Closing the Learning Loop: Principles and Practice with Chris Collison

Flexible program design and iterative implementation driven by practical learning are becoming increasingly valuable in international development, so says Knowledge Management expert Chris Collison when he spoke with the Society for International Development, Washington, DC Chapter Knowledge Management Working Group in June 2016. View the webinar recording and event materials here.

Via remote connection, Collison, bestselling author of Learning to Fly, took us on a journey through the principles and practices of closing the learning loop. He explored the lessons learned cycle, exposing areas where knowledge and insights often leak and never quite make it through to inform the next project.

International development practitioners work in complex environments where success depends on an ability to navigate multilateral and changing political and social systems where change is nonlinear. How then can practitioners and donors know whether progress is being made from month to month or year to year? Given the challenges of knowledge - capturing, translating, maintaining - how can we ensure that lessons learned from development programs feed into decision making and don’t leak along the way?

How can we avoid this kind of leakage, and what can we learn from the Olympics??

The International Olympic Committee employs a variety of knowledge transfer techniques and tools to create learning pathways that help country Olympic committees build on the strengths of past games. These pathways lead all the way back to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Participants discussed the tools and processes needed to maximize learning and knowledge transfer from one city to another, including learning champions, site visits, checklists, templates, budgets, and documentation, which all lead to the key theme of maintaining an ongoing relationship to close the “learning loop.”

Collison closed his session by demonstrating an organizational learning self assessment tool that he developed with the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). A few event participants completed the assessment ahead of time as an example, and Collison aggregated all inputs across the range of dimensions to create a River Diagram. A River Diagram shows the range of scores across all participants by plotting the maximum and minimum levels. The data points that are furthest apart are like the widest point of a river and indicate the the gap in best and worst performance among all respondents. This gap represents the greatest opportunities for lessons-learning and sharing.

Understanding where we are as organizations trying to learn can help us determine the best strategies to close the learning loops and feed lessons from one project to the design of the next.