In this episode, we dive into Emergent Learning and discuss how its principles and practices can support collaboratives navigating uncertainty, complexity, and change.
When collaborative partners come together to tackle complex challenges, learning must be part of the work itself and not an afterthought.
In this new podcast episode, we talk with Lauren Gase of Mindful Metrics and Lori Fuller of Fuller Impact about Emergent Learning and how the principles and practices that are part of Emergent Learning can support collaboratives that are navigating uncertainty, complexity, and change.
This discussion offers practical insights for anyone working in collective impact, backbone roles, or cross-sector partnerships, including:
If you are looking for practical ways to support learning, adaptation, and progress in collaborative work, we invite you to listen to the full episode.
Resources and Footnotes:
More on Collective Impact
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
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Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we explore why learning must be part of collaborative work itself and not something saved for later.
To dig into this topic, we are joined by Lauren Gase of Mindful Metrics and Lori Fuller of Fuller Impact for a conversation on Emergent Learning and how its principles and practices can support collaboratives navigating uncertainty, complexity, and change. Lauren and Lori share practical examples of how groups can learn together as they work, stay aligned around shared goals, and use simple reflection tools to turn experience into insight and action.
Serving as moderator for today’s conversation is the Collective Impact Forum’s Executive Director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I'm Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. Thank you so much for joining us today. As most listeners know, in collective impact work we are all about bringing together a set of people and organizations from across the community to work on making a big difference, to shift systems that are holding problems in place, improve local conditions, and ultimately, improve the lives of folks in our communities. This is hard work. Success relies on working differently to address complex issues where we don’t know the answer when we set out in the work. And so we have to learn as we go. We have to learn from each other, learn about what is shifting in our context, and learn and adapt our work as we go and as it unfolds.
There’s a body of work called emergent learning, a set of principles and practices that can be really useful for folks working in collaboration who are seeking to bring intention to this element of your work. And today we’re going to learn more about emergent learning and how it may help your collaborative make progress.
So without further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Lauren Gase and Lori Fuller to the conversation. Lauren and Lori, I’d love to start by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current work with emergent learning.
Lauren Gase: Hi. It’s so great to be speaking with you today. My name is Lauren Gase, and I believe that evaluation should serve as a catalyst for learning, not just a checkbox for accountability. I'm the founder and principal consultant of Mindful Metrics, where I serve as a strategic partner for government agencies, nonprofits, and foundations, to help them transform how they use data to learn and improve. We worked closely with our clients to support evaluation design, strategic facilitation, and organizational capacity building. We don’t just deliver reports. We create lasting change by building a group’s ability to gather meaningful insights and turn them into action. I joined the emergent learning community in 2020 when I completed the six-month training program offered by Fourth Quadrant Partners, which is now the Emergent Learning Community Project. Since completing the program, I've been privileged to participate in and contribute to monthly community calls, serve as a guest faculty, and contribute to the recently released emergent learning principles guide. And last year I completed the advanced practitioners’ certification. The emergent learning practices, principles, and community have served as a great set of resources in my previous role leading internal evaluation work and now as an independent consultant focused on helping organizations transform how they use data to learn and improve.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Welcome, Lauren. Thanks for joining us. And Lori, over to you.
Lori Fuller: Thanks, Jennifer. Hello, everybody. I am grateful to be a part of this particular conversation today. My name is Lori Fuller. I live in North Carolina. My career has focused on the intersection between strategy, evaluation, and learning. In recent years I've come to deeply believe that networks are really the most powerful way we can create social change. That networks are themost powerful approach in which we can use and apply strategy, evaluation, and learning. I spent 20 years working for a private foundation and then about six years ago I launched Fuller Impact, which is my consulting business. One of the experiences that led me to my current consulting work was joining the emergent learning community back in 2016. That’s when I participated in a year-long training program and became certified as an advanced practitioner in emergent learning. Since then I've served as faculty for several emergent learning cohorts, and also participated in monthly calls like Lauren, and learning summits and other EL gatherings. So it’s really great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thanks, welcome, Lori. And now we’ve referred a few times to emergent learning, but let’s dive in and I’ll start with a really basic question. What is emergent learning?
Lauren Gase: That’s an excellent place to start. Emergent learning is a set of principles and practices that help people across a system think, learn, and adapt together in order to overcome complex challenges, and achieve important social goals.
People often think of learning as a one-off event like a training or as a product like an evaluation report or maybe a PowerPoint presentation, but emergent learning is a habit, a way of expanding our collective thinking in order to grow our ability to achieve the results that we want.
So really concretely emergent learning has a set of nine principles that serve as a foundation for thinking and action. These can be used in different ways and in different situations as well as a set of concrete practices that provide a tangible way to start putting the principles into practice.
Lori Fuller: Lauren has kind of given us a glimpse of a definition of emergent learning which is not easy to do, and I also, I think,in part because it is emerging because it is continuing to be developed now. So the initial concept of emergent learning was developed by Marilyn Darling back in the last century, in the 1990s, and she’s partnered with other consultants since then and continues to really develop and refine those principles and practices in emergent learning.
So Lauren and I use those in our work, those principles and practices, and as we both mentioned in our introductions, we’re also a part of emergent learning community, which is now made up of hundreds of folks who have been trained in emergent learning since 2013. So the community that is now organized as the emergent learning community is part of, is now a project of the Global Philanthropy Partnership. So in addition to training opportunities, that community is holding annual meetings and monthly calls and other things through that community and recently published that free guide to principles of emergent learning in 2023 that Lauren mentioned participating in. And I think that guide being online and available really illustrates how emergent learning is a both/and. It’s a structured framework. There’s formal training. There’s certification and there’s a dedicated community of folks in that framework of emergent learning. And at the same time, it’s also a set of really adaptable ideas that are freely available to anyone working towards social change. So it’s not just one or the other. It’s both.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great. So we can definitely put a link to that guide in the show notes so people can check it out which would be a great next step for folks listening. But let’s dive into some of the components that you both have mentioned are part of the emergent learning approach. You’ve mentioned principles and you’ve mentioned practices. So I think we should start with some principles. Could each of you uplift one or two of the key principles and share a little bit more about what it is or what it means to hold that principle in a collaborative’s work? Maybe I’ll look to you, Lori, to start.
Lori Fuller: Thanks, Jennifer. The principles of emergent learning are interconnected and can really hold a lot of wisdom for collaborative efforts. While individual principles may seem familiar to those experienced in social change work, their combined application creates a really powerful approach. So one example is strengthening the line of sight. That aligns with establishing a shared goal or a North Star. It’s similar to the common agenda in collective impact. Strengthening line of sight, it’s not a new concept, but its effectiveness increases when it’s used alongside the other emergent learning principles. I often start with another emergent learning principle, making thinking visible. This involves clearly communicating strategies and their underlying ideas to ensure that everyone in a group understands and can engage with them. So in one example I actually secured a consulting contract with a coalition of nonprofits and foundations by mapping out their own thinking, which was initially presented to me and others in a typical request for proposals. There were lots of sections. There were really long narratives, and it had, because it probably was, that kind of written-by-committee feel. It was a lot of different ideas. So I mapped their thinking out and gave it back to them in a single visual which really was a simple theory of change. It had their key hypotheses. It had their intended results, but it had it all together in one place, so by making their thinking visible I facilitated better understanding and alignment and progress. Especially in collaborative work, this principle can be really crucial for enabling—this is what enables networks to really learn and adapt over time to achieve results when their thinking is made visible to themselves and to each other.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, so making thinking visible, one of the principles, and then you also mentioned strengthening line of sight. Lori, before we go over to you, Lauren, Lori, I was going to ask can you say a little bit more about strengthening line of sight? I'm not sure I totally followed what that one means.
Lori Fuller: So strengthening line of sight is having that ultimate goal or the why of a piece of work and that it’s held collectively. That’s the strengthening piece. And so that folks are clear and holding that goal in their work so they have something to learn towards, they have a common agenda of what their North Star is for that project. That’s one of the things that allows for emergence if a group knows what their line of sight is, what their greatest intended result is. Then they can make their thinking visible about well, this is what I think it will take to get to that line of sight.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you. That’s super helpful and really consistent with one of the things they often talk about in collective impact work. You mentioned the common agenda and having a very clear result that everyone who’s around the proverbial table holds and understands and actually quite often, if you ask a group of folks around the table, why are we all here? What are we working to achieve? You might not get the same answer from everyone. And so having that shared strong line of sight, I think is super important. So, thank you for elaborating on that. So strengthening line of sight and making thinking visible. Lauren, we’d love to hear from you as well.
Lauren Gase: A principle called maximizing freedom to experiment that I think can be a really useful principle to apply in terms of identifying the mutually reinforcing activities. So the principle of freedom to experiment gives partners the freedom to choose the activities that on the basis of their experience and perspective are most likely to lead to the collaborative’s goals or the desired outcomes. But it’s not just that everyone goes off and does whatever they want and works in their own direction. Importantly, freedom to experiment includes an expectation that partners will assess and learn from the results of their individual actions, their experiments. Thus, there’s accountability to use the information they gain to inform future action. So think of it this way. Lori had mentioned line of sight. If we’re playing soccer we have a shared line of sight. In this case we want to win the game and in order to win the game we need to score goals. But there are many different plays or strategies that we could use to score the goal. So maybe you're starting to see some of the value of collective impact initiatives. Employing freedom to experiment helps create the space for partners to bring their perspectives and ideas to the table. And this can really foster shared ownership and buy-in to give partners the opportunity to align their passions with their commitment. As a short example, I've worked with a collaborative that seeks to advance racial equity in the criminal justice system. I help partners leverage this principle of freedom to experiment to identify their mutually reinforcing activities. One group wanted to work on advancing diversion programs. Another wanted to start with community listening sessions. Another wanted to work on plea guidelines, and in this way, they were each defining their work within a set of parameters to help get to the goal, but not everyone had the exact same set of activities. So this approach not only increases buy-in, but it can help create the conditions to learn faster and better because as folks are bringing their learnings back to the table we can compare and contrast the success, the different solutions, to help understand which are more effective, maybe which were better together, which were better under certain circumstances, etc.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Great. Thank you. So we have also maximize freedom to experiment, and again, there are more of these principles that are in the guide that I encourage folks to check out. And also, circle back to I believe it was Lori, you mentioned we don’t typically take them just one by one. We think of them holistically so it’s a little bit of a figment that I'm asking you to pick out just a few, but we want to whet folks’ appetite to dive in further using the guide that you all mentioned earlier. So that’s a little bit about the practices of emergent learning. Let’s also talk a little bit, sorry, about the principles of emergent learning. Let’s also talk about some of the practices. So, Lauren, why don’t you kick us off talking about one or more of the essential practices that folks should consider.
Lauren Gase: Emergent learning practices a lot of times can help support strategic reflection within collective impact initiatives. One example is this concept called the Emergent Learning Table. It’s a great practical tool that a backbone organization, for example, could use to facilitate a conversation with partners around a shared question to help reflect on what do we know so far. So really concretely, an emergent learning table has four quadrants that you work through. You start with sharing stories and data and then you make meaning of that data to identify insights. Then you identify hypotheses, ideas about what to do next, and finally, opportunities to test that thinking. So it’s a great tool to help bring past work into future planning in a structured way. So I worked with a group to conduct an emergent learning table related to the question what will it take to ensure that schools can address the physical, social, emotional, and behavioral health needs of students. We had a collaborative session where partners took turns sharing stories and data and really working our way through those four quadrants. What’s great is that the results from this exercise can then directly inform not only the action plan but also the learning agenda and the shared measurement system for the initiative. And the group I was working with, one of the hypotheses was if we create structures to help school leaders learn from each other then school leaders will be better equipped to implement health-promoting policies. So with this hypothesis it helped us identify the value of collecting data around the extent to which school leaders were able to learn from each other. So measuring things like strength of connection, number and types of resources shared, whether school leaders felt those resources were valuable, as well as the extent of school wellness policy implementation.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: And is that with the table, is it sort of cyclical that you would kind of move through that cycle multiple times as you're piloting the experiment or putting that strategy into practice?
Lauren Gase: So what’s great about emergent learning tables is that identifying those hypotheses, then those can form the basis for another emergent learning practice which is the learning agenda. So you can really take your hypotheses and cut them into a learning agenda where you then keep track over time about what you're learning about your question of interest and your hypotheses, which exactly as you're saying, then feeds back into the next reflection conversation that you have. For example, doing another emergent learning table. So, exactly. Over time it helps you evolve your hypotheses and really generate some clear insights.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s interesting. Are you familiar with the PDSA cycle, like plan, do, study, act? We sometimes talk about that in Collective Impact Forum trainings and I'm wondering how this is maybe similar or different, if there are other folks thinking about PDSA cycles. How does the emergent learning table fit with that?
Lauren Gase: I think one of the things that I really like about emergent learning tables is that it always starts by asking you to bring in and start with what you know so far. So you're reflecting really concretely on situations or pieces of data that are related to your question of interest. And so you're anchoring in really concrete examples where you're then starting to generate insights and hypotheses and move forward. So one thing I think is that we tend to do sometimes especially when we’re feeling time constraints is we start like, to start from a blank piece of paper. This tool, this Emergent Learning Table really helps you not to do that. It really helps you have some intentional structured reflection on what it is you're trying to achieve and what you know already about the situation that can help you move forward.
Lori Fuller: I agree with that and PDSA is a great example that a lot of folks use if they’re using continuous quality improvement or a similar type of framework. When folks do combine and weave together different frameworks to make them work which is another thing I love about EL, is that it has that flexibility and adaptability. I know folks have used especially in let’s say statewide public health initiatives, where PDSAs are a part of the culture and the work of folks on those collaborative issues have incorporated PDSA and other tools into and including emergent learning. I think one of the things in addition to what Lauren said is it has a nuance that’s different in that in the EL tables you can also start in different quadrants. So you might already have your set of hypotheses but to use one of those earlier principles, you haven’t really made your thinking visible so you might kind of work backwards or counterclockwise on that two by—on that four-quadrant table or two-by-two table. I remember in 2016 trying to figure out what table are they talking about because they often talk about meeting around collaborative tables and I kept trying to figure out what the table was. I completely missed for a long time that it was a two-by-two table. So if you’ve got your hypotheses, you’ve got your strategies, you might ask folks to start showing, well, what beliefs is that on or tell me a story about how you got to those ideas that if we do this, then it will lead to something else. So it does have that type of flexibility that doesn’t, where a PDSA cycle starts at one point and goes in the same direction.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you both for clarifying and saying a little bit more about that powerful practice. Lori, is there a practice that you’d like to also bring in building on the one Lauren shared about the EL table?
Lori Fuller: Sure, and I think one of the things, it actually fits with the example you were asking, Jennifer, about kind of doing it over time. That’s one of the ways you can use the tool, the practice I’m thinking about Before Action Reviews and After Action Reviews so you might use these once you’ve done an EL table and decided what your next opportunities are to test out those strategies, those hypotheses, you might gather some of the lessons learned in Before and After Action Reviews along the way and then use those to populate and talk about and be your stories and data in a later emergent learning table. And at the same time, they don’t have to be paired with a practice. You could do just a Before Action Review and not do an After Action Review. You could even pick some of the questions from a Before Action Review if that fits what’s helpful for a group. So the Before Action Review I’ll often refer to as a BAR and an After Action Review an AAR. They’re really just a simple set of questions, and the sets of questions are slightly different, and they really are made to be used, as I said, by themselves or together. So I used Before and After Action Reviews in a collaborative initiative where local residents who were hiredas community advisors, and with the help of a coach who is a staff member of the backbone of this particular initiative, that staff member has been assigned to help those community advisors plan and implement neighborhood projects. It might be around issues like gun violence prevention and somebody else might be doing events around family engagement and local public schools so this coach needs to support the community advisors in doing this and at the same time collect information and report back to the backbone group as well as the advisory board of the initiative. So everyone’s so aware at the same time because this is a large federally funded project, they’re needing to collect information and document what’s happening for the grant report and the evaluation. It’s also a really new type of work for the coach, for the folks on the backbone that are leading this work that is very community based, for those community advisors who are thinking—who are really given the freedom to plan these community events and also needing to document those and bring them back and have them aligned to the collective work. So because everything feels pretty new, it’s really important, this opportunity of all this federal funding to do something really critical and new in community. There’s a lot of urgency to do it well, and to do that they’re all having to learn in really immediate time, and this is a project that really is currently ongoing so when the coach came to me about what he had been tasked to do and what the community advisors are being asked to do, we set up a system so that he can use these Before and After Action Reviews. So the coach will work with each community advisor separately and they will together do BAR and an AAR after each of their events so they’ll be bookends to each of their events, and they’ll continue to do those. So the coach will be in a position because he’ll be helping to facilitate those conversations to document some of that information from those conversations. He’ll be able to take what’s being learned from one community advisor to another because even if they’re doing very different types of events or different types of content, it still might be really similar issues like they might be faced with low attendance because of issues of transportation, because of the location they chose so they also might be different groups that are both working with the Spanish-speaking community so even if it’s gun violence and school engagement, there are still probably similarities that they can learnacross those projects. The other thing that the backbone can use that information for from those Before and After Action Reviews, it’s tied in with and the evaluation team has reviewed and had some input into those BAR and AAR templates that the coach is going to use so that it’s designed to actually get folks the information they need for both the evaluation and to really think about this new type of work and adjust it in multiple grant years over time.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: And maybe just double clicking for example on the Before Action Review, what are some of the kinds of questions that someone might reflect on?
Lori Fuller: Yeah, so the Before Action Review starts out with, and again here’s that strengthening line of sight principle in practice of a Before Action Review, the first question is what are intended results, and that’s one again that could be used as a one-off question in a meeting just to ground ourself, now, why is it we’re doing this, so that we’re not just doing collaboration for example for collaboration’s sake. It’s what are we trying to accomplish? What will that collaboration make possible? So BARs start with what are intended results and what does success look like was the second question. That one’s a fascinating one because it often feels one and the same, and at times that question of what does success look like, I find it really pulls out the nuance of, for example, I’ve done it internally around planning a board meeting or a trustees meeting. You know what success is going to feel like. There might be a certain energy or somebody’s leaving happy and smiling or there’s a sense of you know you did it and saying some of those things ahead of time can allow folks to really all be on the same page of that’s where we’re headed.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great. That’s great. I was actually part of a Before Action Review a few weeks ago that used the Before Action Review questions and it generated, I will just say, I didn’t realize it was from emergent learning at the time but it generated a really robust conversation across a group of folks who hadn’t worked together before, and they were really discussing what it would look like for success for a new grant program and how would they know what success looked like, and thinking ahead about some of their challenges so as a recent participant in one of these, I can attest to being really powerful so we’ll have to wait and see what the After Action Review says. It is now live still.
So this is great. We’ve talked about the idea of principles and shared a few, and emergent learning practices and shared a few. How can—I’m curious how you have seen emergent learning be helpful with groups that might be facing or working through some challenges in their work. So I know, I imagine the emergent learning principles can be helpful in this way as well, not only planning up front but also working through challenges. Can you share a few reflections on how that might look for folks?
Lori Fuller: I can jump in and start this one. I think what you’ve just mentioned, Jennifer, in the Before Action Review example is the challenge of folks haven’t worked together before meaning that teams are new or teams are coming from different teams on a particular project or piece of work, and one thing that I found in many of the deeper collective impact or other collaborations I’ve been a part of is that folks are from different sectors with very different training and very different perspectives and very different ideas about the work they are doing and the work we should be doing together so those different perspectives are often one of the challenges that I’ve experienced. I’ll share an example of a cross-sector network that I’ve been working with for four years, and I’ve used EL in different ways over time to work with this group and often it’s around those different perspectives in the room. So this is a school justice partnership which is aimed to reduce both exclusionary school discipline, primarily suspensions, as well as court referrals for students for things that happen in schools. So even from the very start bringing together local public school leadership from the superintendent on down, law enforcement, the manager of the team of school resource officers from the sheriff’s office, it’s also bringing in juvenile court folks that are doing intakes for the juvenile complaints, and it’s bringing in youth-serving nonprofits and the folks both directing those agencies and running the programs that work with young folks. So there are a lot of different perspectives in that group just to start out. So I used emergent learning from the very beginning because we were given an initiative model. The initiative came from a state level and we were applying it at a local level so already there you’ve got context that’s different, and the state level was very much from a court and judicial perspective, and that wasn’t necessarily where this group wanted or needed to focus in the local county. So we used emergent learning from the very beginning to really make it our own to create alignment across those different groups to find that zone of things that they did agree on or could at least agree to work on from a common line of sight. So we developed that common line of sight, we used Before and After Action Reviews to gather data and facilitate discussions. I think about different perspectives, like you mentioned, Jennifer, in the Before Action Review, everybody could bring something in even though they hadn’t been on the same team, and emergent learning tables allow that too because you can bring in similar work that wasn’t exactly the same where you’ve learned or have insights from what has helped or not helped in the past on similar issues so it really does kind of open up that room so that there can be more voices around that table even if they have different opinions. Even some of the hypotheses and strategies that Lauren talked about at the end of—you might walk away at the end of an emergent learning table with this set of hypotheses. Some of them can actually be competing. That one part of the group thinks that if we go in one direction we’ll get to that goal and somebody else has a very different idea that is actually opposing, and EL holds that space to be able to try both of those out and then learn collectively from that. So that’s one way that EL kind of helps this space of very different perspectives. I mentioned that this cross-sector network has been going for four years. Thank goodness for emergent learning because it’s allowed me as the facilitator, as the network weaver, to really kind of hold the space for this somewhat loose group collaboration because they’re not doing, they’re not sharing funding and doing projects deeply together but they’re literally in each other’s buildings and working with the same students so having this collaboration over time even when things have changed, because we couldn’t talk about something we couldn’t have planned out from the beginning, there is no way that this work could be linear. Things have happened in the community directly in those four years that we couldn’t have predicted and have significantly changed the setting that we’re working in so we’ve been able to adapt as we go as things happen and really emergent learning helps us test out our assumptions because it’s not whether something is right or wrong in making our thinking visible, it’s putting it out there. It’s making it explicit, and once we make it explicit, then we can ask each other questions or agree that we have a competing hypothesis, that our thinking is different. So it’s allowed me to help facilitate and hold a space that has been one where folks could stay engaged in over multiple years. At this point it still has its challenges, and at the same time we’ve had some wins. This group has more connections among each other. They just simply did not know each other sometimes within that same sector, the same youth serving nonprofits who were getting funding from the same source weren’t working together, weren’t intentionally meeting together until this particular collaborative. We’ve also started now as new community collaboratives have come up in community which is another thing I feel like has happened at different times. It certainly happened where I live. There’s one collective impact group and now here’s one over here in housing, and there’s one over there in food, and, oh, yeah, there’s one in early education or sometimes they’re even closer than that even in the issues. So this justice partnership has been able to intersect and kind of weave together and partner with what is now the local My Brother’s Keeper collaborative group and together there’s a lot of the same people, and it’s certainly a lot of the same organizations but we’ve been able to bring different strengths and different histories and partner together and have some policy wins. We were really excited to see a new discipline policy that changed some things about out-of-school suspensions for our youngest learners, kindergarten through third grade, and actually have seen some really dramatic drops in both out-of-school and in-school suspensions for those youngest kids. So it makes it worth it, kind of continuing to work together even when people rub each other the wrong way and have very different ideas about how we should be handling behavior and discipline in schools.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you for sharing that, Lori, and you touched on quite a few different challenges in the relationships, shifting context, and new additions coming on line and figuring out how different bodies of work fit together, and also using this to advance policy wins that really led to real-time impact on students in the region so that’s a wonderful example. Thank you so much. How about you, Lauren? What comes up for you when it comes to emergent learning really working through some of the challenges that a group might be exploring or facing?
Lauren Gase: Yeah, I think one of the challenges that immediately comes to mind is that collaborative work is time intensive and difficult for a variety of reasons, and emergent learning can help us figure out if collective impact is the right approach for our work. So one example, I worked with a Colorado-based collective impact initiative where a group of nonprofits had come together for a place-based initiative to enhance the provision of services for businesses as well as the resident community, and after some initial work some friction points arose and we realized that we needed to come together and step back, have an honest dialogue, and hope to surface some of the underlying assumptions that had come to light over the initial period of working together. And so we used emergent learning principles including strengthening line of sight, making thinking visible, and asking powerful questions in order to facilitate a half-day retreat. And during that time we asked each organization to talk about their core vision, their core mission, and how it might fold into a common agenda, and what it would really take to achieve the common agenda, and through this process each organization was able to make their perspective and thinking visible, and ultimately what came to be was that the group determined that there really wasn’t sufficient alignment between their organizational work, the areas where their organization felt comfortable providing services and what the community really needed at that time. And so therefore the group decided not to move forward with the collective impact initiative as that group of partners. And I think we have to think about this as a real win because sometimes we assume that more collaboration is always better but the fact of the matter is collaboration takes time and effort, and if the collaborative is not helping us to accomplish our goals, if it’s not meeting what the community needs, then it’s good to let that go and really make space for other work.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, thank you, Lauren. One of my favorite expressions that comes to mind that at least I don’t know if you’ve heard it but I learned from John Kania who is a long-time FSG colleague and author of the original collective impact article. He would always say is the juice worth the squeeze, and as you said, collective impact and this kind of collaboration is designed to tackle really big challenges and it can be very important but it isn’t always the right solution. So those practices can help a group really come to that decision as well, is the juice worth the squeeze. Well, you’ve talked a lot about the power that emergent learning can bring into this work but I’m also curious what challenges might make emergent learning difficult to bring into the culture or the practices of an organization or a collaborative, and what folks might be able to do to overcome some of those challenges.
Lauren Gase: Yeah, I can kick this one off. What I really love about emergent learning is that it’s so practical and relevant for so many different kinds of situations or problems that you’re trying to solve. For example, trying to figure out how to bring people together, how to implement a strategy or as I mentioned before, how to make sure you’re not starting from a blank piece of paper in planning your work. And sometimes you can take one of the practices really off the shelf and use it as it is. But there’s also the opportunity to use the principles and apply them in whatever way makes the most sense for your organization or your situation, and that flexibility is really built in. In this way I think about it more like creative cooking versus following a very precise recipe. However, that being said, in order to advance the principles and practices of EL, it really helps to have a supportive culture, one that values diverse perspectives, curiosity and co-creating solutions, and I’ve definitely found that certain beliefs or organizational norms can make advancing emergent learning very challenging. For example, thinking there’s only one right way to solve a problem, a focus on perfectionism and avoidance of risk or a lack of psychological safety where partners just don’t feel comfortable sharing their opinions and perspectives. As we’re all aware I think, shifting culture and power within organizations or within collaboratives can be very challenging, and there are ways to leverage some emergent learning principles to help shift organizational culture. For example, making thinking visible can help organizations or partners uncover unconscious norms and biases so these issues can be acknowledged and addressed. As another example, stewarding learning through time starts to shift a group’s culture by helping transform learning from one-off disjointed activities to that iterative cycle that we were talking about earlier of asking and answering questions to accelerate and deepen impact and really starting to build that learning culture.
Lori Fuller: I think that’s so important, Lauren, the different ways that EL can be used and sometimes folks can find that as the challenge because like, oh, what am I supposed to do that is emergent learning here, and there’s not one right answer. So that flexibility can sometimes be the challenge. I’ve also tried to and have applied emergent learning in a lot of diverse settings, a lot of very different groups of folks and so that all brings different challenges and opportunities. I did it internal to a foundation during staff changes, and the kind of stress of that. I’ve done it with resident-based community learning groups around the public benefits cliff where we were trying to learn about this large policy-driven situation that was very directly impacting folks in the room. I’m even doing it now with my own religious community as a volunteer as we’re thinking about how to respond to the current political context in the U.S. so I think as well as it being flexible in how you use emergent learning, where you use it can be wide open too which again can create challenges if it feels kind of everything and anything, can be game. I will say in those examples I’ve given, none of them was appropriate or a good fit to use emergent learning completely across the board as the framing for collective learning for the group over time. And so even if it wasn’t suitable for that, whether it was the length of the project or as Lauren talked about, the culture, the leadership in the organization. Sometimes it was emergent learning wasn’t the framework solution for the group for their collective learning because of my role in the group or what control I had or relationships I had or didn’t have with that group in bringing—it would have been a challenge for me to bring emergent learning in a deeper way in some of those situations so I really think in those cases, going to the simple actions of asking a question like what would this make possible, to make thinking visible, to really make those strategies explicit so that we can test those ideas out, and to really lean into the idea that EL can be—is flexible, that it’s not rigid, it’s not all or nothing, and really experiment with adapting and using elements based on what’s useful in your specific context. That way you can keep experimenting too as context changes.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Maybe building on that idea that it’s not all or nothing, what is one step an individual can take to bring emergent learning more into their practice if they’re intrigued to get started?
Lori Fuller: Yes, that is somebody who—I was smiling as Lauren was telling her story about creative cooking and using that as the metaphor. I’d be like give me the recipe. Whether it’s in the kitchen or sometimes with groups, it’s give me some steps to follow. So for me the most important thing an individual can do is to actually try it, just to step in and do something. Try one question from a Before or After Action Review in a meeting and see what happens. You might partner with, there might be a certain person in that organization or collaborative that you think they’d be really open to trying something out and testing and seeing what happens so you might do it with someone you think would be a good partner with to test out. Let’s talk about this principle or can we do—can we try something new and do a Before Action Review or before something coming up. Another way I’ve learned and I especially learned early on was to try the practices myself to get comfortable with the questions and the language so it could be your own project at work or it could be something you know you’ve got control over because you’re going to facilitate this meeting so you can experiment and test it out even if you don’t tell people that, hey, I’m going to do EL now, watch out. You could just kind of weave some of that in. You can also use it in your personal life. I know during the pandemic I was applying emergent learning to parenting during the pandemic as a way to think about what I was trying to accomplish and deal with the actual reality of the work and the life that was right in front of us at that point.
Lauren Gase: Just picking up on that, one of my favorite principles of emergent learning and I can't believe I haven’t mentioned it until now is keeping work at the center which means using emergent learning to solve a real challenge or an issue that you’re currently facing, and so a way to start would really be to ask yourself what work is in front of you. What opportunity or challenge is coming up on your calendar this week. So say you have a high-stakes meeting coming up. As a part of the planning maybe you do some self-reflection or as Lori was mentioning, even better, pull a couple of people together and do a quick Before and After Action Review to get aligned. What are our intended results with this meeting? What does success look like? What challenges might we encounter? What have we learned from similar situations, and what will make us successful this time? And then use those results to help you sketch out an agenda and a facilitation strategy. What I love about what Lori was saying is the key is to help make learning a part of what you’re doing now, as a part of what you’re facing in your ongoing work, not something extra.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That is all very practical advice and great tips for getting started. I’m already thinking of ways to try doing a little bit of this in my week so thank you. So I really appreciate all of the wisdom and learning expertise that you have brought in and the real-life examples of how you all have used and facilitated emergent learning with groups and with individuals and organizations so thank you all. If folks are interested in continuing to follow your work, can you both let us know where to find each of you?
Lauren Gase: Absolutely. You can learn all about emergent learning and the Emergent Learning Community Project, a fiscally sponsored project of Global Philanthropy Partnership at
emergentlearning.org, and you can learn more about me and Mindful Metrics at
mmevaluation.com or connect with me, Lauren Gase on LinkedIn.
Lori Fuller: You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well or my website is
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, Lori and Lauren, thank you both for joining today. I know I have learned a lot and I’m sure our listeners have too so on behalf of the Collective Impact Forum team, I just want to thank you both and wish both of you and everyone listening a wonderful day. Thank you.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for the 2026 Collective Impact Action Summit, that will be held online this April 14-16, 2026. It’s our biggest learning event of the year, featuring over 30 virtual sessions, and sharing out best practices from collaboratives from across the U.S. and globally. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to join the 2026 Collective Impact Action Summit. We hope you can join us.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.