February 10, 2025

Enabling Continuous Learning: A Practical Guide

By Leah Brown

Illustrations of a mad in a tie holding a clipboard. His hand is outstreched, holding a star. He is surround by image os learning and success.

As we discussed in our previous post, an organization’s ability to learn continuously is more than just a nice thing to have—it’s a critical competitive advantage.

As Mark Schwartz argues in The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy, successful organizations don’t just encourage learning—they systematically embed it into their operational fabric through what he calls “learning bureaucracy.”

As Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear note in their award-winning book Wiring the Winning Organization, the most successful organizations create the conditions in which people can solve difficult problems and bring new insights into practice quickly and effectively. That is, leaders can wire their organization for success by not just encouraging but enabling continuous learning.

Let’s dive into some tips on how to enable continuous learning in your organization.

Building the Right Environment

1. Protected Time and Space

According to research presented in the guidance paper “How to Thrive (or Fail) in Building a Learning Culture,” leaders must provide both time and physical space for learning to occur. This means:

Dedicated time blocks for learning activities (like Google’s famous 20% time).
Physical or virtual spaces conducive to collaboration and experimentation.
Clear signals that using this time/space for learning is encouraged, not penalized.

A cautionary tale from the guidance paper describes an organization that invested heavily in innovation centers with design-thinking tools and collaboration areas. Despite the investment, employees avoided using these spaces because taking time for learning was politically seen as not doing “real work.” The lesson? Both space and cultural permission are essential.

In Sooner Safer Happier, Jonathan Smart and his coauthors warn against creating “learning bubbles” or silos where knowledge gets trapped within teams or departments. To prevent this, organizations need robust systems for sharing learning:

Shared documentation platforms that are easily searchable.
Regular cross-team learning sessions.
Communities of practice around specific domains.
Mechanisms for capturing and sharing lessons learned.
Clear processes for transferring knowledge when team members change roles.

Toyota, as described in Wiring the Winning Organization, provides an excellent example through their systematic approach to sharing learning across teams. When one team discovers a better way of working, they have specific processes to ensure that learning spreads throughout the organization.

Making Learning Systematic

Mark Schwartz argues in The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy that organizations need to go beyond just encouraging learning—they need to systematically embed it into their operational fabric. Here are practical approaches:

Build Learning Checkpoints Into Regular Work

Brief retrospectives after each significant piece of work
Regular team learning reviews
“Pre-mortems” before starting new initiatives
Structured debriefs after incidents or failures

Create Learning Feedback Loops

Automated testing that provides immediate feedback
Monitoring systems that highlight areas for improvement
Regular customer feedback sessions
Metrics that show the impact of learning initiatives

Enable Cross-Pollination

Rotate team members across different projects
Create cross-functional teams
Hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions
Build mentorship programs

Tools and Technologies

Several tools can help enable continuous learning:

Wiki platforms
Internal blogs
Video sharing platforms
Collaborative documentation tools

Communication and Collaboration

Chat platforms with good search capabilities
Virtual whiteboarding tools
Screen sharing and recording tools
Project management platforms with good visibility

Learning Management

Learning management systems
Skills tracking tools
Certification platforms
Mentorship matching systems

Measuring Learning Impact

Traditional metrics like training hours completed don’t capture real learning impact. As demonstrated in Sooner Safer Happier, organizations should focus on outcome-based measures. As stated in the book:

“A focus on output, rather than outcomes, guides behavior away from continuous learning, reflection, and adaptation…In a learning organization, continuous learning happens at the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level at the same time. The absence of any of these layers prevents the creation of a learning organization and keeps knowledge siloed inside learning bubbles. Focusing on outcomes with nested learning loops promotes organization learning and continuous improvement.”

Barclays provides a compelling example. As documented in Sooner Safer Happier, when they shifted focus to measuring actual business outcomes, they saw dramatic improvements: lead times decreased by two-thirds, throughput tripled, and incident rates fell by a factor of twenty.

Getting Started

Begin with these concrete steps:

1. Audit your current learning environment

Where does knowledge sharing happen now?
What barriers exist to learning?
What tools are already available?

2. Start small

Choose one team as a pilot
Implement basic learning practices
Measure results
Use lessons learned to expand to other teams

3. Build momentum

Share early successes
Celebrate learning moments
Address barriers as they arise
Continuously gather feedback and adjust

The key is moving beyond just encouraging learning to actually enabling it through concrete systems, tools, and practices. As Kim and Spear emphasize in Wiring the Winning Organization, leaders must create the conditions where continuous learning becomes a natural part of how work gets done.

Remember: the goal isn’t to create perfect learning systems from the start, but to begin building the infrastructure that makes continuous learning possible and practical.

Next week, we’ll explore how leaders can model and encourage these learning behaviors throughout their organizations.

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

1 Comment

Anonymous Feb 14, 2025 3:31 pm
This is a great set of steps and planning factors for an organization of continuous learning. I love the closing section and the mention that it is not about being perfect but setting up the infrastructure that makes learning possible and practical. #CulturalPermission!
Reply

with Andrew Davis and Steve Pereira

with Dominica DeGrandis

with Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais

September 23-25, 2025

February 26, 2025

June 4, 2025

By Gene Kim

By Dr. André Martin

Enabling Continuous Learning: A Practical Guide