Tag: learning culture

Credible knowers
“Some individuals are acknowledged as credible knowers within global health, while the knowledge held by others may be given less credibility.” – (Himani Bhakuni and Seye Abimbola in The Lancet, 2021)

“Immunization Agenda 2030” or “IA2030” is a strategy that was unanimously adopted at the World Health Assembly in 2020. The global community that funds and supports vaccination globally is now exploring what it needs to do differently to transform the Agenda’s goal of saving 50 million lives by the end of the decade into reality. Last year, over 10,000 national and sub-national health staff from 99 countries pledged to achieve this goal when they joined the Geneva Learning Foundation’s first IA2030 learning and action research programme. Discover what we learned in Year 1… Learn more about the Foundation’s platform and network… What is the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030)?

In global health, personal experience is assumed to be anecdotal, the lowest form of evidence. We are learning, as one of many organizations contributing to Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030), to reconsider this assumption.

An ongoing ‘consultative engagement’ in which a group of global experts has been listening and learning with health professionals working in districts and facilities provides a practical example that changing how we know can lead to significant change in what we do – and what results and outcomes may come of it.

On 12 December 2022, the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) hosted a special event with the Immunization Agenda 2030 Working Group on Immunization for Primary Healthcare and Universal Health Coverage, which includes representatives from leading global agencies that support immunization efforts worldwide.

Over 4,000 people participated. Most were health workers from districts and health facilities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the run-up to the event, they shared 139 context-specific experiences about their daily work – challenges, lessons learned, and successes – in integrating immunization as part of primary health care practices. The live event opened with such stories and then transitioned into a formal presentation of the framework. This helped everyone make sense of both the “why” and the “how” of the new framework.

However, this was not the first time that the global group was in listening mode. In fact, the new framework was the capstone in a year-long ‘consultative engagement’ that had begun at Teach to Reach 4 on 10 December 2021, attended by 5,906 health professionals who deliver vaccines in districts and facilities. (Teach to Reach is the Foundation’s networking event series, during which participants meet to share experience and global experts listen and learn. You can view the sessions on primary health care here and here.)

Global health organizations often issue new frameworks and guidance, sometimes accompanied by funding for capacity development. However, dissemination often relies upon conventional high-cost, low-volume approaches, such as face-to-face training or information transmission through digital channels, even though fairly definitive evidence suggests severe limitations to their effectiveness.

To address these challenges, the Geneva Learning Foundation and its partners are launching the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub, a platform for sharing local expertise and experience across geographical and health system level boundaries. The goal is to research and implement new ways to convert this knowledge into action, results and, ultimately, impact.

The Double Loop, a monthly insights newsletter edited by Ian Steed and Charlotte Mbuh, is one component of this Hub. The newsletter asked questions to all 4,000 participants of the December 2022 event, 30 days and 90 days later, to gather feedback on the new framework.

Here are the questions we asked three months on:
1. Since you discovered the Framework for Action: Immunization for Primary Health Care, have you referred to this framework at least once? If you have not used it, can you tell us why? How could this Framework be improved to be more useful to you?
2. If you have referred to this Framework, tell us what did you do with the information in the Framework? How did your colleagues respond to the Framework?
3. How did this Framework make a difference in solving a real-world problem you are facing? How did things turn out? Explain what you are doing differently to integrate health services, empower people and communities, and lead multisectoral policy and action.
Within days, we received hundreds of answers:
- Some health professionals apologized, often citing field work, emergency response, and other pressing priorities. This can help better understand the strengths and weaknesses of learning culture (the capacity for change), which the Foundation’s Insights Unit has been researching in the field of immunization since 2020.
- Others praised the framework in generic terms (“It’s a great framework”), but did not share any specific examples of actual review, use, or application. Some speak to sometimes peculiar practices of accountability in immunization, where top-down hierarchies remain the norm and provide incentive to always provide positive accounts and responses, whatever the reality may be.
- A few respondents candidly explained that the Framework does not fit their local needs, as it was primarily designed for national planners. This begs the question of how such local adaptation and tailoring might happen.
- Finally, we discovered credible, specific narratives of actual use, including adaptation at the local levels. These provide fascinating examples of how a global guidance, developed through a year-long consultative engagement, is actually being translated into practice.
Our Insights Unit is analyzing these narratives, as this exercise is helping us learn how to scale the IA2030 Movement Knowledge to Action Hub to involve the more than 10,000 health professionals who joined the Movement in its first year.

The Double Loop regularly shares feedback from its readers as “insights on sights”. You can already read a sample of responses about the framework.

On 31 March 2023, our team will meet with the IA2030 Working Group to share and discuss the insights gathered through this process.

The Working Group has also changed through this process. In January 2023, it invited its first sub-national member, Dr. María Monzón from Argentina, who brings her own professional experience and expertise from running a primary health care center. She will also serve as the voice of over 10,000 Movement Leaders, immunization staff from 99 countries and all levels of the health system, who met and have been intensively collaborating for over a year in the Foundation’s IA2030 programme.

Surprisingly, one global immunization technical expert shared his concern that thousands of professionals learning from each other to strengthen their resolve and action might amount to “just a bunch of hot air”. This will only be the case if the global immunization community fails to respond and support, even as it proclaims a genuine willingness to recognize local voices as credible knowers. In another blog post, I’ll share some thoughts on what it might take to rise together.
March 21, 2023
Hot fudge sundae

Through their research on informal and incidental learning in the workplace, Karen Watkins and Victoria Marsick have produced one of the strongest evidence-based framework on how to strengthen learning culture to drive performance.

Here, Karen Watkins shares an anecdote from a study of learning culture in which two teams from the same company both engaged in efforts to reward creative and innovative ideas and projects. However, one team generated far more ideas than the other. You won’t believe what turned out to be the cause of the drastically disparate outcomes.

I recorded Karen via Skype while she was helping me to perform my first learning practice audit, a mixed methods diagnostic that can provide an organization with new, practical ways to recognize, foster, and augment the learning that matters the most.

Recognizing that the majority of learning, problem-solving, idea generation, and innovation do not happen in the training room – physical or digital–, is a key step in our approach to help organizations execute change.

Karen is a founding Trustee of the Geneva Learning Foundation.

March 16, 2018
How do we measure the impact of informal and incidental learning on organizational performance?
Evidence from learning science clearly identifies how to strengthen learning culture in ways that will drive performance. However, in a recent study conducted by Learning Strategies International (LSi), we quickly found limitations and gaps in the data available from the organization examined, despite the best effort by the organization’s staff to answer our questions and requests.

We found two gaps that needed to be addressed before the most effective approaches to develop capabilities could be applied usefully – and their impact measured:
1. The gap between a commitment in principle to learning and skepticism about its actual value. (This gap surprised us.)
2. Gaps in data and reporting needed to measure internal learning (and how to improve it).
We believe that the first gap (skepticism about the value of learning) is the direct result of the second (lack of measurement).

Without a measure of its impact on performance, internal (staff) learning is likely to be seen as a “nice-to-have” rather than a strategic priority.

Measurement is needed to demonstrate the correlation between internal learning and performance.

Measurement in learning is notoriously difficult. We recognise that although internal learning is critically important, many other variables determine organizational performance.

It would be wonderful if it were possible to draw a straight line from internal learning to specific business outcomes, but it is not.

Recognizing the value of informal learning further complicates measurement: self-directed learning, coaching, mentoring, and other informal learning strategies have this embedded capacity to allow us to learn much more than we intended or expected at the outset.

This makes such learning more difficult to measure, but far more valuable to the participant, team, and organization. This is why we recommended:
- the use of knowledge, mission, and financial performance of an organization or network as key metrics to correlate with learning culture; and
- an evidence-based approach (already deployed in over 8,000 organisations and adapted by LSi for global, complex humanitarian networks) to measure these three performance variables and correlate them to the dimensions of learning culture.
Featured image: Submarine control panel. Bowfin Submarine Museum, Pearl Harbor. Personal collection.
February 13, 2018
The future of learning that could have been

In June 2017, the Institute’s president, together with its Chief Learning Officer (CLO), convened an all-hands-on-deck meeting to announce the Institute’s commitment to strengthening its learning culture of innovation and change through an innovative, evidence-based internal learning strategy. Staff were invited to nominate and then elect representatives to the Learning & Development Committee (LDC), mandated with the challenge of ingraining learning “karma in the walls and halls” as key to delivering on its promise to prepare a new generation for the coming humanitarian challenges.

In July, the Institute performed its first benchmark of learning culture and performance. This demonstrated that staff learning is key to mission, financial, and knowledge performance (ie, to delivering results). This benchmark was followed by a learning practice audit in August that woke both managers and staff to their existing strengths and the amazing ways in which they were already continually learning at the point of work.

By the end of 2017, in response to this evidence, DFID and other donors agreed that 5% of budgets be used to support internal learning. In 2018, the LDC’s first elected chair, supported by senior management, staff, and managers, began investing in learning events that recognised and reward on-the-job innovative ideas, problem-solving and significant break-throughs. Staff rapidly learned to rely on these new approaches rather than costly, formal training.

Invited to participate in these learning events, partners expressed growing interest in adopting this methodology to their own contexts, significantly raising the profile of the Institute as an innovator and sector leader for learning.

Staff capabilities grew rapidly and engagement soared in 2018, as managers worked with their teams to define one development objective as part of their performance objectives. Each member of staff added to their personal learning dashboards the activities (both formal and informal) that reflected the diversity and productivity of their learning practices. People inspired each other to go further, sharing and collaborating in new ways. Staff were encouraged to take on stretch assignments, with the assurance that they would no longer be penalised for failure.

By 2019, retention remained impressively above the sector average, as managers adopted the practice of “stay interviews” to mitigate turnover, working within a strong HR system that recognised the need for clear career progression pathways that reward positive behaviours and leadership for learning.

Given the strength of HR and learning systems, this rapid growth in capabilities and leadership was visible to all, shared internally and externally, and directly benefitted the Institute’s partners. High-performing teams were recognised and rewarded during memorable all-staff learning events. External partners asked to join these events, as many of the innovative practices and outcomes were directly relevant to them.

Starting in 2018, new staff reported feeling positively transformed by their induction into the Institute. Formal onboarding was limited to essential information found in the new shelf of crowd-sourced, curated resources for staff learning. Instead, new people were quickly assigned a guide – both a peer and a mentor – from another team or centre. They were invited not just to consume content about the Institute, but to feed back on what they need to function effectively.

By the end of 2019, the LDC repeated its learning culture and performance measurement. The results highlighted a dramatic improvement in performance correlated with the growing strengths of its learning culture.

By 2020, the Institute was recognised by its donors and partners as a model for how to organise and strengthen staff learning to drive performance. Institute branches worldwide reported a growing number of requests from partners – humanitarian organisations but also firms from technology and other industries – who, in the past, may have been reluctant consumers of its learning products. They began to request that the Institute advise them on how to adapt this new internal learning strategy to their own context. Conversely, demand for high-cost, low volume formal training (both digital and face-to-face) diminished as partners begin to recognise that the most significant methods to improve preparedness and response for humanitarian crises are to be found in the day-to-day activities of their staff, volunteers, and the communities they serve.

Image: Painting at Trigonos (25 January 2017). Personal collection.

February 13, 2018
Dialogue and inquiry

We learn from each other through dialogue and inquiry. We are excited that we can participate in a rich, diverse world of different perspectives and opinions. Conversation, as George Siemens says, is the “ultimate personalization experience. We ask questions and offer views based on our own conceptions. We personalize our knowledge when we socialize” (Siemens 2006:42).

Newcomers may find dialogue and inquiry to be lacking, but this may be in part that they have yet to learn the unwritten rules of our learning culture. These unwritten (tacit) yet sometimes rigid rules of engagement frame how we may respond to each other’s knowledge needs, especially in group contexts. Confusion or even anger may result when breaking this culture of consensus.

In formal settings, our organizational culture of consensus prevails. Disagreements are seldom expressed overtly. Decisions may be made in informal settings, and meetings then serve to make public what has already been agreed upon.

The task orientation dictated by our learning culture and by the pressure of workload and line management expectations also leads to suspicion when one asks too many questions.

Siemens, G., 2006. Knowing knowledge.

Photo: Conversations.1 Stills from a music video for The Hole Punch Generation (Gwen Vanhee/flickr.com)

March 31, 2015
7 actions imperatives of learning strategy
The learning strategy recasts the evidence-based seven dimensions of learning culture (used to measure learning culture and performance) as action imperatives. In order to improve performance through learning, the organization needs to take specific action to:
1. Create continuous learning opportunities
2. Promote inquiry and dialogue
3. Encourage collaboration and team learning
4. Empower people toward a collective vision
5. Connect the organization to its environment
6. Establish systems to capture and share learning
7. Provide strategic leadership for learning
For each action imperative, analysis is grounded in the narrative of individual learning practices reconciled with best practice drawn from the vast research corpus on learning culture and performance. Patterns emerging at the juncture between narrative and evidence may then be formulated as general and specific recommendations, while carefully considering feasibility and risk in the organizational context and environment.

Photo: Pinwheel tessellation, version 2, reverse, backlit (Eric Gjerde/flickr.com)
March 17, 2015
Make a wish

Is the CLO really the ‘fifth wheel’ in the organizational strategy wagon? Learning leaders tend to roll their eyes upward in sour-faced agreement about ending up as an after thought – after strategic alignment has been completed everywhere else in the organization, or being considered as a support service to enable and implement rather than a partner. So, what to wish for?

First, I would wish for an organization that is mission-driven. This is what everyone wishes for, of course, so let me try to be specific. The mission should inspire, giving everyone something to strive for, to encourage people and structure to reinvent themselves to face global complexity – with clarity that reinvention is a constant, not a one-off. It would require strong leadership, not command-and-control, but modelling the values and practices of the organization and the acceptance that uncertainty requires calculated risk-taking, now and tomorrow. Such distributed leadership requires a strong, vocal chief executive attuned to the hyper-connected, perception-driven world we live, and can be brought to life only by a talent and learning team that excels at hiring, developing and retaining people who don’t fit traditional profiles, who recognize misfits as potential superheroes. The people function needs to be fast – keep a potential candidate waiting for months, and she’s gone.

So, what does such a profile look like? We all recognize that most of the learning that matters is embedded into work… and then go back to organizing workshops, building online courses, and demanding resources so that people can stop their work, go off and study. Therefore, unless she is a digital native, our L&D misfit cum superhero sidekick may have to unlearn her own vestigial L&D workshop and training culture and its overemphasis on formal training – and figure out how the lead the organization through that same process. How? Like an anthropologist, she should be able to unpack, read, and decipher the organization’s learning culture, invent new ideas to capture and share informal and tacit learning, and engineer embedded, adaptive systems to institutionalize these ideas. Immerse, observe, and learn to connect the dots between learning culture, strategy, and mission, knowing that culture drives performance. Through this process, iterate ideas, experiments, and pilots, and do it fast enough and often enough to collapse the distinction between ‘stuff you try’ and operations – stretching the organization’s knowledge performance a little more each time. Think in the yoga of organizational development: stretch and stretch, but accept that you won’t get there the first time. Accept what is ‘good enough’, knowing that you get to try again, and that what is perfect now would not be so tomorrow, anyway. This circles back to leadership for learning – with the learning leader as sidekick, depending on the vision and the will of the chief executive to bring such a vision to life.

The mantra is to maximize efficiency and effectiveness to become a strategic business partner. On efficiency, technology’s economy of effort removes the necessity of distinguishing between internal staff development and the needs of your external audiences (customers). This is key to working frugally with minimal human and financial resources. However, the organization should be skeptical of claims that efficiency or scale trumps effectiveness. Witness the slow agony of the LMS, the massively profitable industry of clunky content containers that require massive investment but depend on transmissive, behaviorist pedagogical models of the past, fail even at the purpose of compliance for which they are designed, and seldom deliver tangible knowledge or performance outcomes.

I believe that it is reasonable to proclaim that in our knowledge-based economy, an organization’s ability to learn is key to both its survival and growth. However, this raises expectations about the relevance of the learning function, its outcomes and return on investment. And yet, even with perfect alignment, we are adding small, single-digit percentage points to performance and business results that, in many contexts, will not be measurable at the time when they matter most, if ever. Here is how Doug Lynch sums it up:

The news isn’t all bad. The theory of human capital development suggests that if we develop people, they will become more productive. The problem is, empirical research suggests between 66 and 80 percent of the variance in performance is not captured by human capital development models. At best, we are able to impact 34 percent of the performance variance. And yet, the space seems to operate like learning is an elixir, curing any ill.

The elixir fallacy results in part from our own legitimate search for relevance, alignment, and results. At the end of the day, you will be asked to “land it”, to demonstrate with fireworks and marching band how learning altered the organization’s DNA and made a difference. But what if that takes time, and looks more like a process of grains of sand washing up on the beach rather than a maelstrom of disruption? What if the part of L&D practice that matters is really, as Karen Watkins calls it, the “little R&D”, the unimpressive, slow-and-gradual process of trying new things, experimenting, getting it wrong and then right…?

So, the last item on my wish list is for an organization that acknowledges that strengthening learning culture requires a mixed methods approach, alternating between slow, gradual change-over-time that leverages smart technology and pedagogy that can impact everyone in the organization with shock-and-awe leadership and high-potential development, action learning, wicked problem solving, innovation tournaments, and other highly visible acts of disruption to shake up business as usual.

Photo: Speaking of effigies (Dayna Bateman/Flickr).

December 9, 2014
Bite-sized update: higher education in fragile contexts, discovery without analytics, and the epistemology of learning culture

As much as I wish this blog could document my reflections as I read, research, speak, and listen… it cannot. Knowledge is a process, not a product, in this VUCA world we live in. I know that I am doing too much, too fast, to be ale to process everything. Accepting this is part and parcel of navigating the knowledge landscape. So here is an incomplete round-up with some schematic thoughts about where I’m headed.

Higher education in fragile contexts as a wicked problem: Most ed tech conferences I’ve attended are mostly male, and tend to focus on the education of those least-in-need. Inzone’s workshop on education in fragile contexts was at the other end of that spectrum, with a diverse team of scholars and practitioners coming together to tackle wicked learning problems such as how to ensure access to education for Syrian refugees in Turkey (access), what to do when refugee camp conditions are such that the committed Jesuit educators who staff the education program burn out after a few days or months, how to adapt courses to learners who lack resources or basic skills (quality), and how to teach 21st century knowledge skills (spanning the range from keyboard typing to critical thinking) in such contexts. Workshop organizer, InZone director, educator, and interpreter (that’s a lot of hats) Barbara Moser-Mercer is doing an amazing job of building meaningful connections and collaboration with other teams from universities and international organizations. This is what a 21st century learning network should look like.

What use is discovery without analytics? Wednesday evening, I’ll be one of a jury of twelve for Semantico’s thought leadership dinner in London, which the digital publishing company describes as “as a way of bringing together leading influencers from the scholarly publishing ecosystem to debate a relevant topic over fine wine and food.” Sounds tasty. I read this as the question of epistemology: how do we know what we know about how people discover knowledge (packaged in containers like publications)? Are the analytics you get from publishing (number of downloads, time spent engaging with content) sufficient when education-based approaches can reveal so much more about what people do with our content?

Learning culture as strategy: The more time I spend with organizations and teams investigating their learning culture, the more it feels like a methodology that starts with diagnosis (measuring learning culture using Karen Watkins’s and Victoria Marsick’s DLOQ instrument) and then deepens individual and team understanding of the learning practices that foster continuous learning and connections with others. Asking questions about how we learn (beyond formal training) makes it obvious how little we reflect on experience. The lesson learned is what we tend to keep, rather than the journey that got us there. Without reflection, this is the Achilles’s heel of learning by doing. Epistemology again. The payoff when you figure this out is that actioning learning culture drives knowledge performance.

Knowledge performance: What is the relationship between individual creativity and an organization’s ability to learn? “We should just test people’s IQ and hire only the most intelligent ones,” is probably one of the silliest statements I’ve heard in the recent past blurted out by one of the smartest people (and dear friend) that I know. Leave aside the fiery debates about the biases of IQ measurements. Just consider that an organization’s ability to learn (no, organizations do not have brains but organizations that do not adapt and change, die) walls in your ability as an individual to exercise and productively apply your creativity, serendipity, and invention. In other words, no matter how smart you are, if your organization has low knowledge performance, you may come up with the most brilliant idea, but it is unlikely to translate into practice.

Photo: Algerian patisserie from La bague de Kenza (Paris), a personal favorite.

December 2, 2014
Learn and change

A learning organization is an organization that has an enhanced capacity to learn and change.

Watkins and Marsick dimensions of a learning organization

Source: Watkins, K.E., Milton, J., Kurz, D., 2009. Diagnosing the learning culture in public health agencies. International Journal of Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning 2.

May 24, 2014
Community health into the scalable, networked future of learning

Preface to the IFRC Global Health Team’s Training Guidelines (2013) by Reda Sadki

“At the heart of a strong National Society” explains Strategy 2020, “is its nationwide network of locally organized branches or units with members and volunteers who have agreed to abide by the Fundamental Principles and the statutes of their National Society.” To achieve this aim, National Societies share a deeply-rooted culture of face-to-face (FTF) learning through training. This local, community-based Red Cross Red Crescent culture of learning is profoundly social: by attending a “training” at their local branch, a newcomer meets other like-minded people who share their thirst for learning to make a better future. It is also peer education: trainers and other educators are often volunteers themselves, living in the same communities as their trainees.

Although some National Societies have been early adopters of educational technology to deliver distance learning since the early 1990s – and IFRC’s Learning network has scaled up global educational opportunities since 2009 –, such initiatives do not appear to have changed the local, community-based, face-to-face training processes that start in the branch-as-classroom.

Quality in the history of Red Cross Red Crescent learning, education and training (LET) has been based on this combination of practical knowledge you can use, building social ties through face-to-face contact, and leveraging the power of peer education to learn by doing. No other humanitarian organization has ‘brick-and-mortar’ structures on a massive scale to embed public health education in each and every community.

The global volume of health training delivered by the Red Cross Red Crescent is indeed massive. For example, every year, 17 million trainees learn first aid skills face-to-face programs run by National Societies. These trainees then use their first aid skills to provide assistance to 46 million people.

In 2011, IFRC’s research into the social and economic value of its more than 13 million global volunteer workforce concluded that, while many volunteers work across multiple fields, the most volunteers – and the greatest proportion of value – are related to health promotion (IFRC 2011:7). Although the Red Cross and Red Crescent is “known mostly for its role in disasters”, this study highlighted that “the area in which most volunteers are engaged is health.” (IFRC 2011:8)

The social value of the health services delivered by Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers is particularly poignant in the context of a global, critical health workforce shortage. However, the recognition of our unique volunteer workforce is premised on our continued ability to ensure that they continually improve skills, knowledge and competencies to contribute to strengthening health systems.

In 2012, IFRC’s secretariat spent 18,485,821 CHF on a budget line titled “workshops and training”, roughly equivalent to 360,000 hours of in-person training – nearly a thousand hours per day. Every subject matter expert in IFRC’s Global Health Team includes the delivery of face-to-face training in his or her work plan, and many also develop training materials in the form of printed manuals or, more recently, online courses for IFRC’s Learning platform.

With the publication of these guidelines, the Global Health Team aims to recognize the significance of the pedagogical dimension of these training activities as the key determinant of quality in training. Indeed, it is only with a clear framework for how we teach and how we learn that we may know how to measure the learning outcomes, impact and effectiveness of such activities.

These Guidelines for face-to-face training provide detailed instructions first in how to assess learning needs to determine whether these can be addressed by face-to-face training. Only once this is established should training be developed using a rigorous methodology based on available evidence of how adult volunteers learn in Red Cross Red Crescent contexts. Last but not least, training activities should be evaluated not only with respect to improved knowledge and skills, but also improved performance for both the individual and the organization.

By adopting an approach based on needs analysis, these guidelines also highlight the potential for innovative approaches to training that leverage the amazing economy of effort achieved by appropriate use of educational technology and broadened approaches that synergize learning and education with training. A paradigm change is needed for training if it is to remain relevant to delivery science, primarily because of the changing nature of knowledge in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

In 1986, according to research by Robert Kelly of Carnegie-Mellon University, 75% of the knowledge needed to do your job was stored in your brain. By 2006, Kelly’s research found that this percentage had dropped to 10%. 90% of the knowledge we use depends on our connections with others. This is in part why, more than ever before, most of what people do in their jobs is currently acquired through experience, regardless of the amount of formal training received. If learning is less and less about recalling information, what then should training focus on?

This dilemma is compounded by the diminishing half-life of knowledge. As learning theorist George Siemens explains, “courses are fairly static, container-views of knowledge. Knowledge is dynamic—changing hourly, daily. [This] requires an understanding of the nature of the half-life of knowledge in [a field, to select] the right tools to keep content current for the learners.” (Siemens 2006:55). How do we train when knowledge flows too fast for processing or interpreting?

If improving performance of health workers in a rapidly-changing world rested solely on more structured, better-designed curricula, this would primarily reveal the underlying assumption or notion that the world has not really changed. Attempting to do more of what has been done in the past is not the answer. We need to do new things in new ways.

As acknowledged in IFRC’s Framework for building strong National Societies (2011), “in a world of changing needs, expectations and opportunities, our knowledge, skills, and competences must keep up to date to meet new demands. We need to address familiar problems by being more proficient in applying what works as well as by using the innovations and insights from new research and technologies that have the potential to bring better results.”

Traditional approaches are unlikely to be scalable. With 13.6 million Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers, no classroom is large enough. No individual is smart enough to tame the knowledge flows, no intervention is complete enough, no training program lasts long enough, and no solution is global enough.

The skills and processes that will make us health workers of tomorrow are not yet embedded in our educational structures. We do know, however, much of what is needed: The capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

These guidelines recognize the value of existing local knowledge, practices and understanding, and that incorporating them into the learning experience is a key challenge. Our local branches form a vast, global network of brick-and-mortar structures which can be used to anchor public health activities, but they currently reside at the bottom of each National Society’s top-down vertical pyramid. They are rarely linked to each other.

Strategy 2020 calls for IFRC to “draw inspiration from our shared history and tradition” while committing to finding creative, sustainable solutions to a changing world. Meeting the challenge in the future – to reinvent Red Cross Red Crescent health education in order to strengthen National Societies – may well depend on connecting branches to each other to extend our learning culture’s social, peer-based learning to form a vast, global knowledge community. In the 21st Century, such connections may no longer be a ‘nice-to-have’, and may well prove indispensable for anyone working for change at the community level, most obviously on global public health issues with local impact and consequences.

Branches connected to each other could support new forms of community-based public health practice in which local volunteers are linked to international delegates and public health and medical expertise in fluid, real-time, two-way knowledge conversations. Such networks will open new possibilities for a new learning system where community and global health workers create together, giving each other feedback (and even feedback on feedback), sharing their inspirations and discoveries. Within their knowledge communities, they will work at their own pace, according to their own interests and capabilities. They will use digital storytelling to explore and implement solutions, embracing complexity and adapting to volatility and uncertainty in ways that rapid health assessments, operational plans, and other current tools simply cannot. We will be lifelong learners, teaching each other practical skills and refining not only the methods but also the conduits for teaching and learning through constant practice.

These collaborative, flexible, motivating, participatory and supportive approaches are neither wishful thinking nor simply a nicer, kinder and gentler form of learning. Their pedagogical patterns closely emulate core competencies of twenty-first century humanitarian workers, who are expected to be able to manage complex crisscrossing knowledge flows, to work in networked configurations (rather than command-and-control structures), and to use participatory methodologies to partner with beneficiaries.

By asking questions about why we do training, by exploring why and how training can improve performance, these Guidelines represent a milestone on the road to the reinvention of the Red Cross Red Crescent delivery science that underpins how we service the health needs of vulnerable people.

Preface to the IFRC Global Health Team’s Training Guidelines (2013) by Reda Sadki

Image: Ancient Mayan port city of Tulum, Yucatán Peninsula. Personal collection.

October 12, 2013