Learning about learning – What did COAST learn from testing ALNAP’s tacit learning resource pack?

From January-August 2021, I joined a steering group of humanitarian experts to guide the development of a resource pack to support the generation and sharing of learning within and between organisations working on the frontline of humanitarian action. We decided to focus this work on social learning or learning that does not rely on written documentation. This is also referred to as tacit learning. As part of this process, I worked with different teams within my organisation -- COAST Bangladesh -- to test the Organisational Assessment and Project Management Checklist in the resource pack. This resource helped us to think about how to incorporate undocumented learning into our day-to-day practices.  

Old practice, new terminology! 

Tacit learning was a new word for us at COAST, despite being commonly practised among our different team members. Our frontline humanitarian workers are continually learning from their work and learning with and from the communities they are working with. For example, our team worked on a self-reliance project in Cox’s Bazar that was implemented in two locations, one performed exceptionally well and the other underperformed. In discussions, staff identified how much the community leader influenced community engagement dynamics of a particular location. This useful point was not documented, it was a key tacit learning passed on to others through discussion. By not capturing, or recognising the value of tacit learning, it could easily get lost. 

Tacit learning was a new word for us at COAST, despite being commonly practised among our different team members. Our frontline humanitarian workers are continually learning from their work and learning with and from the communities they are working with.

In a fast-moving and time-pressured, challenging environment, such as working in Rohingya refugee camps, it is not practical for our frontline team to document all they have learnt, and sometimes it is difficult to write down every nuance. This means nuanced learning and knowledge of particular contexts can be lost. Our teams have been sharing tacit learning, but as an organisation, how do we value and capture this essential knowledge? Giving a name to this type of learning helps us to recognise its value, while the resource pack allows us to think about supporting and capturing tacit learning in practical ways.  

Integrating tacit learning into daily activities 

Due to the limited time and resources to reflect on learning in day-to-day work, we wanted to explore practical ways to integrate learning as a regular practice. Our aim as an organisation is to explore practical ways to facilitate staff, particularly frontline staff, to learn and share learning with each other and other organisations. We used the resource pack to introduce the phrase “tacit learning” to our team – including frontline staff, managers, M&E specialists and volunteers - and to link it with the everyday learning that our teams can capture and share. We used the resource pack piloting as an opportunity to discuss with our teams how to integrate tacit learning into their day-to-day work and tasks. We wanted to explore ways to capture and share their valuable learning without burdening them with additional tasks. We believe that learning should be closely situated to program implementation, not as a siloed stand-alone pillar. 

Using the Organisational Assessment Resource, I facilitated an organisation-wide discussion on tacit learning and how we can capture and use it in an optimal way. The discussion included a wide range of staff from different levels of the organisation from Dhaka and Cox’s Bazar, to identify the milestones or points where we can integrate tacit learning into our day-to-day activities. These discussions led to four practical ways we will integrate tacit learning into the existing organisational processes: 

Tactic learning will be integrated into our organisational monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning system. We started discussing how we can adapt the ALNAP tacit learning resource pack to our local realities to capture tacit learning as part of planned M&E activities, adapting our M&E tools to include a section on tacit learning. We will integrate parts of the project management checklist into the project planning and management guide, and consequently, be part of the M&E plan for the project. 

We started discussing how we can adapt the ALNAP tacit learning resource pack to our local realities to capture tacit learning as part of planned M&E activities, adapting our M&E tools to include a section on tacit learning. 

We will institutionalise tacit learning to be considered from the start of all new projects. Currently, for all our projects we begin with a ‘Plan of Operation’ workshop, in which we develop an operational guideline for the project. We will now include a section on tacit learning, based on the project management checklist, to provide managers with helpful reminders on identifying, capturing, using and sharing tactic learning.   

To promote capturing and sharing tacit learning, we will begin to feature stories from frontline teams in exploring tacit learning in their context, and how they capture it.  

Creating an enabling environment 

In all our discussions and testing- with COAST senior managers, mid-level and frontline staff- the role of organisational culture came up frequently as a key factor in creating a learning organisation. In Bangladesh, organisational cultures between senior and junior staff are strongly hierarchical. Additionally, women's representation in leadership, particularly senior leadership has been a challenge. The organisational assessment tool gave us a way to reflect and check in on our progress in addressing hierarchy, gender and power challenges. Our current leadership skills and competencies were discussed as a key element to creating an enabling environment for learning.  

Good practice in creating an enabling environment for tacit learning is to amend our policies and practices to allow informal learning and mentorship whenever possible. For example, we updated our travel policy that senior staff travelling to the field should stay at least one night where they get to interact with the field office staff informally, share learning and reflection to build stronger relationships. We believe this practice will support us to close the hierarchical culture and power gap within our organisation.  

ALNAP commissioned The Research People to develop a tacit learning resource pack that provides a set of resources that allow frontline workers to identify, capture and share unwritten forms of knowledge and learning generated. To do so, The Research People conducted a document review and expert consultations with humanitarian and learning specialists to understand the state of knowledge on tacit learning in humanitarian settings. To promote local ownership and ensure the resource was relevant to humanitarian working on the frontline, The Research People established a project Steering Group with representatives from national and local humanitarian organisations from Bangladesh, South Sudan/ Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and India. The Steering Group members guided the design, development and testing of the resource pack.