How to Become an Agile Learner
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jnHow to Become an Agile Learner
Uploaded by
jnManaging Yourself
How
Learner to Become an Agile
by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis
November 23, 2023
Antonio Solano
Summary. Learning agility — the skill of learning from experiences so you can
succeed in new situations — is a much sought-after skill to create a flexible,
mobile, and resilient workforce. For example, a leader with learning agility can
successfully transfer their talents across different parts of an organization. And
individuals with high learning agility become the trusted “go-to” for high-profile
projects and high-impact positions. In this article, the authors explore what it
means to be an agile learner and outline several strategies for increasing your
learning agility. close
Learning agility is the skill of learning from experiences so you
can succeed in new situations. It means knowing what to do when
you haven’t done something before, and it’s increasingly
important as “squiggly,” non-linear careers marked with
unknowns are becoming everyone’s reality.
Agile learners can approach the uncertainty and change in their
roles and careers with confidence, knowing their insights and
talents will help them succeed in new situations. Research has
found that learning agility is a strong indicator of an individual’s
potential to succeed in their present and future job roles. As a
result, agile learners are magnets for more — more opportunities,
learning, and possibilities.
For organizations, learning agility is a much sought-after skill to
create a flexible, mobile, and resilient workforce. For example, a
leader with learning agility can successfully transfer their talents
across different parts of an organization. And individuals with
high learning agility become the trusted “go-tos” for high-profile
projects and high-impact positions. Here, we’ll explore what it
means to be an agile learner and outline several strategies for
increasing your learning agility.
The Foundation of an Agile Learning Skillset
There are three building blocks of learning agility:
Navigating newness
An agile learner can successfully navigate two different types of
newness: complex work with no blueprint and situations where
they have no previous experience. Where some people struggle
with the high levels of ambiguity that newness creates, agile
learners take advantage of the opportunity and succeed in
situations where other people might stall.
Understanding others
Agile learners are adept at empathizing with and even
anticipating different perspectives. By putting themselves in
other people’s shoes, they can connect dots, spot and resolve
potential conflicts, and zoom out to see the bigger picture. Rather
than waiting to be told a different point of view or that something
won’t work, agile learners seek out dissenting opinions and are
open-minded in their approach.
Self-awareness
Agile learners have high levels of self-awareness. They
understand their impact and seek insight on how they can
improve. They are specific about the support they need and
confident enough to ask for help from others so they can be at
their best. They see learning as a constant and are proactively
curious about the world around them, borrowing brilliance from
different people and places.
How to Assess Your Learning Agility
Ask yourself the following questions to get a sense of your current
learning agility:
Navigating newness
1. How often do I work on something for the first time?
2. When have I spent time in my courage zone (i.e., doing something
I find “scary”) over the past three months?
3. How do I respond when priorities and plans change without
warning?
Understanding others
1. Who do I have conversations with to learn about people and
teams I have limited knowledge of?
2. How confident am I in high-challenge conversations, where
people have different points of view?
3. How much cognitive diversity (i.e., people who bring a variety of
different experiences, perspectives, and methods) do I have in my
career community?
Self-awareness
1. How do I feel about asking for the help I need to succeed?
2. Where do my strengths have the most impact in the work that I
do?
3. How frequently do I ask for feedback on what I do well, and how I
could improve my impact?
How to Increase Your Learning Agility
Try these strategies to build your own foundation of learning
agility:
Navigating newness
Newness is never easy, as our brains prefer that we play it safe by
doing things we’ve done before. It can also be hard to see how to
use our skills successfully in situations that don’t feel familiar. We
rely on what we know as our source of value, rather than how we
use our knowledge to best effect in our organizations. Getting
better at working with how to transfer your knowledge in new
situations is an accelerator for learning agility. It means you can
make a positive impact on more people and in more places.
Start by “subbing” for a colleague or your manager at a meeting
where you’re not the subject matter expert. This is a safe way to
practice adopting a beginner’s mindset, where your starting point
is no knowledge.
Then, try identifying and leading ambitious experiments that
make you uncomfortable because of time or people pressure. For
example, maybe you’re going to try to produce something in a
month that would typically take twice that amount of time.
Experiments are a natural home for developing learning agility, as
they can act as a forcing function for fast learning.
Understanding others
It’s easy to become short-sighted by the demands of our day jobs.
By being laser-focused on our own world, we forget to consider
what matters to other teams or parts of our organization. This
means we miss out on valuable information and insight that
increases our learning agility.
Start by reflecting on your listening-to-talking ratio. When you’re
talking, you’re rarely learning — you’re telling other people what
you already know. By increasing our listening and decreasing how
much we talk, we create an easy opportunity for learning. Before a
meeting, write down your desired listening-to-talking ratio (e.g.,
60%/40%), then reflect on how you did right after the meeting.
Listening is one of the skills where we tend to overestimate our
capabilities, so don’t be surprised if you’re not where you want to
be. Even the intention to listen more will start to nudge you in the
right direction.
Then, try designing empathy experiences. An empathy
experience is putting yourself in other people’s shoes by being in
their world. This goes beyond having a catch-up with someone on
a different team and looks more like spending meaningful time
with someone to accelerate your understanding of their
opportunities and obstacles. You might attend a team’s weekly
meeting for a month or shadow a project on a few key days. Your
job during an empathy experience is to listen and learn. It’s a
high-investment and high-effort action but one that pays
dividends in accelerating your learning agility.
Self-awareness
What often gets in the way of developing self-awareness is not a
lack of drive to develop the skill, but a lack of clarity about what
needs to be done differently to become more self-aware. Creating
a habit of practicing some simple self-awareness actions can make
a significant difference to learning agility.
Start by knowing how you want to show up in situations that
require learning agility. What are three words you want people to
say about you in those meetings and moments? Perhaps you want
to be seen as confident, calm, and strategic. This gives you a
starting point for your intent (i.e., how you want to show up).
Then ask for feedback — for example, “How would you describe
my impact?” — to see whether your intent and impact overlap.
Identifying any gaps between your intent and impact will help
you be specific about the action you need to take to improve.
Next, try to learn — fast. Different and difficult situations are
prime time for learning agility to be developed. During these
times of high challenge, create a learn-fast mind map by
reflecting on three questions:
1. What strengths have been most useful for me today?
2. Who and what knowledge helped me succeed?
3. How could I improve my impact in this situation?
Your mind maps will offer you useful data for your development
and can also be a prompt for conversations with managers and
mentors about how to take your agility even further.
...
Learning agility is an essential skill for individuals and capability
for organizations, but it doesn’t happen by accident. To increase
your learning agility, you need to be aware of where you are today
and identify the specific actions that will support you. We think of
this as creating your learning agility playbook, where you’re
deliberate about developing in ways to increase your agility and,
as a result, your impact on your team and in your organization.
Helen Tupper is the cofounder and CEO of
Amazing If, a company with an ambition to
make careers better for everyone. Together
with her business partner Sarah Ellis, she is the
author of The Sunday Times number-one
bestseller The Squiggly Career, You Coach You,
and host of the Squiggly Careers podcast. Their
TEDx talk, “The best career path isn’t always a
straight line,” has over one million views. Prior
to Amazing If, she held leadership roles at
Microsoft, Virgin, and BP and was awarded the
FT & 30% Club’s Women in Leadership MBA
Scholarship.
Sarah Ellis is the cofounder and CEO of
Amazing If, a company with an ambition to
make careers better for everyone. Together
with her business partner Helen Tupper, she is
the author of The Sunday Times number-one
bestseller The Squiggly Career, You Coach
You, and host of the Squiggly Careers
podcast. Their TEDx talk, “The best career path
isn’t always a straight line,” has over one
million views. Prior to Amazing If, Sarah’s
career included leadership roles at Barclays and
Sainsbury’s before she become managing
director at creative agency Gravity Road.
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