What Is a Learning History?
A Learning History is a participatory process that surfaces the experiential knowledge of people involved in an organization’s work, capturing how practices have evolved over time. Rather than serving as a comprehensive archive or evaluation, it emphasizes reflection, meaning-making, and contextual understanding, helping organizations make sense of the past to inform future direction. A Learning History process first arose to help organizations reflect on their own learning efforts. When we work with organizations, we often facilitate a Learning History as part of strategic planning or to help facilitate reflection during a time of significant transition.
Sensibilities and Principles
Our approach to Learning Histories is grounded in the belief that experiential knowledge is as central and important to the way we work as any other form of knowing. Within organizations, strategies evolve through learning in context, and the application of experiential learning toward improvement is one way that change can happen intentionally in organizations. Over time, sharing stories about how we have learned and how that has influenced the way we work becomes an important part of honoring where we have come from and influences on where we may go from the present.
A Learning History offers both a participatory process and a tangible product. It helps groups and individuals reflect on where they’ve been, make meaning of how the work has unfolded, and carry forward insights that matter for what’s ahead. Especially during big transitions, Learning Histories can create space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with what has shaped the journey so far.
Learning Histories do not evaluate success against a fixed plan. Instead, they explore how aspirations met the realities of context and practice. They surface the wisdom found in relationships, decisions, adaptations, and moments of tension or breakthrough. They also attend to context, highlighting how broader trends, such as shifts in a particular domain or global events like COVID-19, have shaped the work and its direction.
How Do They Work?
Each Learning History includes a series of engagements such as interviews (often Appreciative Interview-style), facilitated conversations, surveys, focus groups (e.g. Conversation Cafe or Discovery and Action Dialogue format), and shared document review with storytelling to gather insight from a range of perspectives. These aren’t just data collection activities; they are opportunities for reflection, connection, and shared sensemaking among the participants during the activities themselves.
As themes and storylines emerge, they are synthesized into learning artifacts, such as narrative summaries, visual maps, or shared timelines, that reflect the diversity of experience and the patterns that connect it. These are developed collaboratively, and may be tailored for internal use or external sharing.
Why Invest in a Learning History?
A Learning History can support ongoing learning and change efforts, leadership transitions, strategy development, program improvements, and operational coherence. It offers a way to surface the deeper learning embedded in the experience of your work by making it perceptible. Put another way, what may be tacit knowledge acquired through experience can begin to become more explicit, or simply an opportunity for more exploration.
Information About Learning Histories:
2021 Article, “The Learning History Methodology: An Infrastructure for Collective Reflection to Support Organizational Change and Learning.”
(N.D.) Article, “Learning Histories: “Assessing” the Learning Organization".”
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