Where Does the Learning Reside?
By Falahemotu Makapatama and Makapatama Founders and Leveki – Guardians and Stewards of Fakafekauaga-Servantship, FakaFekauaga Catalyst (FFC).
Part Two of The High Performing Collective
The people who are expected to work together learn together
In Beyond Individual Leadership: Developing the Collective through Fakafekauaga, we began with a question that has continued to shape this work: are organisations developing the collective capability they need, or continuing to develop individuals whom we then make responsible for producing it?
In Part One of The High Performing Collective, we took that question into the village foundations of Fakafekauaga. The village could not depend upon one person performing exceptionally well. Its wellbeing and continuity depended upon different people contributing different knowledge, abilities and responsibilities, connected through relationships and through what they served together.
If that is our starting point for developing the collective, another question follows naturally: where does the learning reside?
For many organisations, professional development follows a familiar pathway. A leader or manager participates in a programme, workshop or development experience, gains new knowledge and skills, and returns to their organisation or team. There is then an expectation, sometimes explicit and sometimes assumed, that what they have learned will influence how they lead, how their team works and ultimately how the organisation performs.
There is good reason to invest in individual development. People have particular responsibilities and require knowledge and capability to fulfil them well. The question we are exploring is what happens when the outcomes being sought from that investment depend upon what exists across a group of people, while the developmental experience itself remains concentrated primarily in one person.
The translation between learning and practice
A manager returning from professional development may have encountered new thinking about trust, psychological safety, collaboration, communication, accountability, systems thinking or organisational culture. They return to people who did not share that learning experience and who bring their own knowledge, assumptions, relationships and experiences to the work.
Alongside their operational responsibilities, the manager must now interpret what they have learned, determine what is relevant, communicate it to others and find ways for that learning to influence how people work together. Even where the original development experience is excellent, what reaches the collective inevitably passes through a process of translation.
Learning about collective practice and developing collective practice are different things. A manager can learn about trust, but trust develops through relationships. They can learn about collaboration, but collaboration develops as people work with one another, encounter differences, understand each other's contributions and work through challenges together. Knowledge about these things can be developed by an individual, but the capability to enact them exists across and between people.
There is a limit, therefore, to what even the most capable manager can translate. They cannot experience on behalf of the collective the relational learning that needs to occur between its members. They cannot learn on behalf of someone else what that person contributes, nor can they reproduce through explanation the understanding that develops when people hear one another's experiences, encounter different perspectives, recognise strengths that may previously have been less visible and make sense of their work together.
This is not a criticism of managers. In many respects, it is a question about what organisations have expected of them. We develop one person and then place considerable responsibility upon that person to create something that requires the participation, learning and contribution of others.
The people who work together learn together
Fakafekauaga offers another way of thinking about this pathway because its starting point is not the exceptional individual. Its foundations are found in the village, where collective wellbeing and continuity depended upon people contributing in different ways to something larger than themselves. Different people brought different knowledge, abilities, experiences and responsibilities. The strength of the village did not require those differences to disappear. It depended upon them being understood in relationship to other people and to what the village needed.
Learning sat within those relationships. Knowledge developed through observing and listening to others, through tutala/talanoa/dialogue, participation and practice, and through what was shared between generations. No single person needed to know everything the village required. Knowledge existed among people and within the relationships through which village life continued.
This understanding influences how we approach professional learning and development at FFC. When the people who are expected to work together enter a learning environment together, they encounter the same experience while bringing different knowledge and perspectives to it. Through talanoa, reflection, questioning and collective sense making, they can hear how others understand an issue, discover knowledge already present among them, surface differences that may otherwise remain unseen and develop meaning together.
The learning therefore has the opportunity to reside differently. Instead of depending principally upon one person to interpret the experience for others, people develop their own understanding alongside one another while also developing greater understanding between them. The result is not one interpretation replicated across the group, but a stronger basis from which different people can contribute to what they are collectively trying to achieve.
Developing together does not mean becoming alike
Collective PLD is not created simply by putting a group of individuals through the same programme. People can occupy the same room, hear the same presentation and leave with separate individual interpretations of what they experienced. The number of people participating does not determine whether development has become collective. What matters is what begins to develop between them and how that affects their capacity to contribute together.
The village foundations of Fakafekauaga also challenge any assumption that developing the collective means developing people towards a common way of being. The village did not depend upon everybody possessing the same knowledge, temperament, abilities or responsibilities. Its strength came from people contributing differently while remaining connected through relationships and through what they served together. Difference was not something that needed to be removed before people could function collectively. It was part of what made the collective possible.
That has important implications for development. Someone who is naturally reflective or less inclined to speak frequently should not leave a collective learning experience believing that greater contribution requires them to become more like the most vocal person in the room. They may instead develop a stronger appreciation of their own qualities, greater confidence in the contribution they can make and a better understanding of how that contribution connects with others. At the same time, the people around them may come to understand that person differently and recognise ways of working that allow their contribution to be more fully realised.
The same principle applies more broadly. People enter development with different professional knowledge, cultural knowledge, experiences, abilities, personalities and ways of seeing the world. Collective development should not flatten those differences. It should help people understand how those differences can contribute to what they are there to serve.
One way we understand this within FFC is through lalaga - weaving.
The purpose is not to turn every person into the same strand. It is to help people become better weavers of the different strengths, knowledge and perspectives already present among them. Through learning together, individuals can develop greater understanding of their own contribution while also becoming more aware of what others bring. The development lies partly in learning how those different contributions can be brought into relationship with one another in service of the team, the organisation and ultimately the people and communities their work exists to serve.
There is a progression within this kind of development. I continue to develop as an individual, but I also gain a clearer understanding of what I contribute to the collective. Learning alongside others allows me to understand more of what they contribute as well. From there, we can become better at weaving those differences together rather than expecting everyone to contribute in the same way. The value of the development is therefore not confined to what each person learns individually. It is also found in what we become more capable of doing together and, importantly, how that increased capability enables us to better serve what we are collectively responsible for.
This creates fakamokoi, a reciprocal relationship between individual and collective development. The collective can create an environment in which people better understand and strengthen their own contribution, while individuals become more capable of connecting what they contribute with the strengths, knowledge and perspectives of others. The collective becomes stronger not because difference has been reduced, but because people become better able to work with difference and weave it together.
Individual strength. Collective capability.
Learning to weave our different contributions together.
This understanding of weaving is already present in other areas of FFC's work. In Thinking as a System Weaving, we explore the relationships and interdependencies between people, decisions, actions and the wider systems of which they are part. In Systems Evolution Weaving, that thinking extends across time, asking us to consider what has been inherited, what is required in the present and what we are preparing for those who follow. Weaving, in this sense, is not simply a metaphor for bringing people together. It describes a way of recognising relationships and interdependencies, connecting different contributions and understanding how actions in one part of a collective can affect the wider whole.
Applied to collective PLD, this has an important implication. The facilitator should not remain the person responsible for continually making those connections on behalf of everyone else. Part of what is being developed is the collective's own ability to recognise the knowledge and strengths that exist among its people, understand how those contributions relate to one another and continue weaving them together as circumstances change.
Research into collective and team learning provides an interesting point of conversation with this understanding. Fiol (1994) explored how collective learning can involve sufficient shared understanding for coordinated action without requiring people to hold identical interpretations. Van den Bossche et al. (2011) similarly examined processes including sharing, co construction and constructive conflict through which teams develop shared cognition. These perspectives reinforce something the village foundations of Fakafekauaga make visible to us: the capacity to understand and act together does not require people to become alike.
What do we learn together for?
If people are learning how to weave their different contributions together, another question becomes important: what are they weaving them in service of?
This is where the Five Questions of Service become particularly relevant:
The questions are not intended to produce identical answers from everybody in the room. They create space for people to examine purpose, responsibility and contribution together. A person may understand the organisation's purpose differently because of their role, experience or relationship with the communities it serves. Another may see consequences or responsibilities that others have not considered. Bringing those perspectives together allows the collective to develop a richer understanding of what it serves and what that requires of its people.
The Five Questions therefore connect difference to purpose. They move the developmental conversation beyond what each individual needs to become better at and towards how people's knowledge, relationships, decisions and actions come together around what they collectively serve.
This is why collective development through Fakafekauaga is more than developing people together.
The collective is learning together in service of something.
Learning as something we experience together
This understanding has implications for the design of PLD itself. If the principal purpose of development is to transfer information or build a particular technical skill, individual learning may be entirely appropriate. If the purpose includes strengthening how people think, relate, decide, adapt and work together, the developmental experience needs to provide opportunities for those capabilities to be experienced and practised between the people who will ultimately need them.
This is one reason FFC does not begin from the assumption that the facilitator holds all of the knowledge required by the people in the room. Participants arrive with knowledge from their professions, cultures, families, communities and lived experiences. The facilitator contributes knowledge and helps create the conditions through which people can encounter what others know, examine their own understanding and make sense of what is emerging together.
Fofola e potu, tutala and talanoa, the Five Questions of Service and the Five Core Human Characteristics provide ways of working within that environment. They are more than content to be taught. They enable people to explore purpose, relationships, responsibility and service together, drawing upon knowledge already present while opening space for new understanding to develop.
The collective therefore becomes more than the audience for development. It becomes part of the process through which development occurs.
Established team research provides evidence that teams themselves can be legitimate sites of development. Salas et al. (2008), drawing on 93 effect sizes representing 2,650 teams, found moderate positive relationships between team training interventions and cognitive, affective, teamwork process and performance outcomes. Their findings do not establish the effectiveness of Fakafekauaga informed PLD, which requires its own evaluation, but they do support the broader proposition that capability can be deliberately developed through interventions directed towards teams rather than only through the development of individuals.
The importance of Fakafekauaga does not depend upon this evidence. Its foundations and understanding of learning come from elsewhere. The research allows us to place this thinking in conversation with established scholarship while remaining clear about where Fakafekauaga begins.
So where does the learning reside?
We can now return more directly to the question with which we began.
The learning remains within people because individuals continue to develop their own knowledge, abilities and understanding. Collective development does not remove the individual from learning, nor should it. Each person still needs opportunities to grow, reflect, question and develop greater understanding of themselves and what they contribute.
But when people learn together, something can also develop between them. They can develop greater understanding of one another, stronger relationships, shared ways of making sense of their work and an increased ability to connect their different contributions. Knowledge that previously sat with one person may become visible to others. Assumptions can be surfaced and examined. People can understand more clearly how their decisions and actions affect those around them. They can develop ways of working through difference that could not have been learned on their behalf by somebody else.
The learning therefore resides within people and between people, becoming collective capability through how they understand, connect and weave their different contributions in service of what they are collectively responsible for.
That is the distinction at the heart of this article.
It is also why the question matters beyond the design of a workshop or programme. Where learning resides matters because it influences where capability, responsibility and continuity reside.
When development is concentrated primarily in the manager, much of the responsibility for translating that development into collective practice remains with them. When people develop together, more of the collective has participated in making sense of the learning, understanding its relevance and considering how it applies to their work. The manager continues to have particular responsibilities, but they are no longer the only bridge between development and practice.
For organisations, this changes what can remain after the facilitated experience has ended. People have not simply received the same information. They have had an opportunity to understand one another differently, recognise strengths and knowledge that may previously have been less visible, explore what they collectively serve and practise weaving their different contributions around that responsibility.
The value of the development therefore lies not only in what individuals have learned, but in what the collective has become more capable of doing together.
Where should limited investment go?
This question has particular relevance in the environment organisations are navigating today. Across Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere, financial pressure is forcing organisations to make difficult decisions about where limited resources should be invested. Professional development can come under pressure at precisely the time organisations are asking people to adapt, respond to change, work differently and continue delivering in increasingly challenging circumstances.
The response cannot simply be to argue that organisations should spend more on PLD. Financial constraints are real. They do, however, make it increasingly important to ask what capability organisations need from the development they continue to invest in and where that capability needs to reside.
If the purpose is to develop knowledge or capability specific to the responsibilities of an individual leader or manager, investing in that individual makes sense. If the desired outcome is stronger collaboration, collective adaptability, shared responsibility or a group of people better able to work through complexity together, then there is value in considering whether the people expected to create those outcomes should participate in their development together.
This shifts the investment question. It is no longer concerned only with who attends PLD, but with what the organisation expects to remain after the development has taken place.
That distinction is important. Collective PLD is not simply a larger version of individual PLD in which more people are invited to attend. The developmental intention is different. The collective itself becomes part of what is being developed, and the relationships, understanding and ability to work with difference that emerge between people become part of the capability the organisation is investing in.
What remains after the learning?
That question becomes particularly important when people and organisations change. Managers move, people leave, teams are reorganised and organisations restructure. When knowledge and developmental capability are concentrated heavily in particular individuals, some of what has been developed can leave with them. When people have developed understanding together, more of the relationships, knowledge, shared language and responsibility through which the work continues exist across the collective.
Continuity does not mean keeping everything unchanged. New people bring different knowledge and perspectives, circumstances change, and collectives themselves need to evolve. The difference is that change does not necessarily require the collective to continually rebuild itself around each new manager.
An incoming manager can enter a collective that already understands itself, has established relationships between its people, knows what it is there to achieve and has people who recognise their responsibilities to one another and to what they serve. The manager still has important responsibilities to lead and manage, but the capability of the collective does not have to originate from them.
For Fakafekauaga, this brings us back to stewardship. Development is concerned with what people need now, while also requiring us to consider what is being strengthened for what comes next. When capability exists across the collective, it becomes less dependent upon the continuing presence of any one person and more available as people, responsibilities and circumstances change.
If we have genuinely developed the collective rather than simply developing several individuals within it, then the movement of a manager provides an important opportunity to see what has actually been built.
That leads naturally to the final part of The High Performing Collective.
When the manager changes, what remains?
We will see you on the mat for our final tutala of The High Performing Collective. We look forward to laying it out again when we meet for Part Three.
References
In our Niuean oral culture, knowledge has long been gathered through relationship: observing our elders, listening to our matua and tupuna, participating in village life, engaging in talanoa and making meaning from what we experience together.
Fakafekauaga emerges from this living knowledge. It has been shaped through generations of people whose names may never appear in academic references but whose ways of serving, relating, caring, sharing and preparing for those who followed made the philosophy visible in everyday life.
We also acknowledge the many scholars, practitioners and knowledge traditions that continue to challenge individualistic understandings of leadership and management and contribute to thinking about collective, relational, systemic and sustainable forms of human development.
Fiol, C. M. (1994). Consensus, diversity, and learning in organizations. Organization Science, 5(3), 403–420.
Salas, E., DiazGranados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A meta analysis. Human Factors, 50(6), 903–933.
Van den Bossche, P., Gijselaers, W. H., Segers, M., Woltjer, G., & Kirschner, P. A. (2011). Team learning: Building shared mental models. Instructional Science, 39, 283–301.
Comments