It’s been 12 months of learning out loud as I’ve listened, talked, written, built relationships and tested ideas as a passion project has evolved into a collaborative. As a freelancer, without the anchoring of a large institution behind me, I was tentative at first, becoming more confident as time went by, as a little momentum built and, miraculously, as we sourced some funding to progress our ideas. Hours and hours of thinking out loud, applying intuitive delay as ideas ripened and holding myself back from hurtling forward too quickly.
Truthfully, as I’ve been working on the Climate Migration Collaborative, I’ve neglected the Pragmatic Radicals blog, but I’ve recently noticed that my favourite collaborators and clients – who have nothing to do with the Collaborative- also share this commitment to learning out loud.
Here’s why I think it’s so powerful.
Emergence
When you are starting a new thing – or even if you’ve been doing your thing for decades – there is something quite beautiful in fully leaning into emergence as a strategy. In a world of complexity and uncertainty, even of volatility, cruelty and unpredictability, there is power in resisting the pull to map and strategize to the point that we think we have control over a system. A great blog from Fractals Coop reminds us that “outcomes pathways create an illusion of certainty that isn’t actually useful for practitioners.”
It’s not to say that mapping and strategizing are not useful – they absolutely are and I make a living from helping organisations to do just that! – but there is honesty in admitting that the best we can do is to be as aware of the system around us as possible and take the ‘most elegant next steps’ around leverage points in that system that we identify together. adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy discusses all of this and more. It also means that sense-making in the open – with humility and a learning mindset – is a critical skill.
Vulnerability
Ask for help and give help. Whether it’s been on behalf of my freelance clients, or for my collaborative project, calling on your network as you crowd-source ideas and wisdom, always with credit and citation, is an obvious way to tap into new knowledge and diverse insight. Reciprocating by synthesising and sharing back your findings in the open – via LinkedIn, via communities of practice or via your Substack community – means being useful to your immediate community whilst learnings reach thousands of people beyond it, sparking ripples out into the world.
As well as sharing progress, learning out loud invariably also means acknowledging when you’ve made mistakes or would do better or differently next time. In a commitment to sharing the lows as well as the highs of the Climate Migration Collaborative so far, I even posted on LinkedIn about how a workshop I did at a festival could have gone better and what was missing from the analysis and approaches I used. I don’t write a post every time I mess up (!) but if more of us brought this radical honesty to our work, more of the time, we’d all feel less like imposters and more like fellow humans on a shared journey towards a better world.
It’s true, though, that sometimes the early seed of an idea does need protecting, isn’t quite ready for wider scrutiny. Multi Level Perspectives, described in an excellent essay by the Onion Collective, looks at how ‘niche’ ideas need to be shielded as they grow. So perhaps we need to be honest about how much emergence is too much emergence! Most folk, rightly, need some sense of the journey ahead to come on board. That’s why at the Collaborative we spent a lot of time at the start working out how our values would shape the work, landing on a justice-centred framing that guides everything else.
And I’ve noticed that others who think out loud, who share their learning so consistently and generously – CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs both being great examples of this – leave us in no doubt that they are in the business of building alternative futures that serve people and planet, rejecting dominant systems of extraction. A world-view or mindset placed front and centre give others a sense of confidence that whilst the path forward is unchartered, there is a wider shared vision to get behind.
Connection
Learning out loud has sparked all kinds of connections that I couldn’t have imagined if I’d sat quietly at my desk working on some sort of thesis! I’ve been inspired by art, music, science and architectural design, around actual and metaphorical community bonfires. The truth is that few of us are hands-down experts in our areas of work – we are constantly learning as we go. This is especially true of generalists like me whose skill-set hovers alongside subject matter expertise and is all about noticing patterns, weaving connections and building relationships across systems. Learning out loud and doing it together is a powerful tool for building community.
There are times when I’ve signed up for an event and had to push myself to show up, worried if anyone will want to talk to me about my new project, whether I can bring coherence to a still-emerging set of ideas, but I’m learning to let go of the need to ‘perform’ and focus on just making connections, no agenda. It has always been worth it!
Connection also creates accountability. That might mean close collaborators urging a re-think on an idea that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It might be a wider sense of accountability to community – the momentum to keep going having declared an intention quite publicly, or made commitments to deliver something. If there’s no discomfort in this, where is that learning edge?
Starting
Just starting. Listening deeply, learning, acting from a place of humility but starting nonetheless. Knowing that there’s no single right way forward and a plurality of perspectives to learn from. Knowing that its actually OK to pivot, course correct or just try something else. Being the change you want to see is not having all the answers but being willing to show up and explore together. And in a way, this feels true not only of my side projects but also of my freelance work at Pragmatic Radicals. So who’s with me on learning out loud?