We Said This Ten Years Ago. The World Finally Caught Up.

Learning Journeys, Learning Power, and why the missing ingredient in every complex system has always been human.

I want to tell you about a white paper I co-authored with colleagues at the University of Bristol and the University of Technology Sydney. We published it under the banner of the International Centre for Infrastructure Futures — a group of researchers and industry professionals who were trying to get serious people in serious industries to think differently about why organisations fail to change, even when they know they need to.

The paper was called Learning Journeys and Infrastructure Services: A Game Changer for Effectiveness published by UCL.

It was, I’ll admit it now, ahead of its time. Not by a little. By a lot.

The ideas were rigorous, the evidence was there, and the argument was — I believed — urgent. But the world wasn’t quite ready to hear it in the way it needed to be heard. The language of ‘learning power’ and ‘resilient agency’ sat awkwardly alongside spreadsheets and procurement frameworks. Systems thinkers nodded. Most everyone else moved on.

That was then. A great deal has changed.

What We Were Actually Saying

At its heart, the paper made a deceptively simple argument: the most expensive problem in infrastructure — and in any complex organisation — is not a technical problem. It’s a learning problem.

We were watching billions being spent on infrastructure renewal while the same patterns of failure repeated themselves. Cost overruns. Community resistance. Knowledge locked in silos. Lessons from one project never making it into the next. The ‘failure of hindsight,’ we called it — and it was quantifiable.

Our argument was that this wasn’t primarily about better engineering or smarter procurement. It was about whether the human beings inside these systems — leaders, engineers, community members, frontline staff and users, had developed the capability to learn. Not to receive training. To actually learn: to sense what’s changing, make meaning from it, adapt, and move forward with purpose and courage.

We called this Learning Power — the capacity to regulate the flow of information and energy over time in the service of something that matters. And we proposed that it could be measured, developed and embedded into the very architecture of how organisations function.

The metaphor we offered was the Learning Journey — a framework with four interlocking processes: forming and aligning identity and purpose; generating learning power; structuring and co-generating knowledge; and producing and reviewing value. Not a training programme. Not an away day. A design principle for how human change actually works.

Why It Was Hard to Hear Then

Looking back, I understand the resistance better now than I did at the time.

We were asking people to make a fundamental shift in their mental model of what learning is. The dominant model — and it still exists everywhere — treats learning as the acquisition of content. You attend a course. You receive information. You are now ‘trained.’ Tick the box, move on.

What we were describing was something categorically different. Learning as a dynamic, relational, embodied process — inseparable from identity, from purpose, from the quality of relationships and the courage to face uncertainty. Not a bolt-on. The very engine of organisational performance.

We were also asking people to sit with an uncomfortable idea: that the reason change initiatives fail is not usually lack of resources or strategy. It’s that the people leading them — and the people being led — haven’t developed the inner capability to navigate genuine uncertainty. To tolerate not-knowing. To collaborate across difference. To zoom in and zoom out. To fail fast and learn faster.

That is a harder conversation. It implicates everyone, including the people at the top of the old hierarchies.

What Has Changed

The world has not become simpler. It has become dramatically more complex, more interconnected, more unpredictable. The climate crisis, the water security crisis, the digital transformation of every sector — these are not problems that yield to expertise alone. They require something else: organisations and communities that can genuinely learn their way forward together.

And time has been gentler on these ideas than the original reception suggested it would be.

The language of psychological safety, of adaptive capacity, of human-centred systems — language that barely existed in mainstream infrastructure conversations a decade ago — is now everywhere. AI has made the argument for learning power almost self-evident: if machines can now do much of the routine knowledge work, what remains distinctively human is precisely the capacity to make meaning, to exercise judgment in conditions of ambiguity, to build trust, to act with purpose. Learning power, in other words.

The systems thinking community has grown. The evidence base for dispositional learning analytics — measuring how people orient themselves as learners — has matured substantially. And crucially, we now have something we didn’t have in the same way when the white paper was written.

We have evidence.

Hunter Water: What It Looks Like When It Works

When I think about what the Learning Journey framework can actually produce in the real world, I think about Hunter Water Corporation in New South Wales, Australia.

In 2016, Jim Bentley was appointed CEO with a mandate to transform a compliance-focused utility — an organisation that had, in the words of its then-Chairman Terry Lawler, ‘forgotten how to learn.’ What followed was one of the most remarkable organisational transformations I have been privileged to be part of.

Learning Power principles became the backbone of the transformation: not as a training initiative, but as a genuine shift in how the organisation understood itself and its relationship with its community. Staff didn’t just receive information about change — they were supported to develop the curiosity, the mindful agency, the collaborative capacity to generate change. Purpose moved from compliance to genuine inquiry. The question shifted from what are we required to do? to what could we build together?

The results were measurable and they were striking. A 34% culture shift, validated through diagnostics. A 15% reduction in leakage within three years. And perhaps most remarkably: 70% community support for the Lower Hunter Water Security Plan — up from years of adversarial opposition. The ‘Love Water’ campaign wasn’t marketing. It was the natural expression of an organisation that had genuinely learned to learn with its community rather than simply ‘telling it what to do’.

Terry Lawler described it this way: a compliance-focused organisation that had forgotten how to learn became curious about what it could achieve and optimistic about the future it could build. That is triple-loop learning — not just doing better, not just learning how to improve, but being genuinely transformed in identity, behaviour and purpose.

This is what the white paper was pointing towards. A decade on, it happened.

The Framework Still Stands

I want to return briefly to the intellectual architecture, because I think it matters more now than ever.

The Learning Journey framework rests on a view of knowledge that has shifted from ‘stock’ to ‘flow.’ We no longer live in a world where expertise is something you acquire, store and deploy. Knowledge is generated, shared, recombined and regenerated in networks of relationships, in response to real problems, in real time, framed by a shared ‘big’ story. The premium is not on what you know but on your capacity to learn — to identify what matters, make meaning from it, and act with purpose.

This is not a soft idea. It has structural implications for how organisations are designed, how digital systems are built, how leadership is developed and how communities are engaged. The learning infrastructure — the social and digital architecture that scaffolds the human learning journey — is as strategically important as the physical infrastructure it supports.

What WILD has done, and continues to do, is take these ideas from the white paper and operationalise them at scale — with validated diagnostics, with learning journey platforms, with AI Augumented coaching programmes and with the measurement models and evidence base that makes this legible to boards, regulators and investors.

The three applications we identified in the original paper — developing learning leadership capacity, modelling stakeholder behaviour to improve engagement, and building digital platforms for behaviour change at scale — are now WILD’s core offer. They work. We have the data.

An Invitation

If you are leading a complex programme — in water, energy, transport, health, or any system where human behaviour is the critical variable — I want to invite you to sit with a question.

Not: what do our people need to know?

But: what kind of learners do our people need to become?

And then, genuinely: what kind of learner do I need to become, to lead this?

The Learning Journey framework was never really about infrastructure. It was about the human condition in a complex world — and our capacity, when we develop it intentionally, to navigate that complexity with curiosity, purpose and resilience rather than fear, compliance and denial.

The world needs that now more than ever. And the good news is: we know how to create the conditions that facilitate it.

Professor Ruth Crick is the founder of WILD Learning and a pioneer in Learning Power analytics and self-directed learning. She has held senior academic positions at the University of Bristol and the University of Technology Sydney. WILD works with infrastructure programmes, organisations and communities across three continents to build the human capability that drives measurable performance improvement.