As practitioners of people-centred service design and agile delivery, my Stick People partners and I have been privileged to design and deliver specialised learning programmes for public and private sector organisations.

Recently we’ve been thinking about the things that make learning at work truly effective. To paraphrase the Agile Manifesto, we are uncovering better ways of learning, by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Shared purpose over organisational targets

Learning by doing over teaching to the test

Social construction over content transmission

Designing for diversity over delivering standard courses

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

This post sets out the thinking behind each of those value statements and ends with some principles. It’s an early draft on which I’d welcome any input. Thanks to Edmund Edgar, Rob Banathy and Victoria Betton