How to increase your learning agility in seven steps
What is learning agility and how can you improve it? We’ve come up with seven steps to help you along the way.
What Learning Agility Stands For?
Learning Agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experience, and then apply that learning to perform successfully under new situations.
Learning agility is increasingly being required of managers, employees and even whole organizations. Learning agility helps you to further develop yourself in a dynamic world and to achieve success at the same time. Our advice will help you train yourself to be a more agile learner in your working life.
Step 1: Be curious and open
Confronted with something new and unknown?
You arrive at the office one morning and receive the news that all the workspaces in your department are to be rearranged and all the laptops replaced. You almost drop your cup of coffee. Your current workspace is perfect the way it is and your laptop is set up just the way you like it!
But never fear, in change lies a great opportunity for you to say goodbye to the old and give a big, warm and curious welcome to the new!
Step 2: Gain experience
Give your experimental side free rein and have fun welcoming and experiencing new things! For example, you might notice when you try the new laptop that it has a cool new function that could be of use to you. Or you might notice upon taking a sip of your morning coffee that you have significantly more storage space now and that Paul’s desk is further away. Simply reorganize yourself, find new uses for the space and put your newly rearranged workspace to the test.
Step 3: Reflect on your experience
Now it’s time to take a critical approach and reflect on the experiences you’ve had. What went well, what went okay, and what didn’t go well at all?
The new laptop is very fast but your eyes are always watering. The additional storage space means that you can organize your documents much better. But Paul’s desk is a bit far away. You constantly have to get up and go over to him just for a short discussion.
Step 4: Gain insight
Indulge yourself in some lightbulb moments. Watery eyes are an indication that something is off with your screen’s resolution. Being able to communicate with Paul is very important – it should be possible to have short and uncomplicated discussions with him.
Step 5: Identify Potential
Now identify where you have concrete potential to optimize things, e.g. you need to fix the screen resolution so that your health doesn’t suffer and you need to move closer to Paul so that you can both work more efficiently together.
Step 6: Unleash potential
Carry out measures that lead to your desired positive outcomes, e.g. get the IT department to help you fix the screen resolution and ensure that you and Paul move your desks closer to each other so that it’s possible for you to talk again without having to get up.
Step 7: Test out your optimization measures
Now challenge yourself to test out the optimization measures that you have put in place. Are your eyes better now? Are you able to communicate with your colleague smoothly again?