Associations lean on executives’ expertise to effectively steer strategic goals to mission impact. Even as new challenges appear, we draw upon accumulated experience to navigate organizational strategy. However, years of working don’t automatically amount to professional growth. To ensure we are building leadership experience, it’s imperative that professionals lean into learning. By using an organizational framework, or an “operating system,” to guide professional development, associations don’t leave learning opportunities to happen by chance and instead intentionally create them.

We must design a system of adaptive learning, not as a technology platform, but as a continuous learning process applied to strategy execution, assessment, and improvement. This is crucial for preparing executives with facilitating anticipatory, rather than reactive, responses when implementing organizational strategies in analysis and planning, knowledge management, and digital strategy. Learning leaders guide professionals through the system’s learn-measure-adapt steps to realize day-to-day learning moments. A natural and necessary evolution of the leader’s own development is a shift in focus from tactical to strategic execution.

Adopt a Progressive Analysis and Adaptive Planning Framework

Leaders must be able to exercise critical analysis and careful planning when driving associations toward strategic goals. Instituting a process with a progressive series of checkpoints opens numerous opportunities for adaptive learning. For example, strategic plan execution requires constant recalibration. Scanning your current operating environment in conjunction with reviewing business plan key performance indicators (KPIs) at regular intervals, such as quarterly, enables you to consider in a timely way whether issues could significantly impact the success of your strategic plan. Should environmental factors cause you to adjust your strategic priorities, goals, or objectives at this time? This analysis allows you to amend strategic pillars and goalposts, if needed, in response to environmental conditions throughout each year of your plan, not just when developing a new one.

Concurrently, reviewing how well your plan is performing and meeting KPIs informs not only a projection of the year’s results, but also a forecast of the targets you need to meet each subsequent year to reach desired outcomes. How do results impact multiyear strategy? Can you define better objectives to determine success? A dual assessment balances long-term and short-term focus and lets you refine or alter strategies and metrics for the next interval and business plan.

An effective adaptive learning cycle supports steady performance improvement through regular refreshes of strategic and business plans, allowing you to course-correct at every checkpoint. Learning leaders support this system by installing procedures for analysis and sharing lessons learned after each action step. Fostering inclusive spaces for routine collaboration with multiple lenses further propels strategy development and execution that reflects what stakeholders and the mission actually need.

Activate Actionable Knowledge With the Right Information and People

Sharing the right information with the right people at the right time helps leaders collect and disseminate essential data to make informed decisions, breathing life into knowledge management strategy. Applying learning loops ensures that at multiple stages, a metamorphosis from information to understanding to action occurs. For example, in monitoring strategic and business plan performance, this system allows you to perpetually challenge a common pitfall that arises with false confidence in dashboards. At every checkpoint, leaders should examine: Is the data you are collecting the right data? Are your data points adequately supporting your desired outcomes anymore?

Including leading KPIs with lagging indicators helps you get to the right information. You can differentiate between the two types of metrics by asking if the data offers actionable insights. Lagging indicators tell you how a particular strategy has performed. This is useful data, but it’s too late to let you do anything about it. Leading indicators help you forecast and anticipate how well your strategic objectives will perform given this piece of data. Based on what you learn and measure, you can then modify your tactics or metrics in the next interval of planning and execution for better performance.

Learning leaders facilitate the system’s connection of information with the right people and empower stakeholders to participate and take co-ownership of strategy execution. Employ a framework to align steps with the right roles and responsibilities, such as a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) model. At each stage, ask: Who should be engaged and how? Have you invited perspectives from all levels of the organization across all segments and communities? Involving multiple perspectives for different insights creates an inclusive environment that sparks knowledge eruption and transfer.

Integrate Digital Strategies to Facilitate Learning Cycles

The increasing speed with which today’s machine applications expedite information feeds to decision-makers requires us to address digital strategy in an adaptive learning system’s design. Technology solutions must support, not replace, these learning cycles. Continuously conducting the same iterative process of analysis, learning, and adaptation with a strategy on how technology is adopted and employed at each stage improves learning workflows. For example, at each checkpoint, we should consider: How can we use this technology to facilitate the flow of information to the right people? How does it help us organize and store information so that it’s accessible?

Learning leaders support the system by designing a training regimen on how technology solutions should be effectively used and applied. This not only accelerates successful adoption, but also prepares teams to employ them in concert with the learn-measure-adapt steps at review checkpoints. With increased adoption of digital tools, it is important to include a regular efficacy review of standards of use and policies surrounding them. To check and challenge your assumptions, consider: How do governance guardrails support the application of technology in adaptive learning?

Given the nature of ongoing needs analysis rooted in adaptive learning functions, the future of learning relies on learning leaders who have made the transformational ascent from serving as system shepherds to becoming system architects. By designing the quality learning environment that makes ongoing learning opportunities possible, we are helping shape the future success of associations.

A variation of Santayana’s aphorism gives association leaders a final warning: Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. Effective adaptive learning is designed with intention. Institutionalizing recurring learn-measure-adapt loops as an association’s system of operating ensures not only continuous performance improvement, but also meaningful growth in leadership experience gained through knowledge and insight step by step.

Guiding questions for adaptive learning implementation:

• Which milestones, actions, or series of actions should present the most meaningful data to use to assess performance?
  Tip: Include checkpoints after the end of and prior to the start of key project milestones that would most impact success.
• What cadence of review should provide sufficient time to conduct assessment and make adjustments?
  Tip: Increase the frequency of checkpoints during periods of disruption.
• Who should be involved and how?
  Tip: Employ a RACI model to identify the roles and responsibilities needed at each checkpoint.
• What should you do differently to improve your future results?