Informal and Incidental Learning in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

The Problem: COVID-19 has brought challenges to all sectors of society, from leadership at the top to service at the front lines. Learning (and unlearning) by its very nature will play an outsize role in our reinvention and renewal. Much of that learning will be informal and incidental learning. How can complexity science help us think about informal and incidental learning in a pandemic and how might we develop our capacity to productively learn given these turbulent circumstances? The Recommendation: Workplace educators are encouraged to take a complexity perspective on their work post-COVID-19 and to enlarge their repertoire of responses to learning needs to include informal and incidental learning. A critical role for these individuals will be to help workers increase their skill in being proactive, critically reflective, creative, and playful as they learn informally. We encourage use of design thinking—coupled with knowledge-intensive tools, data visualization modeling, imagination, and abductive reasoning—to reframe how we learn in times of complexity in the time of COVID-19. The Stakeholders: All of us have to learn our way through during this great reset. Every sector, every workplace, will be affected by the changes wrought by a pandemic and an economy in jeopardy. Thus all who learn and particularly those of us who help shape and guide workplace learning have a stake in understanding complexity and how to enhance informal and incidental learning as a strategically important response to these times.