I was recently asked to present for a broadcast Google hangout about culture of learning. It was a super fun night and bordered on silly, but it got me thinking about writing down a few thoughts in this realm.

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We all know that constant learning and a willingness to change is key to our success as individuals and our organizations today. Things move too fast for us to rest on our laurels; most of the best ideas come from increased knowledge, sharing, etc.

Creating a culture of learning is about allowing and coaching people to play and explore. These are the elements that lead to creativity and innovation. 

One of my core values is actually a perception that I try to apply to my own growth and instill in those I work with: we are constant beta. This is the idea that we are always growing, improving, changing, and learning. Whatever you are doing to learn and grow is great as long as you keep doing it; you have to keep iterating or you get stale and outdated. At Commerce Kitchen, a web development, design, and marketing company, we each have to share something we have learned at our weekly staff meetings (also known as wine Friday). People know that constant learning is just part of the job and it empowers people to take ownership of their learning and progression.

Fail fail fail! We learn so much more from our failures than our successes. Let your people fail, and don’t just pay lip service to that idea: you need to actually support it. I recently heard Josh Linker speak, and he talked about a company that gave their staff get-out-of-jail-free cards every year. If they tried something and it crashed and burned, no problem, they just turned in a card. And they were supposed to use these cards! If a staff person got to the end of the year and still had their cards, that was a sign to the company that there was a lack of experimentation and risks, which led to real concerns about the fit of that person in their organization.

Lastly, to me, fostering tech knowledge is about fostering a culture of learning and curiosity as a whole, not just about fostering learning for those things that can easily be tied and related to usual work duties. Be interdisciplinary. Ideas, solutions, insights come from all sorts of arenas and I have found that the best opportunities for increasing my learning and knowledge in an impactful way tend to come from outside the industry and from unpredictable places. In our recent presentation at Denver Startup Week about organizational culture, all of us on the panel realized that some of the best ideas for our companies came from our lives outside of work such as in the restaurant industry, the music scene, or the art world. One thing we are getting going at Commerce Kitchen to support this is to give people time off for them to engage in learning. We don’t require these experiences to have a direct relation to what you do at work (or even a loose one; in fact, we encourage our staff to do something completely unrelated and creative) and we don’t judge what type of learning takes place during this time. All we care about is that people are flexing their brain, learning something new, playing and exploring.

These are just a few personal thoughts and things we do at Commerce Kitchen. What are some of the ways you create a culture of learning in your organization? What about finding time and motivation for ongoing learning in your own life?