Learn and Grow Spotlight: Are you an agile learner?

In times of change, we all need to be more agile. Adapting to new business strategies, working across cultures, dealing with virtual teams, and taking on new assignments all demand that we be flexible and agile. The willingness and ability to continue learning throughout your career is more important now than ever. Learning agility is about knowing how to learn — knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. With improved learning agility, you’re able to make the most out of your experiences. As you build the habits that help you figure things out as you go, you’ll improve how you navigate new and difficult situations and increase your contribution to your organization. It’s never too soon (or too late) to increase your learning agility.

Four Ways to Build Your Learning Agility

Be a Seeker.

Immerse yourself in situations that broaden your skills and perspective. Explore new pathways.

• Embrace the challenge of the unfamiliar. Don’t just go through the motions. If you react to the new learning opportunity by staying close to your comfort zone, you minimize struggle and discomfort, but you also miss out on the corresponding rebound in growth and performance. The result is that you’re pretty much the way you were before, and the full power of the new experience is lost.
• Take on a new challenge that scares you. Find something that is meaningful, but not so important that failure will have serious personal consequences. Most importantly, tell others what you’re doing, and ask for their help and support. Taking on new challenges allows you to develop new skills and perspectives that may become an important part of your repertoire in the future.
• Don’t get stuck on first solutions. We often choose the first solution that comes to mind, rather than taking time to consider whether it’s truly the optimal course over the long term. By trying out new approaches, you can uncover ways of doing things that could save time and energy and introduce new learning that may not have been considered otherwise. Look beyond the obvious or the easy.
• Make it a habit to push for new ideas — the less traditional, the better. When faced with a challenge, ask yourself two questions: What’s holding me back from trying something new and different? If these constraints weren’t in place, how would I approach this situation differently?

Hone Your Sense-Making.

In today’s high-stakes, complex, ambiguous, and fast-moving situations, you don’t have the luxury of time. You need to dive in and start making things happen. This means you need to take an active approach to making sense of the new challenges you face. Be curious and willing to experiment. Ask “Why?” “How? and “Why not?”

• Actively listen to understand what others are saying, and trust that you’ll have a response when they’ve finished talking.
• Pause when you find yourself feeling stressed.  Don’t just say or do the first thing that comes into your head. Take a moment to consider what’s really required.
• Find another way to understand a problem. Use multiple techniques; engage different senses; and tap into your emotions to gain better understanding, insight, and meaning from the experience.

Internalize Experiences and Lessons Learned.

People who are learning to be agile recognize that others are essential to them. They build ties and relationships that increase their connection to people who can provide new experiences and opportunities to learn.

• Ask for feedback and be open to criticism. Find someone who you trust to give you open and honest feedback. View feedback as a gift that someone’s giving you. You may not like it, and it may be uncomfortable, but there’s value in it, nonetheless. It’s an opportunity to learn something about yourself.
• Don’t defend. Resist the temptation to explain your actions or make excuses. When you enter a mode of self-preservation and try to defend what is, you close yourself off to what could be. To ward off defensiveness, always thank the other person. Consider the feedback carefully so you can see patterns (and changes) over time.
• Reflect, both alone and with others. Learning occurs when you take the time to reflect, to shift your thinking beyond what happened to why things happened the way they did. Reflection surfaces the intuitive and locks it in for future reference. Step back and figure out what you’re learning from a project, from an interaction, or from a new experience.

Adapt and Apply.

Through your experiences, you learn. Over time, you get better at using what you’ve learned to navigate new and challenging situations.

• Rely on your intuition.  When faced with something new, look for similarities between the situation and things you’ve done in the past. Draw on these similarities to frame the new challenges.
• Don’t overthink. Inspiration often comes from the unconscious; being open to this can spark new ideas and strengthen performance.

Resources
Learning Agility—Have you got what it takes? | It’s Your Yale
Experiential Learning Opportunities (ELOs) | It’s Your Yale
Experiential Learning Opportunities Guide | It’s Your Yale
Develop your learning journey (linkedin.com)
The importance of learning agility (linkedin.com)
Making yourself relevant (linkedin.com)
Adaptive companies excel (linkedin.com)
Agile: It’s not just for software (linkedin.com)
Pursuing mental agility (linkedin.com)