Learning in a cohort builds trust and promotes new ways of working. When a group of people embark on a learning journey together, they share time, space, and ideas inside and outside of formal training. Over the duration of the journey, learners have the opportunity to process information with each other, experiment with new tools, and share their results. The experience of practicing new ways of working can feel exposing, risky, and uncertain. This sense of vulnerability is an essential part of development. When facilitators, learners, and coaches validate and embrace feelings of vulnerability as an element of the journey, individuals and teams make better progress. Learners who are willing to embrace vulnerability are more willing to try new things, make mistakes, and ask for help. Learning with others in a cohort enables participants to “learn in public” with others, where the group benefits from individual insights and experiments. When learners demonstrate vulnerability by grappling with their own learning, it builds trust in the cohort. Developing strong relationships within a cohort creates new social norms at work that promote learning and reinforce new ways of working.

Personal development is an essential ingredient to healthy, high-performing teams. A new project, initiative, or role might require working in new ways, with new people, and on new challenges. Individuals who focus on how they work with others ultimately have more fun working together and deliver better results. Learning journeys support the development of communication skills by providing an opportunity to foster self-awareness, social-awareness, and build empathy by learning together. While reading and reflecting are valuable, strengthening communication skills requires in-person practice: during group trainings, interacting with coworkers, relationships outside of work, and coaching conversations. Through practice and training, participants recognize they can’t change other people’s behaviors, so the opportunity is to change their own behaviors to better reach their goals. This mindset change and continued personal development lead to better performing, healthier, safe, and intentional team dynamics. 

Support from managers, leaders, and peers are a key ingredient to driving change. Participants in the learning journey support each other to complete all the pieces of the learning journey. Teams of learners are responsible for completing a practicum project that requires applying the skills and tools they’ve gained from training. When participants are regularly encouraged to share their learning with other coworkers who are not in the learning journey, the whole team benefits from the experience of a few members. Through this, individuals not in the learning journey gain inspiration about what’s possible. To create alignment and support between managers and learning journey participants, a leadership kickoff meeting is an opportunity to encourage learners to protect their time and integrate new ways of working. The kickoff is also an opportunity to invite managers and leaders to offer their explicit support of the outcomes the learning journey delivers. Support from coworkers and leaders can remove barriers for learners to apply their new skills, tools, and mindsets without triggering an organizational immune system. With accountability and support from multiple angles, participants in a learning journey are set up for success in using the tools, skills, and techniques they gain from a learning journey.

Experiential learning and experimentation deliver lasting results. A learning journey gives participants the support to try new skills or tools several times, even unsuccessfully. This ability to practice and experiment different ways of using these tools increases the likelihood that participants will successfully integrate the new practices and tools into their work. Practice projects provide learners the opportunity to apply their new skills, tools, and mindsets to an example project with low-stakes and less dependencies than their real work. Having a time-bound, cohort-based learning experience means that participants are expected to apply their new skills in their day-to-day work and reflect on their experiences with the cohort. Additional support from coaches, leaders, and peers help participants synthesize what they’re learning in the journey to make sense of how it all fits together. The entire length of the learning journey contributes to professional development – both the time spent in class and the time outside of class – because the participants integrate new skills throughout the journey. The investment of 90 hours of training time over a 10-week period offers 400 hours of experiential learning.

Investing in professional development is good for the individual, the team, and the organization. Mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters[2] to someone builds intrinsic motivation in individuals is a key driver of employee engagement. When people feel engaged at work their performance improves. On a larger scale, companies with the highest employee engagement outperform their competitors by a 2.5 to 1 on an earnings per share basis[3]. Companies who invest in learning journeys by committing time, talent, and resources demonstrate their commitment to the overall goals of the journey and to employees. When participants recognize the investment their organization makes through a robust learning journey, they have the opportunity to build mastery and may feel similarly inclined to invest creative energy and discretionary effort in new ways, unlocking new opportunities, ideas, and solutions.

Learning Journeys unlock innovation and organizational performance 

With standalone workshops the likelihood of change rests on the individual whereas learning journeys create a reinforcing cycle between individual performance and team performance. The explicit support from coworkers and leaders, and the strategic alignment of the curricula in a learning journey, increases the potential for sustained change. The faster, more sustainable path to business value and social impact comes from improved team performance – not solely improved individual performance.

Individuals ultimately lead organizational change, but it typically requires more than one person. Organizational transformation is a lot to ask of one individual. When an individual is successful in implementing something new, it may be that they are changing ways of working in an unsustainable way. One way to notice if this is happening is to consider if that individual leaves, what will change? Will the practices, tools, or principles they brought survive on the team or within the organization? Without support, an individual might have to take unnecessary risks or heroics to pull off a change they care about at work. This can cause a backlash among other employees or managers because this unsupported change may mean an increased risk of burnout for the team and it may not align with team interests.

When several people from the same team go through a learning journey together, their individual transformation in applying new ways of working occur at the same time. A group of participants on the same team can work together to consider how to best introduce tools with the most relevance to team members outside of the learning journey. Each participant has their own perspective and takeaways from the learning journey and when they share this with others it means a team hears the same message delivered in several different ways, increasing the chance for true understanding. When teams work well together, they attract attention and create inspiration by demonstrating a concrete example of what is possible.

Learning journeys are an opportunity to cultivate the organizational culture you want.

The most powerful learning journeys include training and learning experiences that offer new tools and techniques for how people work together. Organizational culture is defined by how people work together – the accepted attitudes, behaviors, and social norms. By embedding things like empathy exercises, collaboration techniques, presence and communication skills, listening techniques, and facilitation tools in a learning journey we can create cultural norms and expectations that align with the kind of culture we aspire to build and sustain. Once a team establishes a healthy baseline of how they want to work together, these norms and expectations persist through team changes due to the alignment of goals and the team working dynamics. Learning journeys are an opportunity to be intentional about the cultural dynamics we support and the ones we challenge.

Workshops are one-time learning experiences, delivered by external or internal facilitators. Delivery formats range from lecture to facilitated conversation to interactive or hands-on learning. People attend workshops to develop a new skill, understand new research or insights, network with people in their field, or because they need to learn a new policy or tool. 

Organizations invest in workshops as a way to develop and support people. In 2015 alone, companies spent $160 billion on training in the United States and close to $356 billion globally[4]. Unfortunately, workshops on their own are unlikely to create long-term individual or organizational change[5]. 

Workshops are an effective format to pass on a finite amount of information to learners or to develop a specific skill. Workshops can build awareness, curiosity, and inspiration for a topic or skill along with the skill development. It can be an introduction to a new skill or strengthening an existing skill. Workshops are also effective for introducing new organizational policies that people are expected to follow.

The outcomes of great workshops are developing specific skills or compliance with a new policy, strategy, or tool.

Limits and risks of a workshop only approach

The causality between a workshop and sustained improvements in individual performance is unclear. The limited time and duration of stand-alone workshops may prevent the desired change from sticking. Participants might be inspired to apply their skills in their day-to-day work, but lose motivation as the impact of the training fades. Training that occurs outside of work relies on the individuals to bring this information back to their organizations. The individual must communicate the value and need for working in new ways to teammates in a compelling enough way to bring everyone else along with them.

If an employee tries a new skill, but fails to communicate it effectively, which is common in the early stages of learning, they may become discouraged to try again. Without coaching or peer-support, employees don't have the support and feedback about how they might try again. If an employee's new skills are misunderstood or judged by coworkers, managers, or leaders, it decreases the likelihood that employee will take the risk of trying again.  

Stand-alone workshops often fail to inspire change because personal and team accountability is rarely embedded into the workshop structure.

Team members, managers, and organizational leaders can make or break an individuals' success integrating new skills into their daily work. When challenges arise, the new learning is often the first to be dropped. Harvard Graduate School professors, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, describe this as the immune system of an organization that prevents long term and systems wide change[6].

What might look like a straightforward compliance issue, often has deep cultural roots in an organization. For example, workshops to prevent sexual harassment are often viewed as compliance. Attempting to disrupt a cultural issue with a reminder of company policy is unlikely to deliver meaningful, cultural change.

“This widely embraced development model doesn’t acknowledge that organizations are systems of interacting elements: Roles, responsibilities, and relationships are defined by organizational structure, processes, leadership styles, people’s professional and cultural backgrounds, and HR policies and practices. And it doesn’t recognize that all those elements together drive organizational behavior and performance. If the system does not change, it will not support and sustain individual behavior change—indeed, it will set people up to fail.[7]”

– Kegan and Lahey, Immunity to Change

Workshops are a great start, but an individual workshop doesn’t hold the promise of lasting cultural change. Continuous improvement takes continuous effort that one workshop can’t be expected to deliver on its own.

Use learning journeys to develop complex and interrelated skills, invest in personal and professional development, build trust and comfort with experimentation within and across teams, create openness to new mindsets and ways of working, and prepare individuals to support organizational transformation.

Seven Steps to Design a Learning Journey in Your Organization:

1.     Understand organizational goals. A unique benefit of offering a learning journey inside of an organization is that it can be customized and designed for the organization and the results you want to achieve.

2.    Research, design, and empower organizations to understand what their stakeholders and customers care about in order to create meaningful content for a learning journey.

3.    Design a pilot and invite high-performing teams that are already inclined to new ways of working to be the first cohort.

4.    Recruit support from managers and leaders. Involving managers and leaders creates more people who are invested in the success of the learning journey.

5.    Get feedback from learners and their managers both during and after the pilot. 

6.    Iterate on the design of the learning journey by incorporating feedback along the way.

7.    Continue to look for ways to improve the learning journey after each delivery to ensure it is meeting the needs of participants and the organization.

Reach out to us to talk about designing organizational transformation with learning journeys.

Credits and Sources

Contributing authors: Sylvia Raskin, Lauren Broomall

Editor: Peter Moon

Originally written in February 2019

Revised in July 2020

[1] Schrader, M. B., Kotter, J. P., & Buckingham, M. (2016, September 09). Why Leadership Training Fails-and What to Do About It. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it

[2] Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

[3] Gallup Inc., 2013. State of the American Workplace, Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders Report.

[4] Schrader, M. B., Kotter, J. P., & Buckingham, M. (2016, September 09). Why Leadership Training Fails-and What to Do About It. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it

[5] Beer, R. E. (2015, July 13). Why Change Programs Don't Produce Change. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/1990/11/why-change-programs-dont-produce-change

[6] Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

[7] Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.