Agulhas' lessons on training partnerships provides a taste of what we’ve learned about training people who work in highly complex, politicised environments, and about building a culture of learning that outlasts any single programme.
Agulhas has been a long-term learning partner to UK government departments, arm’s-length bodies, and cross-Whitehall funds. Over the past five years, we’ve trained more than 1,000 staff in international and complex programme management, and in that time, we’ve watched what we teach shift constantly, as guidance, policy and priorities are consistently rearranged in a turbulent world. But some things hold steady. What follows is a taste of what we’ve learned about training people who work in highly complex, politicised environments, and about building a culture of learning that outlasts any single programme.
The term ‘innovation’ is used a lot but hardly ever defined. For us, innovation in training means something simple: using a method that’s less traditional, genuinely new, or designed for one sector and translated appropriately into another.
Scenario-based learning, immersive audio-visual material, role play and other highly participatory techniques can reinvigorate a training session and keep learners engaged. Complex contexts don’t necessarily require complex methods; learners are often better served when trainers use their experience, connection with learners’ contexts, and ingenuity to apply simple methods well.
Working with a client, rather than for one, gets the best results for learners. A learning programme becomes a learning partnership at the point where everyone is invested in meeting learner needs as well as meeting strategic outcomes. Shared delivery, debriefs, responsibilities and goals build a relationship of trust that runs both ways. And when a client trusts its learning experts, delivery can adapt in real time, and quality can improve.
Like ‘innovation’, ‘agility’ is invoked far more often than it’s practised. We’ve found an agile approach doesn’t mean scrambling to adapt retrospectively when something changes dramatically. It means expecting continuous, gradual change and designing for it from the start.
Build a contract with enough flexibility for priorities to move and plans to be reshaped, and you get a learning model that’s adaptive by design. Requests for deep dives on particular topics, or more emphasis on pressing issues, can readily be incorporated. Lessons can adjust session by session, day by day, not just at the scheduled review points.
In politically complex and sometimes unstable contexts, it’s broadly accepted there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to programme management. The same is true of learning. With the trust of a partner, an adaptive-by-design approach, and innovation used if and when the context calls for it, you can design a programme that meets learners where they are. When off-the-shelf won’t cut it, bespoke training leaves room for the challenges people actually face in their roles.
‘Sustainability’ is a word that often gets forgotten at the start and panicked over at the end. Sustainable learning is one of the most important parts of any programme, and one of the hardest to get right. We’ve found that participatory approaches are the ones that are most likely to make learning stick: fewer presentations and more chances to apply theory in practical exercises. Peer-to-peer learning is key, because no one person knows everything, but a group usually holds the answer between them; combined with specialist input when it’s needed, which sometimes means bringing in the people who wrote the guidance. Get a whole organisation, department or network invested in a programme and new skills are far more likely to spread, because people will always sooner ask a colleague than open the handbook.
This is where it helps to be clear about what we’re trying to build. Learning, in a working organisation, runs along a progression. It starts with data. It moves to understanding the relationships, seeing how factors interact. Give that data structure and context, and it becomes information. Grasp what the information means for a decision and you’ve reached understanding of its significance. Synthesise all of it into something you can act on, and you have knowledge. That knowledge then gets put into action, applied to programme choices, policy and partnerships. And at the far end sits ‘know-how’: understanding so deeply embedded in how an organisation works, that it shapes behaviour automatically and consistently, without anyone reaching for the manual.
Much in-work training stops at providing people with information; what people need to know. It loads people up with content and assumes the rest will follow. We’ve learned it rarely does. What truly matters is putting that information to use as knowledge-into-action. The point worth holding onto is that transforming information into knowledge, and then know-how, is fundamentally a challenge of people and culture, not technology or documentation. Writing the guidance doesn’t mean it changes what people do on a Tuesday afternoon under pressure. Having a system doesn’t mean anyone uses it.
That’s the case for real-world, scenario-based training. You can give someone information in a presentation, but know-how is only built by doing: by putting people in situations close enough to the real thing so that they have to apply what they know. Scenarios, role play and practical application are how knowledge crosses the gap into action, and how repeated action settles into know-how. The aim isn’t to transfer content. It’s to change behaviour, durably, so that a considered, proportionate and effective response is instinctive, even when the guidance is forgotten and the context has moved on.
It’s no coincidence that Agulhas’s full name is Agulhas Applied Knowledge.
