How to capture your learning to survive and thrive past Covid-19

Work Horizons

As you and individuals in your organisation respond to the COVID-19 crisis and customers’ changing needs, you’re all learning an enormous amount about adapting yourselves, your teams and your organisation.

• As you plan for the future, some of these insights will be invaluable in understanding how the organisation and your markets have changed from the ground-up.
  
  
• As the ‘new normal’ catches up with other parts of your organisation, the experiences of these early impacts will save time and resources, allowing people to benefit from their colleagues’ trial and error’.
  
  
• Sharing learning between colleagues and teams can be a powerful way of building motivation and strengthening connections, at a time when both are very much needed.

This is great in theory, but the real challenge is working out how to capture and share what has been learned. We suggest 3 key areas to reflect on

• What has worked well for you and within different teams or functions? What was done that delivered those successful outcomes?
• What systems and processes helped? And what got in their way?
• If you could do it again differently, what would you change?

At Work Horizons we have created a toolkit to support leaders in capturing their organisational learning through Covid-19. It includes questions to ask and reflect on, as well as a template for recording your thoughts and findings. Importantly, the template has been optimised for on-screen collaboration in a Zoom call or similar.

We recommend that you use this in a focused way, repeating as often in as many different places as appropriate, to match the changing circumstances.

Specific Questions to Capture your learning

• What has worked well recently? What did you do that made it particularly successful?
• What have others done that helped?
• What systems or processes helped?
• What got in the way?
• If there was something that could make it even better next time what would it be?
• What are you going to do differently over the coming weeks
• What else could you put in place to help continue this forward movement?

 How to capture your answers and reflections

• Give yourself the gift of a few minutes over a cup of coffee, using these questions as prompts to help your thinking.
• Consider doing this on your own, with a colleague or your team.
• Be creative about how you capture your learning: pen and paper, Post-it notes on the wall or using this template in a virtual meeting.
• Capture your responses and then allocate them under one of the headings below or use the template you can find here https://workhorizons.com/learning-capture-template/
  
  
• Things to start doing
• Things to stop doing
• Things to do more of
• Things to do less of
• Things to continue doing

Finally, you can use this exercise to celebrate and recognise all the amazing things that have been done over the last few months

Diane Rance and Ann Terry
Work Horizons