The pace of change in the way that an organisation undertakes its business and communicates with its customers and patrons is increasingly aligned to the rate of change we are experiencing in software development and supporting mobile digital devices; access to content is king. To keep pace with this rapid state of constant change, we need to keep learning and adapting and innovating. This raises questions. What makes us good at learning? Are we able to experiment effectively whilst delivering services to clients? Erika Anderson (Harvard Business Review, March 2016, p. 98) has found ‘people that do succeed at this kind of learning have four well developed attributes: aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity and vulnerability’. The learning curve may be steeper for some than others, but with these four attributes we can scale anything. We can access new products, alternative markets and peoples well beyond our immediate location, breaking beyond traditional boundaries, acquiring knowledge and building new capabilities.

Learning to learn