The wheels are starting to come off.
Cracks are appearing in the stories we were raised to believe, and the structures that seemed immovable and certain are beginning to crumble – leaving us in a world that feels volatile, uncertain, fluid, and complex.
In Outgrowing modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira puts the diagnosis sharply:
The deepest challenges humanity faces today are not primarily technical or informational; they are cultural, affective, and relational. If modern cultures fail to ‘grow up’ in time, prompting a significant shift in collective consciousness and behaviour, humanity will remain on a slow-motion path toward premature mass extinction and accelerate the extinction of countless other species. Growing up as a culture is fundamentally an educational challenge, one that modern education has largely failed to confront.
These are the questions driving the work of Collective Impact Agency, a practice committed to building the kinds of learning cultures organisations and communities actually need – and the starting point for a one-day event we are co-hosting with Northumbria University in Newcastle on 17th June, exploring what radically different approaches to learning might look like in practice.
This is a time when deep learning is needed – and yet many of us working in learning spaces cannot help but feel the inadequacy and brittleness of our current learning frames, in higher education and in other learning contexts.
Part of the predicament is that our beliefs about learning have been infected by many of the assumptions and value sets of the collapsing system. Learning has been disembodied and depersonalised, stripped of its essential vitality in the name of turning it into something measurable and palatable, something that can sit neatly in reports.
The head has eaten the heart and the gut
Western culture has spent a long time identifying us with our heads. We talk about “the head of the organisation” or “the head of the family” – never the heart of the organisation, or the gut of the family. We instinctively identify ourselves with the rational, logical part of us, and quietly demote everything else.
The same value judgement runs right through how we organise learning. Strategies must be evidence-based, decisions must be data-driven, and the evidence we’re willing to count tends to be numerical, quantifiable, impersonal, analysable. Qualitative material is the poor cousin – there to bring “colour” to the real, hard data.
But the gut is the seat of intuition. The heart is where we feel loss, connection, and the things we can rarely justify in a meeting but already know to be true. These are not decorative additions to cognition – they’re sources of knowledge in their own right.
A learning culture that severs them in pursuit of measurability is not just impoverished – it’s actively misleading us about what we know. The lived experience that sits in someone’s body, the trauma that makes them attuned to other people’s pain, the knot in the stomach that says “something is wrong here” – these are forms of evidence we can’t afford to keep treating as decorative.
Who I am depends on who else is in the room
A learning room is not a neutral container. “Who I am depends on who else is in the room” – a phrase that has stayed with us from our own collective work – captures something that most learning design quietly ignores.
Whether someone feels able to share an instinct they can’t yet justify, whether they have the confidence to admit to confusion, whether they risk being wrong, has very little to do with the agenda. It has a great deal to do with whether they trust the people next to them, whether power has been laid down at the door, whether the loud voices have left any space for these other contributions.
The corollary is just as uncomfortable. The quality of our thinking is proportional to the quality of the attention we’re given. When people listen deeply, ask probing questions, and genuinely try to understand us rather than wait for their turn, we think more clearly and we learn more completely. Learning deepens when we view it relationally.
Deep listening, on this view, is not a soft skill bolted onto learning – it’s the infrastructure of learning. Without it, you don’t have learning. You have information transfer, which is a much smaller thing than we’ve been pretending.
Beyond reports and dashboards
In our sector, there’s a strong pull to treat learning as a deliverable. We commission learning reports, build dashboards, and turn the messy, embodied, relational business of people changing their minds into a tidy artefact that can be filed, scored, and forgotten.
What we’ve come to suspect is that this damages the very thing it claims to capture. In any space where people are doing things together, latent learning is happening all the time – most of it tacit, most of it living in the hearts and minds of the people involved.
The more an organisation tries to formalise and codify that learning, the more it asks people to translate what they know into evidence that the system will accept, the more it risks crushing the true learning underneath. Often, the report no-one reads is what survives, and the conversation that actually changed how people see the world quietly evaporates.
Formalisation also reactivates a lot of old wounds. Many of the people we ask to “engage with the learning” have spent years being told by formal education that they’re not very good at it. The moment we frame a space as a learning space, those wounds reopen, and people quietly conclude that what they actually know is not worth saying out loud.
Community gives you the hope to try again
If learning is embodied, relational, and partly inarticulable, then the unit of learning is not the individual – it’s the community. Communities of practice, properly understood, are not really about exchanging information; they’re about people building enough trust with each other to challenge and be challenged, to learn with rather than learn about.
This is also why community gives you the hope to try again. “Learning from failure” has become a buzz-phrase, but failing is the easy part – everyone fails. Getting back up is the hard part, and you can’t do that on your own. The relationships are the recovery system.
In order to “grow up”, we need to unlearn much of what we’ve taken for granted about learning itself, and instead craft new collective learning practices, systems, and structures – moving beyond the accumulation of facts and into the development of collective wisdom and sensitivity. That’s a critical challenge for universities and communities alike.
We can’t keep doing THIS: transforming learning for a wicked world will be held at Northumbria University on Wednesday 17 June. Details here.
