ImprovingU: What It Looks Like to Institutionalize Learning

There is a significant gap between a company that values learning and a company that learns.

The first company talks about learning in every all-hands. It has a Confluence page with a curated list of resources. It might have a budget line item for professional development. But learning is something that happens to individuals who take the initiative, on their own time, based on their own direction.

The second company has built learning into the operating system. Not as a program or a perk — as an operational design decision.

Building ImprovingU was one of the most valuable operational design decisions I made in my time as President. Here is what I learned from doing it.

Values Without Structure Are Wishes

I believed in continuous learning before ImprovingU existed. I said it in talks, I modeled it in my own practice, I asked about it in hiring conversations. And yet, the learning that actually happened in the organization was uneven, undirected, and not compound.

Individuals who were self-directed learners grew. Individuals who needed structure to learn consistently did not. Teams that happened to have a few strong learners built a culture that drew others up. Teams that did not had flat capability curves.

The insight: if you believe in something and want it to happen consistently across an organization, you have to operationalize it. You cannot rely on individual intrinsic motivation to produce organizational-level consistency. Some individuals will always be self-directed. Many will not. The organization that relies on intrinsic motivation for learning will grow unevenly and leave capability on the table.

The ImprovingU Design

ImprovingU had two tiers:

Global tier. Semester-based courses, remote attendance available, wide range of topics, four to twelve meetings per semester. This tier provided structure that transcended geography — anyone in the organization could participate regardless of where they were located. The semester structure created commitment: you were signing up for a sequence, not a single session.

Local tier. Quarterly cadence, journaling and discussion between meetings, topics dot-voted from a backlog. The quarterly structure was slower and deeper: the goal was not exposure to a topic but genuine change in how people thought and practiced. The journaling between sessions was not optional — it was the mechanism by which the quarterly conversation produced lasting effect rather than a one-time insight.

The dot-vote mechanism deserves specific attention. Topics for the local tier were not assigned by leadership; they were selected by the participants from a backlog of submitted ideas, prioritized by vote. This is direct application of Agile prioritization to learning culture: the people doing the learning have the most relevant signal about what they need to learn next. Trusting that signal produces better learning investment than any top-down curriculum design.

What Structured Learning Produces That Unstructured Learning Does Not

Shared vocabulary. When a cohort reads the same book, discusses the same ideas, and journals through the same challenges, they develop a shared language for concepts that previously had no common label. This is not a soft benefit — it directly improves the speed and quality of conversations across the organization.

Accountability without hierarchy. When a group commits to a learning cadence together, peer accountability replaces managerial oversight. The person who shows up without having done the reading feels the social cost of that choice. This is a more durable and less exhausting form of accountability than manager check-ins.

Compound depth vs. surface breadth. The quarterly cadence with journaling between sessions was specifically designed to prevent the "I attended the session, I have the learning" error. Real behavior change requires the period of deliberate application between learning events. The journal creates that period.

The Organizational Outcome

The shift I observed: teams with consistent learning structure had more consistent capability growth, developed shared problem-solving vocabulary faster, and adapted to organizational change more smoothly than teams that did not. The learning was not just individual — it was networked. One person's insight, processed through shared discussion and journaling, became available to the whole cohort.

The implication for any leader: if you want your organization to learn, you have to do the operational design work. Define the cadence. Build the topic selection process. Create the journaling or reflection mechanism. Make participation structurally easy and social accountability high.

Hoping that your values will produce organizational-level learning is not a strategy. It is a wish.

Part of the Thought Leadership series — Thread 1: People, Culture & Organizational Systems. Related: [[T09-mentorship-as-structure]], [[T11-psychological-safety-ai-prerequisite]], [[T14-vocabulary-as-force-multiplier]]