21st Century Government Learning Community of Practice #2: What needs to be learnt, and how should we learn it?
- Bridget Gildea
- Nov 6
- 6 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
In blog #1 on co-creating a Community of Practice on 21st Century Government Learning, we proposed transitioning from a ‘where next?’ approach to policymaking and learning, to a ‘how, next?’ one, to meet our current challenges.
When it works well, learning in Government is not only a set of useful organisational or HR tools – it’s a continuous approach to new information and shifting territory, that materially helps us rethink how we can better tackle the complex and growing challenges we face.
Overall, we often hear (and say) that the work of governing in the 21st century demands a fundamental rethinking of how we go about the work of policymaking and government, and a set of new approaches.
But what are these new approaches, and how should we move from words to action?
Learning through doing vs skills acquisition
One key question that keeps coming up in our co-created CoP is:
What are the skills civil servants need to do this work in the 21st century, and how do they acquire them?
This is quite a hard question to answer without knowing what the state of play is for how work currently happens, where the ‘skills gaps’ are, and also what the appetite and experience for deep, embedded learning is in any organisation we’re looking at, government or otherwise. Usually in our work this takes 6+ months of co-discovery to find out with any government, UN agency, large foundation, etc., with whom we work – so in the spirit of learning through doing, here is a sketch based on a much shorter co-discovery runway than normal in this CoP, which will be co-developed as we go.
Learning assessment Pyramid of Needs
The best place to start: finding out what and where the learning needs are. In our work with multiple governments across the world over the last 15 years, we have developed a Learning Assessment Pyramid of Needs that looks at the levels and kinds of capacities, capabilities, opportunities, motivations (and yes, skills), that need to be developed to meet our current challenges. [This is with our apologies to Maslow, who as we know never meant his work on needs to be a pyramid].
This is a work in constant progress, as the world shifts and new challenges emerge, as well as new thinking on how to do this work. But generally speaking, the best way to start is at Level 1:
Level 1: What’s happening now?
Looking at capacities and capabilities of teams and individuals, with an emphasis on not just assessment, but self-assessment, by the learners of where the gaps are, to feed into the learning provision and design/co-design.
Key questions to consider for assessing learning needs in Level 1:
What are the scarcities faced of time, resource, and social capital? (Recommend drawing on Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s work on Scarcity, as we do extensively in the Curiosity Incubator programme, in orienting guided self-assessments by people doing the learning to help inform the design, to add to the overall learning needs assessment by organisational teams – and seeing how those match up, or don’t).
What information do we use to make decisions, from day-to-day ones (in project or programme management) to large-scale strategic decisions? – Where does it come from, how much of it comes from inside vs outside our team, or Govt, and how do we know we’re using the best information, in each case?
How are we doing our work in teams and in departments – how much time gets spent on what, and how do we work with each other?
What are the blockers to the (right kind of) work getting done and the (right kind of) decisions getting made? (And what are the ‘right kinds’?)
What are the physical and behavioural environments our work is happening in, and do they impede or support work and collaboration? (For more on this, see some of our work on Place-based co-design for collaboration with the Open Society Foundations).
How is time measured and used, and how do we keep momentum, efficacy and impact high?
What are we incentivising people to do – either intentionally or not, and what are the most effective kinds of incentives in work (ie, not always financial)?
How strong is our organisational network to get work informed and done? Is it mainly internal to our team and department, or are there other collaborators we work with in other departments, levels of government or other sectors? Who would we call to get a quick answer on something we need sense checking on?
Level 2: How do we need it to happen?
How do we need our work to happen, in ways it is not happening yet? Key themes in Level 2 are often around navigating organisations and teams, horizontal sense-making and the structural elements of how we do work – ie the messy middle where most new things founder. Key things to consider:
Collaboration – decision making and iterative information gathering and use; who does what? Who can do what?
Partnerships – how are these formally built, with what guardrails, contractual and financial provisions, and engagements? What information can be shared, what communication norms are expected, what is the collaborative ‘hygiene’ of how work happens?
Procurement and the other structural and financial tools of government – are they working in concert with our policy goals, separately, or unintentionally impeding them?
Applied systems approaches – systems “thinking” in an academic sense can often be too esoteric and abstruse for work by policymakers and governments, so adapting systems thinking into applied approaches for best efficacy is important for it to be useable and to materially aid the work.
Co-design, including human centred design, behavioural science, digital UX if appropriate (NB not all design, like not all innovation, lives in digital products - so digital approaches should be adapted to other parts of policymaking with caution, not mirrored, or copied & pasted).
Evidence/impact - how do we know things are working? And how do we use iterative understandings of how things are going to inform adaptation as projects, programmes, and work, mature?
Level 3: Cutting edge thinking – what could happen?
The top of the pyramid is where learning about, and with, new and emerging thinking, tools, approaches and technologies can thrive. Once we collectively have a sense of how Levels 1 and 2 are working, that’s when we have the background and information to critically and creatively think through how these new and emerging tools, knowledge and approaches could (or couldn’t) work, and how learning about and with them can succeed. In other words, once we know what Levels 1 and 2 look like and can draw on them to critically think through what's next, that’s when we can innovate in government with the most success.
Some current learning in government trends that could thrive in Level 3 are:
Foresight and futures thinking
New technical approaches/products, including AI
Relational and Place-based work and evidence creation, as well as participatory approaches
Dynamic capabilities in government beyond cities
New financial compacts and economic thinking
New governance approaches to public policy-focused work
New forms of democratic and communications engagement with citizens
Learning and education about government and the civic space, for actors outside of government; shoring up trust in institutions
Knowledge co-creation rather than brokering
New pathways to finding out ‘what works’ and how to build better ways of working
...And more as we move forwards
Learning needs are cumulative, not one and done
Next blog, we’ll work through some learning typologies and approaches, and what can work vs what very probably will never work well, no matter how much of the Learning Assessment Pyramid of Needs work (or any other kind of expertise) we take into the co-design of it.
But the critical takeaway from this is: learning is an iterative, informed, and critical thinking exercise, primarily; and it happens every day in our work and daily lives.
Building learning programmes and projects for people in government works best when their experience of work and learning is co-designed into the learning interventions themselves; and when learning is embedded in the work and with a laser focus on what it's ‘for’. Cutting edge topics can be incredibly useful and helpful, but only when learned in a collaborative and applied way. One-off ‘training’ rarely moves the dial.
Next up – how we can all contribute to better designed (and co-designed) learning. And some fun COM-B inspired co-design approaches to play with. Onwards!
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