We often work with organisations in social work and social care on developing learning and support systems within their processes/procedures, and in their wider team support and behaviours. What we have found is that building a learning culture provides a strong platform to make progress and change. And we try to mirror that within Iriss…
Every year the Iriss team meets for learning week – it’s a time that we make in our calendars to pause day-to-day work and focus on learning, evaluating and planning – for us as a collective and for ourselves individually.
After a few years of doing this – and learning as we go about how to do it well – we can support your team to bring this valuable space and learning activity into your work.
With a focus on evaluation, learning, reflection, and planning, our approach helps to identify and understand what team members are seeing and learning across different parts of the systems, connect these different strands and ways of thinking, and translate them into action. For us, this has gone from being seen as a luxury, to an absolute necessity in how we learn from our recent work, and how we plan for the future. Our Learning Week activities build on, and inform, the reflecting and evaluating we do across the year in different spaces like team meetings and quarterly programme reflection sessions.
From planning, to bringing the team together (a good lunch and snacks really help), making meaning from what we individually do, see and learn, translating that into action (so it doesn’t get lost on a flipchart paper) and building in important time for people to learn, reflect and reset individually. Iriss can help you create your learning week to suit your team’s needs and aspirations.
We can help with…
- Ideas for tools and session design to help you do this in person and hybrid.
- Planning, pace and structure for taking a week out of daily work activities to focus on collective and individual learning.
- Prioritising what to focus on, when everything is important and you want to take action immediately! The flexible Iriss innovation process of explore, image, shape, realise can really support you to plan ahead and develop your next steps.
- Building on what you already do to plan, evaluate and learn to incorporate a learning week into your annual work cycle.
We also offer coaching, self evaluation and innovation design workshops to support you to go into more depth.
We’ll work with you to develop a learning week that celebrates your impact and hard work, and amplifies individual and team successes – while setting everyone up for more learning and action. We can also work with you to help practically embed learning and support into your wider structures and processes.
To start a conversation about how Iriss can help you develop your own learning week, contact us at services@iriss.org.uk
