What have you learned this week?

At lunchtime today, I helped co-facilitate the final webinar in a series of three, that I have been helping to organise in my volunteer role as knowledge lead for the Nuclear Industry Project Management SiG.

The three 45 minutes sessions have each explored an aspect of knowledge and learning in the context of the Nuclear Industry. We’ve covered Storytelling (with Helen Wass from HS2), Hidden Learning (with John Hovell) and, today, Unlearning (with Ann Alder).

On each occasion, these events have encouraged me to reflect about learning. Which is something I’d now like to ask you to do, via a simple question: “What have you learned this week?”

To get you started and give you a benchmark to aim for, here’s my own own answer to that question.

On Tuesday, I took part in one of the quarterly meetings of the Association’s Knowledge and Studies Committee. Aside from being an opportunity to get a head’s up on what we have coming up over the next 12 months, in the context of knowledge, I learned two things that particularly struck me:

What I learned about myself and my work
The first lesson was about myself. I am regularly asked to present to this committee on our recent knowledge sharing activities and our plans going forward. On this occasion, we talked about the work we have been undertaking to refresh our knowledge repository and that I have done in terms of the design of that process, the application of our new knowledge taxonomy and the plans for a visual refresh of the repository. The Major Projects Association and our committees are genuinely safe places to share and I like to use these opportunities to talk about both success and disappointment. The result and the feedback I received helped to reinforce my sense of how my colleagues and how our members see me and my work, which I think is particularly useful since, as a mobile worker I occasionally find the absence of opportunities to chat informally can leave me questioning what I do or its value.

What I learned about projects
The second lesson was about the nature of projects. One of the committee members talked about the idea of reframing transformation, which has very much become one of the hot concepts of the last five or so years. Our common understanding of transformation is that it represents a a move from the original state (A) to the transformed state (B). The reality of transformation is that (B) does not actually exist. If we thought about the process rather than transformation as one of continual transition, this might be a more accurate reflection of what we are trying to do and it might, in turn, also have a seismic impact on how we do it – very much a light-bulb moment for me.

This week is by no means an exceptional week and, whilst my role as part-time Knowledge Manager at the Association may be unusual in some ways, in other ways I don’t think it is exceptional either. Which is why I am interested to hear what you’ve learned this week. Collectively, as an industry, we have surely learned a great deal in a very short space of time, which is not necessarily how we see ourselves, but rather tend to emphasize how little we have learned during the course of a working week, a year or a whole project. The problem, perhaps, is that we haven’t actually asked ourselves ‘what did you learn this week’. Consequently, the learning may have been taken for granted, never translated into a new way of working or never acknowledged as a personal or a team achievement.

Use the Mentimeter question to share your responses to ‘what have you learned this week?’ The results will appear below, in real time.

Please don’t let one of my lessons of the week be “gosh, how few people will share their responses to the question ‘what did you learn this week’?”

Jonathan Norman,
Knowledge Manager