What are we interpreting?
What else could explain this?
Who might see this differently?
What would help us tell those explanations apart?
Then ask what it means for what you do next. That question takes us to the third part of adaptive learning capacity: responding. It turned out to be the hardest part for Linden. Acting on what you’ve learned means deciding what to test, what to stop, and how to explain a change to a funder who has been happy with your numbers. That’s the subject of the next post.
The Adaptive Learning Capacity series:
Getting Past the First Explanation (you are here)
Learning Only Matters If Something Can Change (coming 10/27)
Building the Habits That Make Learning Last (coming 11/3)
