For me, the first part of learning week is putting my out-of-office response on. Iriss is closed for our annual learning week, it says. We are valuing our learning and connections as a team, it implies. It’s a nice feeling.
Arriving at the Social Hub in Glasgow there’s hugs and catch-ups. Haven’t seen you, in-person, for ages! How’s that project going? Me, well, yes it’s busy (a common theme). Let’s have another one of those tasty pastries. Then we’re all called to order: we begin.
Iriss learning week is a precious thing, and this is our fourth. We have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all together, then Thursday and Friday for our own personal reflection and development. It’s a lot to ask everyone to put their work on hold for an entire week, all at once. Learning week takes place at a crucial stage in the Iriss year (it comes during Quarter Four, traditionally our busiest time). That means the payoff, both for individuals and for Iriss as a whole, must be very worth it.
The immediate impact I notice, as we start our first session – collective reflection on the past year – is that we all slow down a bit from our default busy-ness setting. Our eyes dart about a little bit less. We know that, in this space, we can share, we can evolve ideas, and we can ruminate on our points together. “People are messy and life is messy,” one of us reflected. “I found relief in learning how the team grapple with the complexity of the work.”
After the first morning of collective reflection, we moved on to planning for next year. I found the order of this very important. Too often, circumstances compel us to plan out the next step before we’ve settled our minds down from what’s gone before; but having this follow on from the group reflection allowed us to translate our recent experiences into our future. Some things we’d do differently, some things we know work and can do more of the same, other things need tweaks or refinements. “We aren’t too rigid,” a colleague said. “We are accompanying the sector, and adapting as it shifts, too.”
Day two was all about evaluation. Katie, our Research Analysis Lead had devised a Winter Olympics themed presentation – amazing skills! – and we thought about what evaluating our impact meant to us. It can be really hard to do, we acknowledged. We might feel that we make a difference, but how do we prove it? Katie, together with one of our Development Leads – Louise – were unbelievably creative when it came to helping us think in different ways about demonstrating our impact. They also helped us share the impact we had on each other. We were encouraged to, anonymously, write things that we valued in our teammates. When I sat down and read mine, my heart skipped.
Our final sessions were a mixture – some on our comms, some on planning a future project together and, for Brenda (the National Adult Support and Protection Co-ordinator) and I, sharing our learning on developing National Guidance for Scottish Government. Brenda and I suggested this session ourselves. That’s another really great thing about learning week: the agenda isn’t imposed, and if anyone has a bright idea, they can lead one of the sessions.
I’ve always thought Iriss gets a lot done for the number of staff we have. I believe that learning week is essential to our organisational health: a protective factor against us holding on to our own worries, a key mechanism for us to share all our work, and a way for Iriss to set our direction of travel. There’s no denying that it’s an intense week, though, and when it ended, I found myself feeling that my brain had been poked and jabbed. I guess this was because I was reflecting in ways that were outside of my usual patterns.
Even though Iriss gets together regularly for team meetings, and us Development Leads also meet regularly for our own reflective sessions, there’s nothing like learning week. It’s about the time, the space (and maybe those yummy pastries too). As one of us pointed out: “The Iriss hive mind is strong when all the bees get together!”
