Summary: Eddie’s article on human learning systems
This blog is a summary of an article our co-founder Eddie Harris contributed to on “‘human learning systems’. The full article can be found here.
Introduction
It is widely recognised that the world is in polycrisis - the meeting of climate collapse, rising inequality, political instability and other challenges. Meeting a situation of this complexity requires new approaches.
Community resilience
For the purposes of the article, community resilience is seen from an holistic perspective - including both the ongoing wellbeing and interconnectedness of a community and its ability to respond quickly and effectively to crisis.
Conditions that enable social resilience
Include:
Shared values. Crucially, this includes the recognition of shared circumstance.
Agency - the ability for individuals and groups to influence their environment.
Interconnection within the community (built on trust and appreciation of difference)
The ability to respond to change (autonomy and access to shared resources)
The necessity of building transformative capacity beyond adaptation
Policy makers and the public are often more comfortable with adaptation because it involves less uncertainty. But only transformation will change the underlying cultural, economic, and political conditions that have brought us to this moment of polycrisis. The real-world challenge is to help create conditions for transformative change while ensuring there is ongoing learning, feedback, and accountability for change.
Summary of social, economic, and environmental impact evaluation tools
A number of tools are already used to monitor project impact:
Social return on investment: measures returns using monetary values.
Local economic multiplier effect: evaluates a project on costs and benefits.
Whole-life carbon analysis: measures the greenhouse gas effects of a product or programme across its entire life-cycle.
Wellbeing mapping: identifying behaviours that improve wellbeing.
The issue with these approaches that they tend to fall down on the following criteria:
Recognising and responding to real-world conditions
Providing useful feedback to incorporate into learning
Transparency for evaluators to understand.
These, however, are strengths of an alternative tool: Human Learning Systems (HLS). By design, HLS focuses on the learning and insight that emerges from people in a system - not on targeted, measurable outcomes.
An HLS approach
HLS works by increasing agency and knowledge. It allows people within a system to constantly reflect on what is arising and adjust and adapt accordingly. It does not have an end date or goal - something that can prove unsettling for those used to traditional ideas of change. It uses a principle called ‘action learning’ - learning with others through doing and reflecting. It sees a system as a whole - as a complex web where a change in one part will impact on other parts. It recognises the need for safety and care to allow for open exploration and sharing of challenges without fear of shame.
HLS and project programme delivery
HLS was used to develop and monitor the funding of community-led programmes financed by the Scottish government. The aim was to create innovation, build trust, and develop a systems-wide approach to evaluating change.
This is seen as a development on previous models which:
Had to predict futures based on present day conditions
Relied on determining outcomes before much of the on-the-ground work or learning had been done
Did not normally include the development of the delivery organisation as part of the overall objectives for a project
Were not effective in understanding causation when impacts were achieved
Were rarely deeply based on the knowledge of those closest to where the change was meant to happen.
HLS and planetary social pedagogy (HLS+)
An HLS+ system is proposed by the authors. It would incorporate within HLS appreciation of environmental factors as a point of learning and adjustment. This could include, for example, appreciating the views of young people, recognising the rights of future generations, and seeking to understand the needs of nature all as part of the learning cycle.
Learning opportunities
Learning from the experience of using HLS in Scotland:
People had to adapt to a new system. This happened but there was inevitable uncertainty.
HLS needs a longer lead-in time. Funding would need to be available for this too.
It is effective to have an intermediary between a funder and delivery organisation who understands both worlds.
In Scotland, the funders could not be satisfied with just an HLS model and so some degree of traditional metrics for measuring outcomes had to be included in the programme.
Discussion and conclusion
Traditional data misses out essential parts of the human condition like beliefs, norms, and judgement that are critical for funding programme insights. These kinds of things could and should change strategy and assessments. This is especially important at a time when people are being driven away from each other rather than toward understanding and learning and when change seems to happen at such a rapid pace there isn’t time to make sense of it. Perhaps most importantly of all, HLS+ gets to the heart of the question: how do we understand value? HLS shows that value should be seen in the way systems are felt and interpreted by us.