In facing the challenges of today’s VUCA world, public organizations share more in common with the private sector than ever before. As such, learning becomes an integral daily work activity and lifelong learning a reality.     

The 70:20:10 workplace learning model highlights that adults actually learn about 70 percent from on-the-job experiences, with 20 percent coming through peers, coaches, and mentors, and the remaining 10 percent from formal training. For several years, this framework has tried to shine a spotlight on the continuous learning environment that work already is and offers a number of key touch points to impact learning outcomes: workflows, team sharing, networks, supporting others, conversations, working out loud, and so forth.  

Yet the structured learning intervention has often taken center stage in public-sector performance reviews and IDPs, with much activity and expenditure focusing on securing the right content and experience. We see mounting pressures on agencies to more fully explore the “other 90 percent” as employees, supervisors, and leadership face some critical unmet learning and development gaps they know are key to their ultimate success in navigating their VUCA worlds.

Throughout government, the learning function is stressed because the performance function is under stress. Learning is increasingly challenged to become more strategic and supportive of agency and government-wide performance goals and diverse employee learning needs. The key questions are not really whether the government learning function is important or should be funded this year or next, but how can it effectively evolve within its own VUCA pressures to help guide others with theirs?

Bob Johansen wrote about how to deal with a VACU world  in Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World  and created the VUCA prime, which we’ll take a quick look at here to see how L&D professionals might begin to evaluate their implications for government learning functions today.

1. Government learning needs to meet volatility with vision

Here, learning needs to think big. The federal learning function must let go of its past and develop practices to help it focus on the future of work and the future of government. Its role is to prepare others for that future, not to train for a past world. Successful agencies will have successful learning functions contributing to a vital learning culture and supporting the performance it needs.

This requires a re-dedication to agency L&D professional’s own learning needs, as well as to the need for even stronger learning leadership—both within agencies and across government. Learning has much to contribute to articulating the visions and cultures needed for successful agency futures and must continually position itself to be able to effectively do so.

2. Government learning needs to meet uncertainty with understanding

Federal learning can take its mastery of training and content management and extend it to systematically mastering greater understandings of context and focusing on how to learn. One of its central questions has always been what content needs to be engaged to support KSAs—for financial managers, for new supervisors, for leadership development, and so on.

That hyper-content focus can now be expanded to developing greater shared understandings of agency and public service context. Scanning the internal and external environments; understanding the agency strategic plan; benchmarking government-wide best practices; and paying attention to agency stakeholders, customers, and business models all feed into developing those greater contexts. 

3. Government learning needs to meet complexity with clarity

Here, learning can look for clarity in agency missions, government mandates, and public service ethics to help make sense of wicked problems and focus its efforts strategically. Clarity of purpose can also come from ensuring learning directly supports the performance needed to meet the agency’s goals, as well executing learning that supports the specific employee, supervisor, and leader behaviors valued and needed for organizational success. 

4. Government learning needs to meet ambiguity with agility

Federal learning can up its game to adapt and respond with more agility—experimenting, demonstrating ROI, failing, and moving on more quickly than ever before. The learning function needs to be ready to move quickly to put solutions in place and assess their effectiveness more readily. This requires greater organization communication, as well as greater learner and supervisor involvement.

Moving forward

Learning cultures and activities can help provide a strong counterweight within the public sector’s new normal. Using concepts like VUCA and 70:20:10 to describe this now normal is just one way to help us characterize learning’s disrupted future in public organizations.  And it’s helpful to highlight that not only will government will be doing learning differently, but also that those working within the L&D functions will need to continually disrupt themselves to remain relevant.