Spotlight on Gunnar Brückner
By Mike Levy (April 2004 Issue)
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Gunnar Brückner was formerly chief learning officer with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). As such, he had responsibility for staff development and learning of 5,000 employees spread over 140 country offices. This led him to conclude that wherever learning takes place, ‘one has to let go and not even attempt to control the learning of such a diverse group of people’. He realised that in an environment as complex as the UNDP, only a fraction of those who needed training could be identified and ‘you were never sure that what you delivered was going to be used’. Against this realisation that top-down learning strategies wouldn’t work, he concluded that ‘we need learning for all, not just for select managers who get flown to a big city’. There needed to be a more self-directed approach to learning that could be accessed by all staff as and when they needed it.
According to Gunnar, ‘You still have to deliver courses, but the “big bang for the buck” is in finding entry points to create learning in a decentralised fashion. And in a hands-off approach.’ In practice this led the UNDP to make big investments in multiple coaching schemes, e-learning, and ways in which learners and coaches or experts can collaborate. ‘The courses we developed had a structure,’ Gunnar recalls, ‘but each was customised based on the real needs on the ground. We began to take the learners and their diverse needs much more seriously.’
Making learners more responsible for their learning was no easy task – especially for an organisation with such diverse cultural norms. ‘There were cultural barriers, but in the UN there is a high degree of motivation and rallying behind a common goal such as the eradication of poverty,’ says Gunnar. Such important goals gave staff the impetus to overcome language or other cultural barriers to learning, he says. ‘Though English was often the main channel of communications, we developed a team of volunteer learning managers/coaches at local level who would (in their spare time) translate our packages into languages such as Brazilian Portuguese. Then there was a general cascading of expertise. The Brazilian manager would translate or adapt material for the Angolan office, they would do the same for Mozambique staff and so on. All this didn’t have to be planned … it happened because a certain kind of learning culture had begun to take root.’
Gunnar’s role was to start off the process so that learning projects could be taken up independently anywhere in the world. ‘Everything was done in the spirit of sharing learning,’ he explains. ‘We did in-house what we preached outside. We democratised learning. Empowerment was part and parcel of the UNDP approach.’
Gunnar believes that what happened at UNDP was not a special case. He is convinced that any organisation with a global reach and a clear vision can kick-start an informal learning programme that will spread to every corner of the globe.
Gunnar, who continues to spend his time creating learning culture all over the world, is now CEO of the Canadian company coachingplatform Inc. He is giving the opening address at this year’s Learning Solutions event.1 His theme is informal learning. How does he define this? ‘It’s learning that is not controlled by the organisation,’ he answers, pointing to many subtle differences between informal, accidental, non-formal learning. Aside from semantics, he says, the bottom line is that one is always dealing with a continuum between formal and less formal learning methods. The big question is where to invest your resources?
‘My experience is that the more intentional your learning, the better you learn. So this means that you must move the learning process to a more intentional direction. It should be the goal of the learning organisation to facilitate this. The potential to do this with informal learning is largely untapped but huge! This is a tremendous responsibility for learning professionals,’ says Gunnar.
Gunner’s recipe for effective informal learning takes a lot of hard work. ‘You need to develop a plan based on the needs of every, and I mean every, individual. You create a blueprint for learning with quite a few blanks where each individual can fill in what they need. You also have to encourage collaborative learning styles. You discover that you learn so much more from your peers than you would ever from a pre-packaged course. Give people time UNDP introduced a ‘5 per cent of staff time for learning’ policy; give them a buddy, a tutor or a mentor for the day. Often if you want to learn how things are done, go and show them, and let them show each other. You can’t put everything in writing or divide it into neat lessons, and you have to recognise that learning styles are so different between individuals.’ And that applies equally to a business-suited executive in Milan as to an engineer in Mali. Help your staff to learn! ‘Learning to learn’ is a starting point and one of the best investments you could possibly make with a view to create continual, self-directed and effective staff development and learning.
Reference
1. Gunnar Brückner will deliver the opening address at this year’s Learning Solutions event on 25 May at the Business Design Centre, Islington.
Gunner can be contacted at gunnar.bruckner@coachingplatform.com or visit http://coachingplatform.com
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