Why are we so pre-occupied with building a 'learning culture'?

The phrase ‘learning culture’ isn’t particularly new, Peter Senge was writing about it over thirty years ago (The Fifth Discipline). So why are we as L&D professionals still so obsessed?  If the LPI’s dashboard is to be believed, building an organisational learning culture is learning leaders’ number one challenge and priority.

The world of work that Senge described back in 1990 has changed so very much, very much like the way we all learn has changed too ( a pet topic of mine as some of you may have worked out.) The green shoots of what’s been termed the ‘democratisation’ of learning are growing stronger and increasingly we are seeing people taking more and more ownership of their own learning. If this is the case, why does L&D still feel it needs to develop a ‘learning culture’?

If after thirty years of trying we still haven’t cracked it, are we ever going to?

So rather than thinking about building ‘culture’, a notoriously slippery and difficult to measure proposition. Maybe we should seek to re-frame the problem and the question?  When we talk about building a learning culture, do we really mean improving learners’ engagement in learning?

If we re-frame the proposition and look practically at the actions we can take as L&D leaders to help learners access and engage with the learning they need/want, aren’t we more likely to grow a positive learning culture organically?

But, how do L&D teams engage the workforce? What steps are we taking to make the most of the digital learning revolution we’re all experiencing to better enable and empower learning?  Rather than being pre-occupied with the dated and potentially distracting concept of ‘culture’.  After all culture is just a term used to describe “how we do things around here…”

Let’s stop being concerned with the big picture, lets focus on the practical – what can you do to encourage learning, be it formal programme based or just every day ‘in the moment’?