Change often moves faster than individual learning can keep up with. While people focus on their own learning, groups less often do the same. When learning becomes collective, it compounds: each observation enriches shared understanding across the group.
Creating a culture of group learning takes deliberate structure. Short debriefs after events, cross-team catchups, shared note or drawing spaces, or rotating story-circles all help surface what people are noticing and connect those observations together.
The aim is connecting perspectives, not reaching consensus. Differences show where understanding can expand and evolve. When patterns are observed and discussed, learning moves from personal to systems level. Collective learning spreads responsibility for sense-making and helps people feel less isolated and bamboozled by complexity. Over time, these conversations create new insights, new understanding and can translate into network memory: a shared understanding of what's been tried, what's changed, and what keeps working.
In a moving system, that memory is one of the most valuable forms of stability.
Something to chew on:
Where could learning flow more freely in your community, and what small shift might help that happen?
Resilience Bites offers weekly insights from the Australian Resilience Centre, drawn from decades of work alongside communities across Australia and internationally. Each Bite explores an aspect of resilience and closes with a reflective question to chew on.
Across the series we'll explore themes that shape resilience in practice, including place, patterns, networks, leadership, learning, feedbacks, thresholds and the deeper work of change.
This series is for people working in communities, landscapes, systems and change. It will help you explore key resilience concepts, apply them in practice and build our collective capacity to create resilient futures.
To learn more about the Australian Resilience Centre and explore our work and services, please visit https://www.ausresilience.com.au/
To read published Bites, please visit https://resiliencebites.ausresilience.com.au/
