Turns out, I don’t know it all (shocking!)
What I learned from a week-long learning experiment
Over two months ago [longer], I wrote about self-directed learning, and this experiment idea came to me. I would list all the topics I am currently interested in learning. Then, I will open my agenda for one whole week, in 30-minute blocks, to anyone who wants to teach me something related to those topics.
I called it the Highly Unqualified Learn-a-thon and launched it into the world.
I talked to 25 people. Twelve of them were strangers.
Everyone was free to teach me whatever they wanted, as long as it tied back to one of the topics on my list. How they chose to teach me was up to them. I listened and took as many notes as I could. I also took screenshots and saved links, PDFs, and anything else they would share.
For the past month, I have been looking back at all my notes and reflections, stitching them together, reflecting on them, and making sense for anyone curious to learn what this experience was like. This is not a detailed documentation of these lessons. That would be too long of a post and only relevant if the topics I care about are also topics you care about.
In this letter, I aim to:
—Reflect on the experience.
—Share a PDF containing a one-pager for each conversation, with insights that stuck with me, things to try out, and resources to explore.
Let’s go!
This experience tasted like magic seen through a kid’s eyes
Every single chat was unique and insightful. Many were also emotional. Not one call was a waste of time, which speaks volumes in a world drowning in meaningless meetings.
Here are my reflections from a bird’s-eye view:
💡 Learning is really an excuse for connection.
People who talk about something they love or care about reveal facets of themselves you might otherwise miss. I knew some people well, but this conversation allowed me glimpses into other corners of their brains and hearts and helped me feel more connected to them.
💡 As the “learner,” you lean in by default. The mind is wide open.
When you enter a conversation with the question “What will you teach me today?” you are entirely open to the experience. Anything can happen. You don’t know what you’ll learn, but you know it only works if you are open to it. Several conversations started with the “Trust me, lean in for now. It will make sense in a minute” mantra.
And leaning in, I did.
💡The dynamics created a mutually vulnerable space.
Learning something new exposes you because you admit to a shortcoming.
“I don’t know. You know. Teach me.”
And yet, when you ask someone to share something they are passionate about or care about, you invite them to share pieces of their identity. It is a deeply personal experience to share something you love. That’s why many people I talked to have brought soul projects forward.
Learning is an act of rebellion. ✌️
We learn because we want to be certain.
Confident in our knowledge.
Yet to learn anything new, we need to be comfortable being uncertain.
And we all know how our brains feel about uncertainty and ambiguity. 😅
So yeah…
✨ Learning is an act of rebellion.✨
[Me, on LinkedIn, a year ago]
💡Learning rooted in personal interest hits different
The people I talked to could bring any topic, case study, tool, or concept into our meeting, and that’s why everyone picked something they were deeply passionate or curious about. This unlocked something. They dared a bit more. They took up space. They became engaging storytellers. They brought creativity and a personal flavour into the conversation. That pulled me in, captured my attention, and turned my brain into a sponge.
💡30 minutes is enough for insights to emerge
I was worried that booking short slots would be problematic. In L&D, we have this aversion to one-time “learning.” I still believe this to be true if the solution aims to change behaviour. But if what you are after is insights, inspiration, awareness, or curiosity, then 30 minutes is plenty of time, especially when the purpose of the conversation is clear.
💡Quality is a non-issue
This one’s important. Quality is a recurring theme in nearly all discussions about social and peer learning. Like most things in life, this too is contextual. Are you learning the procedure for an emergency at a power plant or during surgery? By all means, quality and accuracy are ALL that matter. In ‘regular’ social and peer learning situations, the quality is in the eyes of the beholder. A while back, I wrote about how peer learning is not for everyone. If you’re having a conversation with someone and are not getting out of it what you expect, the blame lies with you. Don’t place it on the other person; they cannot read minds. We all see the world through our own lenses. Speak up. Ask questions. Challenge. Bring a different perspective. Expand their view of the world, and allow them to expand yours. That’s what learning is all about.
💡For maximum impact, pick a lens or set an intention
This insight came as a surprise. I'm not sure why. It all makes sense in hindsight.😁
Initially, I set a general intention for each chat: To reflect on what they were teaching me and find links to my work. To try to fit it somewhere.
It so happened that I was working on the design of a creative, different leadership development experience that week and something really cool happened. In almost every chat, something they said sparked new ideas for my leadership program design. If you are working on something specific, running a learn-a-thon experiment will bring MANY fresh ideas!
I captured a screenshot of this Substack note from on a random day because it captures a viewpoint I haven’t considered, and it got me thinking…
The humans and the gifts they left me with
These conversations were so rich in ideas, insights, resources, tools, and stories that it’s impossible to capture them all here, and that was also never the purpose.
I condensed each one into a single page.
Before we start, a reminder about the list of topics I wanted to explore could be helpful:
—Immersive Experiences and Experience Design
—Art applied to learning, community-building, or experience design
—Art education innovation projects and creative education projects
—Future Thinking, Foresight
—Behavioural Change interventions
—Co-design projects
—Social Innovation projects
—Systemic Design projects
—Organisational Innovation and Transformation projects
—Center of Excellence Projects
—Enablement of Extended Leadership Teams
I clustered the insights into the following:
1. The (Learning) Experience Design Area
2. The Behaviour Change Area
3. The Community Building Area
4. The Foresight Area
I took so much time to decide how to go back to, process, capture, and report on my learnings. It was the tension between “I don’t want this letter to be longer than a book” and “I want to do these conversations justice.”
I created one-pagers for each conversation and am sharing them in a single PDF for all the real learning nerds here who welcome projects with strong rabbit hole energy.
For those of you with little time on your hands…
I chose to highlight three of the conversations that I still think about. Enjoy!
Julia Burgess (Professional Development Trainer at Medical Solutions)
The concept of “negative capability” was coined by John Keats in a letter to his brother. The peace of mind comes from saying, "I don't know.” It’s also the start of innovation practice, creative thinking, and even leadership.
Negative capability is in direct contrast to intellectual certainty. In most L&D interventions, we want people to reach a place of intellectual certainty: This is how things work and how you must behave.
This keeps us stuck in a state of rigidity, while we all know that the only constant is change. We must learn to operate in uncertainty, where everything is a nuisance. Nothing is certain. Interestingly, one would say that science is certain. “It is scientifically proven" = it’s the truth.
However, the scientific method opposes any certainty: one must never forget that new experiments and studies can always lead to new truths and certainties.
I asked Julia how we can use this as learning experience designers and facilitators. Listen to her explaining four concrete examples in this 9-minute audio snippet from our conversation.
Sara Guagnini - Wilbers (Senior Learning Specialist at Exact)
"The Right to the City" is a concept that emphasizes the need for inclusivity, accessibility, and democracy in urban spaces. As part of a research lab during her studies, Sara explored squatters’ communities, which embodied this concept.
The research lab involved walking around the ADM squat, collecting stories, asking people to take pictures of things around them, and connecting the story to the object or space they were in. The final object was an exhibition of the various artifacts that students created based on these stories, including pictures, sounds of the place, sketches, and objects.
This immersive experience, followed by sense-making and creative representation of the findings, will stay with the students much longer than any “right to the city" academic paper ever will.
This project inspired me so much. With Sara’s permission, I am reading a poem, one of the artifacts students created for the final showcase.
If this opened up your appetite for the use of audio in experience design, I have explored that here.
Joumana Mattar (Executive Coach, Facilitator, Lecturer)
This project BLEW MY MIND! 🤯
When Joumana left Africa, it wasn’t by choice. She left a war behind. When she returned to visit, she wanted to give back something that was unique to her (her design skills) and something that was truly needed by the local community (education: learning how to read, count, write, and sing).
Joumana brought his project to life alone. She started it, crowdfunded it, designed the experience, and rolled it out, all in collaboration with the local teachers.
—She designed 10 animal booklets rooted in local heritage as gateways to science, music, and learning.
—Reusable toys and games accompanied the booklets in kits produced from recycled materials, featuring QR codes for multimedia content.
—Learning kits have reached 600 students in 7 schools in Tanzania
She harvested so many lessons on this journey; here are some of them:
“It is very humbling to see how we can live with so little and be so happy.”
Representation matters. The kids should see themselves in the booklet. "I wanted them to be proud and think this could be us in the future.”
Lack of access to technology is not an excuse not to engage others in learning.
Design modularly and make it simple to produce locally. Think about scaling with few resources.
“Curiosity knows no limits: from me to the teachers, from the teachers to me, from the students towards the activities.”
“What was planted with love will continue to grow.”
Sometimes you put something into the world, and it resonates with many. This was one of those things. It was fun to see others create their own versions of it. This shows how versatile the learn-a-thon can be, and how you can tweak it to your context.
What if you’d run one inside your organisation? A
✨ Life lately ✨
I don’t know about you, but when the sun is shining after months of darkness (I live in the Netherlands…), all I want to do is plant myself on the balcony, soak it in, and sprout. 🌱 Much like these tomatoes and radishes we’re hoping to grow this year.
The best discovery last month: these multifunctional STABILO Woody 3 in 1 chunky pencils you can use to draw on windows!! ✌️ All I want to do in the morning while I have my coffee.
I sometimes take these mindfulness walks in the morning, setting the intention to focus my attention on something specific each time.
Bugs. Shells. Fungi. Ducks. You name it.
This week, I captured "everything that's in bloom".
On my way back home, I thought:
How would I turn this into an experience for a team?
The answer is pretty obvious: Invite them to a Walkshop. 💫
I wrote about this here.
And on that note, I’ll catch you later. Very much irregularly! ✌️
Anamaria
Speaking of rabbit holes... I recently tripped across the work of Michael Polanyi, and his concepts of indwelling—knowledge isn't just something we possess cognitively; it's something we inhabit and embody—and tacit knowledge—we know more than we can possibly tell.
What the heck does this have to do with this amazing experiment of yours, you might be wondering? Seems to me that for modern professionals, if Polanyi was right and what we know becomes a sort of inseparable, almost-physical part of who we are, the work world can be pretty existentially brutal…
This invitation to share, on the other hand, came without having to first prove their credentials, pitch you on their value proposition, package an offering, or preface with much or any justification for seeing the world the way they do. They could simply be smart and themselves in your direction; what a gift.
Thank you for sharing! I’m certain I’ll be stealing (with all due credit).
Love reading this post and what you discovered with this experiment. I recently explored a course in ceramics just out of personal interest, and could so well relate to your point that learning rooted in personal interest hit different.