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Managing Yourself

How to Become an Agile

Learner
Strategies for honing this in-demand skill. by Helen Tupper
and Sarah Ellis

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How to Become an Agile

Learner
Strategies for honing this in-demand skill. by Helen Tupper
and Sarah Ellis
Published on HBR.org / November 23, 2023 / Reprint H07WKY

Antonio Solano

Learning agility is the skill of learning from experiences so you can

succeed in new situations. It means knowing what to do when you
haven’t done something before, and it’s increasingly important as
“squiggly,” non-linear careers marked with unknowns are becoming
everyone’s reality.

Agile learners can approach the uncertainty and change in their roles
and careers with confidence, knowing their insights and talents will
help them succeed in new situations. Research has found that learning

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agility is a strong indicator of an individual’s potential to succeed in

their present and future job roles. As a result, agile learners are magnets
for more — more opportunities, learning, and possibilities.

For organizations, learning agility is a much sought-after skill to create

a flexible, mobile, and resilient workforce. For example, a leader with
learning agility can successfully transfer their talents across different
parts of an organization. And individuals with high learning agility
become the trusted “go-tos” for high-profile projects and high-impact
positions. Here, we’ll explore what it means to be an agile learner and
outline several strategies for increasing your learning agility.

The Foundation of an Agile Learning Skillset

There are three building blocks of learning agility:

Navigating newness
An agile learner can successfully navigate two different types of
newness: complex work with no blueprint and situations where they
have no previous experience. Where some people struggle with the high
levels of ambiguity that newness creates, agile learners take advantage
of the opportunity and succeed in situations where other people might
stall.

Understanding others
Agile learners are adept at empathizing with and even anticipating
different perspectives. By putting themselves in other people’s shoes,
they can connect dots, spot and resolve potential conflicts, and zoom
out to see the bigger picture. Rather than waiting to be told a different
point of view or that something won’t work, agile learners seek out
dissenting opinions and are open-minded in their approach.

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Self-awareness
Agile learners have high levels of self-awareness. They understand their
impact and seek insight on how they can improve. They are specific
about the support they need and confident enough to ask for help from
others so they can be at their best. They see learning as a constant
and are proactively curious about the world around them, borrowing
brilliance from different people and places.

How to Assess Your Learning Agility

Ask yourself the following questions to get a sense of your current

learning agility:

Navigating newness
1. How often do I work on something for the first time?
2. When have I spent time in my courage zone (i.e., doing something I
find “scary”) over the past three months?
3. How do I respond when priorities and plans change without warning?

Understanding others
1. Who do I have conversations with to learn about people and teams I
have limited knowledge of?
2. How confident am I in high-challenge conversations, where people
have different points of view?
3. How much cognitive diversity (i.e., people who bring a variety of
different experiences, perspectives, and methods) do I have in my
career community?

Self-awareness
1. How do I feel about asking for the help I need to succeed?
2. Where do my strengths have the most impact in the work that I do?
3. How frequently do I ask for feedback on what I do well, and how I
could improve my impact?

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How to Increase Your Learning Agility

Try these strategies to build your own foundation of learning agility:

Navigating newness
Newness is never easy, as our brains prefer that we play it safe by doing
things we’ve done before. It can also be hard to see how to use our skills
successfully in situations that don’t feel familiar. We rely on what we
know as our source of value, rather than how we use our knowledge to
best effect in our organizations. Getting better at working with how to
transfer your knowledge in new situations is an accelerator for learning
agility. It means you can make a positive impact on more people and in
more places.

Start by “subbing” for a colleague or your manager at a meeting

where you’re not the subject matter expert. This is a safe way to
practice adopting a beginner’s mindset, where your starting point is no
knowledge.

Then, try identifying and leading ambitious experiments that make

you uncomfortable because of time or people pressure. For example,
maybe you’re going to try to produce something in a month that would
typically take twice that amount of time. Experiments are a natural
home for developing learning agility, as they can act as a forcing
function for fast learning.

Understanding others
It’s easy to become short-sighted by the demands of our day jobs.
By being laser-focused on our own world, we forget to consider what
matters to other teams or parts of our organization. This means we
miss out on valuable information and insight that increases our learning
agility.

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Start by reflecting on your listening-to-talking ratio. When you’re

talking, you’re rarely learning — you’re telling other people what you
already know. By increasing our listening and decreasing how much
we talk, we create an easy opportunity for learning. Before a meeting,
write down your desired listening-to-talking ratio (e.g., 60%/40%), then
reflect on how you did right after the meeting. Listening is one of
the skills where we tend to overestimate our capabilities, so don’t be
surprised if you’re not where you want to be. Even the intention to listen
more will start to nudge you in the right direction.

Then, try designing empathy experiences. An empathy experience is

putting yourself in other people’s shoes by being in their world. This
goes beyond having a catch-up with someone on a different team and
looks more like spending meaningful time with someone to accelerate
your understanding of their opportunities and obstacles. You might
attend a team’s weekly meeting for a month or shadow a project on a
few key days. Your job during an empathy experience is to listen and
learn. It’s a high-investment and high-effort action but one that pays
dividends in accelerating your learning agility.

Self-awareness
What often gets in the way of developing self-awareness is not a lack
of drive to develop the skill, but a lack of clarity about what needs
to be done differently to become more self-aware. Creating a habit of
practicing some simple self-awareness actions can make a significant
difference to learning agility.

Start by knowing how you want to show up in situations that require

learning agility. What are three words you want people to say about
you in those meetings and moments? Perhaps you want to be seen as
confident, calm, and strategic. This gives you a starting point for your
intent (i.e., how you want to show up). Then ask for feedback — for
example, “How would you describe my impact?” — to see whether your

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intent and impact overlap. Identifying any gaps between your intent
and impact will help you be specific about the action you need to take to
improve.

Next, try to learn — fast. Different and difficult situations are prime
time for learning agility to be developed. During these times of high
challenge, create a learn-fast mind map by reflecting on three questions:

1. What strengths have been most useful for me today?

2. Who and what knowledge helped me succeed?
3. How could I improve my impact in this situation?

Your mind maps will offer you useful data for your development and
can also be a prompt for conversations with managers and mentors
about how to take your agility even further.

•••

Learning agility is an essential skill for individuals and capability for

organizations, but it doesn’t happen by accident. To increase your
learning agility, you need to be aware of where you are today and
identify the specific actions that will support you. We think of this as
creating your learning agility playbook, where you’re deliberate about
developing in ways to increase your agility and, as a result, your impact
on your team and in your organization.

This article was originally published online on November 23, 2023.

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Helen Tupper is the cofounder and CEO of Amazing If, a company

with an ambition to make careers better for everyone. Together with
her business partner Sarah Ellis, she is the author of The Sunday
Times number-one bestseller The Squiggly Career, You Coach You,
and host of the Squiggly Careers podcast. Their TEDx talk, “The best
career path isn’t always a straight line,” has over one million
views. Prior to Amazing If, she held leadership roles at Microsoft,
Virgin, and BP and was awarded the FT & 30% Club’s Women in
Leadership MBA Scholarship.

Sarah Ellis is the cofounder and CEO of Amazing If, a company

with an ambition to make careers better for everyone. Together
with her business partner Helen Tupper, she is the author of The
Sunday Times number-one bestseller The Squiggly Career, You Coach
You, and host of the Squiggly Careers podcast. Their TEDx talk,
“The best career path isn’t always a straight line,” has over one
million views. Prior to Amazing If, Sarah’s career included leadership
roles at Barclays and Sainsbury’s before she become managing
director at creative agency Gravity Road.

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