LEARNING PRINCIPLES

A core value of the Partnership is learning. Learning means the continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into knowledge-- accessible to the whole community of interest and relevant to its core purpose. Knowledge is information which changes something or somebody, increasing the capacity for effective action. Knowledge is actively "constructed" by an individual learner as a way of making sense of his or her world. Learners struggle with a rich variety of information and have to actively work with it to create patterns that they can understand.

There are two kinds of learning, exploration and exploitation. Exploration, the higher order of learning, is around identifying new and better opportunities/strategies. Exploitation is in doing better and better what you already know how to do. During the four-month pilot phase, the Partnership will focus mostly on exploration.

There are two kinds of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is captured in rules and guidelines. Tacit knowledge is what results in instinct and intuition. One of the challenges of the Partnership is to capture individual tacit knowledge about regional strategies and allow it to become explicit, shared broadly, and used to change behavior throughout the Partnership.

Learning is organized around real problems and real situations that reflect the context in which the learner will have to use his or her knowledge. Learning can only take place where the work is and when participants in the work are actively engaged in the content and design of the learning experience. We need all of the participants in the network to agree to a way of capturing and sharing what they are learning from their experiments.

Learning succeeds when the learners start with a question in mind. As learners pursue the question, learning will follow. Something must open the mind of people so that they ask: Is there anything we should be doing fundamentally differently? The Partnership needs to start to define the key questions.

Most learning happens in a social context and is a function of the learning networks people are part of. Learning happens everywhere and all of the time. However, learning is not an isolated individual phenomenon. It happens best within social networks of people who share practices. The Partnership needs to provide opportunities for members to come together to share experiences and questions.

To create a cross-regional Learning Network, learning must occur at two levels:

Site Learning: Each site must frame its own questions. Regional coordinators need to help the sites to develop a means to collect lessons along the way which relate to these questions. If possible given the time constraints, the sites need to an outcomes-based plan that helps create a common language across the sites. The plan should describe basic assumptions about the system, what is going on in it, what will work or not to achieve the goal, and potential steps to try.

Cross-Site Learning: To have cross-site learning, first there must be good site learning. Second, there must be the belief that the success of each site will improve the chances for success of the others. Third, the sites need to be committed to apply ideas and report back to the other sites. Cross-site learning can occur through the regional coordinators sharing information with the sites, the Web Site, conference calls, and the periodic meetings of the Partnership.

Some things that could assist learning within the Partnership for Regional Livability include:

• A clear purpose and vision bringing the participants together. It is essential to have a clear, common purpose that everyone shares. What are our goals? What kind of value do we intend to provide and to whom? How do we want to work together? What is really important to us? What does success look like and how are we going to get there?

• Agreement about measures of progress and success. Measurement systems help gauge progress and know when corrective action is needed. What are appropriate measures of progress (both impact and process)? What do we want in terms of results? What do you most want to know to do your job well? There should only be a handful of measures.

• Agreement that experiments will be set up for maximum knowledge creation. It is important to put in place structures for testing experience. Look for ways to reconstruct things that you are already doing to make them learning activities.

• Acceptance that difficulties and failure provide valuable lessons to capture and share. Not everything the partners try can work. The Partners can learn a great deal from what does not work if we share these experiences.

• A Knowledge Agenda: What knowledge is most important to the Partnership’s success? (What is it that we know? What do we need to learn? What will we try out and how will we share results? What are our knowledge assets, i.e. individual staff and information systems which can turn individual knowledge into something useful to the partnership? What capacity does the partnership need to build? Are there significant knowledge or capacity deficits?) In the case of the Partnership, both process information -- how to organize and build partnerships for regional projects -- and new tools and strategies which support the regional projects -- for example, tools for land use planning -- are important.

• Rich diversity of information. The information must be in diverse modalities to appeal to different learning styles. There need to be open and multiple pathways for communication of this information.

• Frequent opportunities for people with diverse points of view to come together to reflect on conditions and possibilities, notice patterns that are emerging in their knowledge and ask new questions. There needs to be capacity for reflective, collective inquiry so participants can swap "trade secrets" and, thereby, convert their tacit knowledge to concepts others can understand, use, and augment. There need to be processes for exposing the rules of successful models and behaviors so they can be shared and improved by others. There should be facilitators who have the responsibility of synthesizing key lessons and sharing this information.

• Investment in Knowledge Networking: Investment in knowledge goes beyond E-mail, Web pages, intranets, and groupware to the development and dissemination of experience and even wisdom, so that everyone in the partnership -- anywhere and at any time -- can access the partnership’s knowledge capital and bring insights to his or her daily work. The point is to build what Tom Peters has called "formal knowledge management structures" for capturing and managing knowledge as a strategic asset.

PARTNERSHIP FOR REGIONAL LIVABILITY LEARNING PLAN

Up-Front Interviews: Julia Parzen or Pete Plastrik query all members of the Partnership about: What are your goals for the Partnership? What do you think it will take to create successful regional projects and partnerships? What questions do you have about how to proceed? What new approaches are you planning to try/tools are you planning to use? How will you capture lessons so that they can be shared with the other members of the Partnership?

Monthly Query: Julia Parzen or Pete Plastrik query all members of the Partnership about: What new ideas have you tried? What has gone well? What improvements do you want to make? What changes would help you? What questions do you have and what help are you looking for? What are the lessons you have learned and should be recorded so that they are accessible to all members of the partnership?

Monthly Conference Call: After receiving a summary of the monthly queries, members of the Partnership talk about emerging patterns in their knowledge about the rules of successful models and common questions, swap trade secrets, and ask new questions. (The call should include the Regional Point People, Regional Coordinators, Resource/Support Team, and Foundation and Federal Representatives.

Toolkits From the Partnership/Consulting on Key Questions: Throughout the four-month pilot, the Partnership needs to provide new information to stimulate experiments. The new information will include such things as the Toolkit which Scott and others are preparing and rapid-turnaround consulting on specific topics. (This is why the technical consulting part of the budget is so important.)

A Lessons Learned Session At the June Meeting: Members of the Partnership discuss the lessons to date, explain to each other in more detail things that are working and why, and talk about lessons to share beyond the Partnership and ideas which could be replicated at additional sites.

A Listserv For Posting Questions and Comments: Members of the Partnership will have access to a listserv. The listserv will be used to share periodic learning memos with the partners. The partners will also be encouraged to use it to post comments and questions.

A Web Site: Members of the Partnership will have access to all of the above on the Web Site.

PARTNERSHIP LEARNING AGENDA EMERGING QUESTIONS

PROCESS AND SUBSTANCE QUESTIONS

[ ] How to Build Bi-Partisan Support?

[ ] How Can the Regions Facilitate Low-Income and Minority Participation?

[ ] How to Build Linkages to Rural Communities and Acknowledge Their Issues?

[ ] How to Expand Business Involvement in the Partnership?

[ ] What are the Minimum Conditions for Success of the Partnership Projects?

[ ] How Best Should The Regions Approach State Government?

[ ] What Support Will Help the Regional Teams most?

[ ] What Could Be The Structure of Federal Agreements?

[ ] What Methods Are Effective For Negotiating Regional Agreements?

[ ] What Is The Role Of The Foundations In Helping the Federal Partners to Try New Approaches? What is the Capacity of Foundations to Provide This Support?

[ ] What are the Foundations Learning About How to Do Their Work?

[ ] When There Are A Few Lead Funders, Will This Discourage Other Funders From Participating In The Partnership?

PARTNERSHIP LEARNING AGENDA EMERGING LESSONS AND OBSERVATIONS

[ ] The structure of federal agencies will define the Partnership relationships: Each federal agency has a different way of organizing national and regional activity. Therefore, the federal regional relationship to the Partnership will be different for each agency. The Partnership needs to work through how and when to work with headquarters and/or regional staff. A working group of the Partnership Steering Committee was formed to begin addressing this issue, including Dave Garrison, Doug Henton, and Scott Bernstein.

[ ] How the Federal Partners will help: Some of the regions have tried unsuccessfully in the past to partner with federal regional staff. They wonder how the federal partners can help. Right now, the federal representatives are searching for people in the federal government who want to innovate, care about place-based strategies, and have the authority to act. They are also identifying opportunities within existing federal authorities to support the emerging regional projects and for federal agency people who are prepared to use these authorities. The federal partners can triangulate between these federal programs, federal staff who want to innovate, and the regions. The new federal partners may not be the "usual suspects" with whom regional representatives have tried to work in the past. The more specific the regional projects are, the easier it will be to find the right people in the federal government and engage them, i.e. "we want to do the following on welfare to work issues in our region and we think we will need to have HHS, DOL, DOT, and HUD involved". The difficulty is how to balance having very well articulated projects to attract new federal partners with getting the partners involved early enough in each venture that they can truly become partners in the undertaking. The real lessons will come about what the federal partners will be able to do when there are some projects on the table.

[ ] The Role of Foundations in Brokering the Partnership: A unique role the foundations can play in the Partnership is providing a place for people in the federal government to think about and try new things. Federal partners have said that having the foundations willing to drive the process, to serve as intermediaries, and to grease the skids provides federal agency people with an especially good environment in which to try to achieve the goals of the Partnership.

[ ] Building Diversity within the Regional Leadership Teams: Because the majority of the partners come from an environmental/sustainability perspective and few have primarily a poverty agenda, it may be harder to achieve diversity goals. The same is probably true for rural issues since most of the partners have an urban bent. There are differences in diversity among the Regional Leadership Teams. It would be worth trying to understand why.

[ ] The Differences Among the Regions in Who Is Championing the Projects: Regional Leadership Teams can have very different emphases. For example, the Bay Area focuses on civic entrepreneurship with an emphasis on corporate leadership. Other Teams are more heavily driven by public interest organizations.

[ ] The Value of Building on Existing Networks: The regions have very different approaches to building their Partnership networks. Chicago has multiple networks to draw upon. The Bay Area has one established network. Atlanta is trying to create a network. The presence of existing networks may be a determining factor in how quickly the projects can be articulated. As suggested in the criteria for success of the Partnerships, most of the projects will build upon existing efforts and networks.

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Last updated March 24, 1999.