By Stefano Anfossi & Fabrizio Pierandrei
Fall 2018
Tags:  LEARNING • INNOVATION • CULTURES • PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Cultures and working spaces designed to foster peer-to-peer learning
A culture of innovation is transforming contemporary organisations with features that contrast markedly with what has gone before.
Technological advances coupled with a continuously changing business culture mean that every company must up its game and embark on a programme of continuous improvement in developing the skills of its employees.

At the heart of this change is a process of innovation with regard to learning experiences that empowers employees to make their own individual choices about training and education, leading to continuous personal development, which in turn shapes the culture of learning in the firm.
Providing an environment that allows the employees to learn new skills and competencies is a feature that helps companies stand out in the highly competitive talent market.
Traditional learning management system companies are rapidly evolving in their ability to deliver modern, compelling experiences for learners …. CB Insights, which tracks venture investments, estimates that more than US$3 billion was invested in new learning and educational start-ups in the first six months of the year 2015. Almost $1 billion of this went into tools, content, and companies that focus on the corporate market.i
A new perception of what we perceive personal development to be and how it should function underpins the renewed interest of organisations in learning cultures.
According to a trend report by Deloitteii, learning has become “an essential tool for engaging employees, attracting and retaining top talents and developing long-term leadership for the company”, even when this new demand leads to a profound transformation in the organisation.
One of the most apparent manifestations of this change can be seen in the way that the process of learning is embedded in the day-to-day working lives of people, rather than as a series of separate programmes and courses.
None of this is particularly new. Some existing learning models have already embraced the idea that a range of experiences and activities lead to better outcomes. For example, the 70:20:10 model created by Morgan McCall at the Centre for Creative Leadership, in which employees obtain 70 percent of their knowledge from job-related experiences, 20 percent from interactions with others, and 10 percent from formal educational events.iii
One new factor is the way in which learning is now viewed as a continuous process for people. In practice this perspective means that skills are not merely shared between people, but often reframed and redefined.
It is not merely about exchanging information with individuals but helping them ‘learn how to learn’.
While each individual is empowered to undertake this process of continuous learning, the prevalence of teamwork in the workplace means this learning to learn takes place alongside collaborative learning, a process pioneered by schools and higher educational institutions, which have been forming new models of learning and new techniques for some time.
Research into the dynamics of learning amongst small groups of between four to six people in schools is just as relevant for the collaborative learning techniques of the workplace.
Learning in this context can also help overcome some of the drawbacks of teamwork. It helps to restrict the tendency for groupthink and the potentially overbearing presence of a dominant leader and also discourages the idea that meetings are a waste of time or even completely useless.
In contrast to purely individual learning, which improves specific skills and competences, team learning is more likely to foster the creation of a shared vision or goal for the team, a greater understanding of the processes activities of the whole group, and a sense of ownership of specific roles and responsibilities.iv…