Learning Isn't What's Slowing Philanthropy Down

Philanthropy takes a lot of heat for being slow to move money. And the thing that's usually blamed for that is learning, all of the evaluating and the reports and the pontificating. Our guest today thinks that this critique is fair, but that the blame on learning is actually not accurate. 

Katherine Haugh is the founder of the Convive Collective, a learning partner to some of the largest climate focused philanthropies in the US and Europe. Convive has co-created a learning philanthropy framework with an initial cohort of six funders, including Co-Impact, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lodz Foundation. 

In this conversation, we cover what's actually slowing philanthropies down if it isn't learning, why learning is often used as a way to dodge a decision, how trust-based philanthropy and rigorous learning can actually reinforce one another, and the two things a philanthropy needs in place in order to become an effective learning-based philanthropy or organization.

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:20] What a "learning organization" actually means, and why the for-profit version doesn't fit philanthropy 
[00:02:30] Three reasons the corporate learning playbook breaks down for philanthropies
[00:08:30] The false tension between trust-based and learning-oriented philanthropy 
[00:10:20] The power dynamics that push grantees to hide what they've learned 
[00:14:15] The real reason money moves slowly: control and ego, not learning 
[00:18:00] Why learning has such a good brand, and how that hides dysfunction 
[00:19:45] Learning as a way to dodge a hard decision 
[00:20:45] What authentic, effective learning actually looks like 
[00:26:30] The two non-negotiables: leadership commitment and psychological safety 
[00:32:35] Why philanthropies won't publish their failures 
[00:37:50] What the pilot cohort did that no one expected 
[00:44:30] The "healthy life" metaphor for becoming a learning organization

Notable Quotes:

[00:15:50]: "I actually think that the reason why that is is a function of control and ego." Katherine Haugh

[00:17:40]: "The message from a lot of these foundations is, 'We need to be responsible stewards. We need to learn, we need to evaluate.' But that's not actually the part that's slowing them down." Eric Ressler 

[00:18:00]: "Learning has a great reputation. Learning is a great brand. No one ever says, 'We hate learning.'" Katherine Haugh 

[00:19:45]: "The safest action that saves face within a foundation is, 'That's a good point. Why don't we learn more about this?' And it can punt an uncomfortable decision in a seemingly professional way." Katherine Haugh

[00:26:45]: "The best thing that's going to happen from taking this risk is not the outcome, it's the learning." Katherine Haugh 

[00:28:15]: "You can have excellent evidence, you can have the best sense-making process, but if your team doesn't feel safe to say what they really feel, it's all for nothing." Katherine Haugh

Resources & Links:

• The Convive Collective — Katherine Haugh's learning and strategy partner to climate-focused philanthropies
• The Learning Philanthropy Framework - helps climate-focused philanthropies see what good looks like, measure progress, and strengthen the learning practices that power impact.
• Center for Evaluation Innovation — cited at [00:16:30] as the source tracking how much of philanthropy portfolios go to learning and evaluation.

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:00]: Katherine Haugh, thank you so much for joining me today.

Katherine Haugh [00:01:05]: Thank you for having me, Eric. I'm so excited to be here.

Eric Ressler [00:01:15]: So I would love to dive in and just start to understand this idea of a learning organization and more specifically a learning philanthropy. Tell me a little bit around what does that actually mean? What does learning mean in the context of philanthropy?

Katherine Haugh [00:01:20]: Oh, fantastic question. So excited to speak about this. So a learning organization is actually a term that was coined in the late '70s by researchers who were trying to understand why certain for-profit companies outperformed their peers. And they came up with this theory and this concept that organizations that really put learning at the heart of their operations and culture are able to adapt faster, learn from feedback faster, innovate more, and ultimately create more staff satisfaction within their company cultures so they have higher retention as well. So this concept kind of took root in the study of for-profit companies, which is great, but it presents a challenge for us in the philanthropic sector because we hear all the time that foundations say we want to be a learning organization because that's ultimately a way of being more effective. But that term and the literature associated with it is still very much rooted in mental models and incentive structures for for-profit companies.

And we see three key differences for philanthropies. First and foremost, a lot of the literature is around how to use information to beat out your competition. So don't share data, don't share anything, pointy elbows and beat out the next guy to be the best in the market. That doesn't quite work for foundations or in the philanthropy sector in general. If you're trying to achieve any kind of lasting change, you need to do that in collaboration and coordination with others. You actually have a higher incentive to share information than to keep it for yourself. The second one is this concept of efficiency. So a lot of the literature for learning organizations is around how to gather information so you can be more efficient. Think Toyota, think Microsoft Hackathons. It's thinking how can we get as much information as possible so that we can cut out steps in the process, be more efficient to ultimately making profit?

That's also problematic for us in the philanthropic sector because sometimes in order to be more effective, we actually have to be less efficient. We have to pause, check our assumptions, gather more information before we're ready, see what happens in terms of making different hypotheses and different bets. And so a focus too much on efficiency actually hurts us and makes us less effective overall. And the last piece of the puzzle is around feedback. So you're going to love this one because for for-profit companies, feedback is built into the business model. They're wondering, do consumers like this or not? You need to be constantly paying attention to signals of success. Whereas with foundations in particular, that feedback isn't automatic. It needs to be intentionally structured and built in. It's totally possible for a philanthropy to be running a strategy and a way of grant making that's absolutely not working, but without intentionally collecting data and feedback about their strategy, they could not know and be running an ineffective operation.

So that's why also for us, last but not least, partners who are most close to the work need to feel safe to actually be able to tell their foundation partners this is or isn't working without fear of retribution. And so there's a whole other element of the relational side of collecting data and feedback and to have that be truly for the purposes of learning and not for accountability and then there be grant making repercussions.

Eric Ressler [00:05:45]: So in your experience working with a number of these philanthropies, and you all have worked with a lot of the major philanthropies in Europe and the US and all over, how are philanthropies specifically? And when we say that, I think just to be clear, we're also talking more specifically about major institutional foundations largely, but also maybe family offices who act more institutional. What are they doing right now for learning? What was the need that you saw working with these folks?

Katherine Haugh [00:06:05]: Yeah, totally. And we like to use the term philanthropy because it's broader really because the word, what that means is the love of humankind. So it captures the essence of what this sector is about from huge institutions to tiny family offices to individual donors and their partners. So that's an intentional choice on our behalf in terms of language. But what we see is that I would say maybe the focus primarily for foundations when it comes to learning has traditionally been evaluation. So thinking, let's evaluate how effective our work is. So either I think more traditionally that's done with grantee partners. So saying, "Hey, we're giving you this grant. We'd also like you to evaluate it when the grant is over and share with us how effective it was. Did you reach your goals? Did you hit those outcome targets and why or why not?"

I think since that's maybe decades old practice that has evolved through much research, a lot of iteration to become more developmental and emergent. So instead of the end of a grant partnership saying, "Hey, what did we learn? What did we achieve?" It's more throughout the process that you're reflecting with your partner like, "Okay, are we on track? Are we not on track?" And I think even more now with the onset of trust-based philanthropy, that's been less about being really controlling about reporting and setting the direction of what success looks like and allowing the folks who are closest to the problem to set the direction and determine what success looks like and course correct as needed. So I think now we're coming into a moment where the concept of a learning philanthropy is really vital, mostly because now we're at a place where folks are recognizing evaluation isn't quite enough.

That's just one way to learn. And somehow that has become synonymous for learning like, oh, if we evaluate our grants, then we'll have learned. But we know from the study of how adults actually learn that passively engaging with material like that is one of the least effective ways to learn. And it really needs to be a constant practice and a way of working and thinking that's embedded to how a foundation works with its partners and each other. And interestingly, Eric, the trust-based philanthropy movement has kind of created this tension that we don't feel is there between being trust-based and being learning-oriented. It's almost as if folks sometimes conflate that if you're trust-based, that means you're not asking your partner for any data or information, you're not reflecting and adapting with them. But we think actually they go hand in hand, but it's about the orientation. It's not saying, okay, give us this data because we're checking to make sure that you're doing things correctly. It's like, let's share information both ways so that you can be set up for success in your role in the ecosystem, and same from the foundation's perspective in terms of the decisions that they need to make.

Eric Ressler [00:09:20]: Yeah, there's so many good threads to pull in there. So first of all, I think to your point, I've always heard this kind of lumped together with MEL, measurement, evaluation and learning.

Katherine Haugh [00:09:35]: Exactly.

Eric Ressler [00:09:40]: And learning feels kind of like this tacked-on thing, right?

Katherine Haugh [00:09:42]: Yes.

Eric Ressler [00:09:45]: And what I think I'm hearing you say is that none of those things work in a silo. They all need to work together. And I'm also really interested to dig a little bit more into this tension between, or maybe even this misunderstanding of what trust-based philanthropy means, where if you interpret it incorrectly, it's that there is no evaluation whatsoever in trust-based philanthropy.

Katherine Haugh [00:10:05]: Exactly.

Eric Ressler [00:10:05]: It's a fully trusted hand over the money and hands-off and hope for the best, which I don't think is what trust-based philanthropy was even initially set out for.

Katherine Haugh [00:10:15]: Absolutely not.

Eric Ressler [00:10:20]: So I'd love to hear, there is, I think in the worst case in a philanthropic relationship, power dynamics that actually run very counter to learning, right? Where a grantee feels the need to perform, to produce results, sometimes even to flub those results or to massage the statistics to look like things were effective even if they did have learnings and they're scared to share those learnings for fear of not getting a grant again from the same funder.

Katherine Haugh [00:10:45]: Exactly. Exactly.

Eric Ressler [00:10:50]: And I think this is largely where the movement, I'll say, around trust-based philanthropy came from, is just an objective measure of like, "Hey, this is not a healthy way to do this work." So I'd love for you to paint a picture of the counter narrative to that. What does this look like at its best and how does learning fit into that?

Katherine Haugh [00:11:05]: Yeah, that's an amazing question. I think first and foremost, what this looks like at its best is that decision-making authority about what the activities in the grant should be focusing on and what the goals are actually sit with those who are closest to the work or the problems that they're trying to solve. I think a lot of challenges come from still this top-down orientation around foundations setting strategies, setting the directives, saying these are the challenges we see, and this is how we believe change is going to happen with a theory of change if then. And then it's almost like finding grant partners who fit into that vision already creates so many problematic relational elements and also ultimately makes a foundation, in my view, significantly less effective with that way of orienting to a grant-making relationship. So I think it actually starts with working with folks who are closest to the problem that you're trying to address and putting learning first and foremost.

I think a lot of times foundations will come in or start with a new strategy. And because there's so much pressure to get money out the door, get moving, quickly show results, keep board members happy, keep fundraising going up, there's not often enough time for really properly understanding the root causes of a problem and thinking through who are the right actors to support you in moving the needle because there's so much time pressure around, okay, we have limited trust perhaps from above. We have to quickly demonstrate that we're making progress. Otherwise, this whole thing might come crashing down like a house of cards. So I think actually a lot of the tendencies that we see in philanthropy can be traced back to leadership, to board dynamics, and then we see them play out either positively for learning and in a trust-based fashion or negatively where things are becoming really inefficient and performative and hollow.

I think a lot of grant partners struggled not only just to be honest with their grant managers to say, "Hey, we're actually not on target for this outcome, and here's what we're learning, and here's how we're going to pivot." But I also think that foundations currently don't often have the capacity and resources even to work with the data they receive from partners. So grant partners have to fill out every different type of reporting form because there are many different funders. And in my experience, most foundations have not adequately found a way to truly learn from that material that they receive from their partners. So I think folks are reticent to really feel that it's truly a learning exercise because it's not quite clear how that feedback loop gets closed.

Eric Ressler [00:14:15]: So I want to make a counter argument to hear how you think about this with regards to learning. One of the criticisms that I hear about philanthropy in general, and especially major philanthropy, is that we actually spend way too much time as a sector thinking, learning, evaluating, measuring, writing reports, and not enough time and effort actually just doing and getting money out the door. You hear a lot of criticism. And I think some of this is valid around major philanthropies not spending down fast enough, not hitting more than their minimum 5% payout, which includes overhead on their side. It doesn't even go directly to grantees. And so how do we incorporate learning as a way to get more money out more effectively in the sector?

Katherine Haugh [00:15:15]: Yes, I love that. I think this is an amazing question and also I think represents the tension we were speaking about between being trust-based and being learning-oriented and why those two sit together in a complimentary way. I agree with you that I think the critique around philanthropy being too navel-gazing and slow to move money is valid. And I do see a lot of inefficiencies that are created within foundations around unnecessary bureaucracies that actually slow them down from just giving as much of their portfolio away as quickly as possible. So I totally agree with that. I actually think that the reason why that is is a function of control and ego. Because there's a lot that goes on within foundations from my viewpoint around creating many unnecessary steps to keep folks within the foundation clued in, feeling important, adding advice, adding perspectives when all of that could be shortened significantly. But if folks were more comfortable to take risks and had less control and ego in the game, and I think that that is very much informed by the type of founders who create the foundation and what their ethos and philosophy is around why they're doing philanthropy. And so I think that in my view, that has very little to do with learning because actually most foundations spend less than, I have to look up the stats, so I'll check myself, but less than 1%, maybe 2% of their entire grant-making portfolio on learning evaluation impact measurement. And this is something that's been studied by the Center for Evaluation Innovation year on year to see if that percentage is picking up and how foundations are spending their funds internally or supporting their partners to learn.

And it has bumped up and bumped down, but for the most part stayed abysmally low. So I hate that learning gets thrown in with maybe just a control related bureaucracy and friction that's happening within foundations that then becomes part of that navel gazing critique.

Eric Ressler [00:17:30]: Yeah. So your take on this is that the reason that's slow is because of learning is actually not accurate and a charitable interpretation, and it's actually more about bureaucracy, ego.

Katherine Haugh [00:17:40]: Definitely.

Eric Ressler [00:17:40]: The message from a lot of these foundations is like, "Oh, we need to be responsible stewards. We need to learn, we need to evaluate." But that's not actually the part that's A, slowing them down, or B, even accurate for the most part.

Katherine Haugh [00:18:00]: Definitely not. I think also, we talk about this a lot on my team, that learning has a great reputation. Learning is a great brand. No one ever says, "We hate learning," or, "We don't really do much of that here." Everyone is like, "We're learning." But somehow I think learning can be a catchall for covering up. Actually, we're just deliberating internally and we can't make up our minds, or actually we're dealing with some dysfunction or we're just getting started and we're figuring out our operations or we're dealing with disagreements between our leadership and our board. That could all be under the umbrella of we were learning, we commissioned a report, and I think also a bit of ego in learning and a bit of reinventing the wheel. There's so much in philanthropy where there's this idea of we're a foundation, we're going to do something totally different. We're totally different. And this special snowflake phenomenon that we see a lot where foundations significantly under leverage publicly available data, information, reports, but there is some feeling about like, oh, okay, well the natural next step is always to learn something a bit more. But in our view, that's like, okay, let's commission a study to gather some research, but doesn't actually change behavior. And I think too, something that I see all the time is that when there's actually a decision to be made that might alter someone's thinking, might challenge somebody's position, might actually admit, okay, we messed up here or we want to do something different, the safest action to take that saves face within a foundation is, okay, well, that's a good point. That's interesting. Why don't we learn more about this? And it can actually punt an uncomfortable conversation or an uncomfortable turning point for the foundation or a critical juncture down the road in a seemingly professional way. So learning gets a bad rep, I think, and a good rep at the same time.

Eric Ressler [00:20:25]: Learning is like the cover.

Katherine Haugh [00:20:30]: It's a cover. It's a good cover, man.

Eric Ressler [00:20:35]: Yeah, right. Okay. So we just spent a little bit of time talking about all of the fake learning and what that might look like. So tell us now, what does authentic, real, constructive, effective learning look like instead?

Katherine Haugh [00:20:45]: That's a great question. My mind goes to, it really starts at the very beginning with first and foremost, how the foundation is formed. So something that we're researching right now as part of the learning philanthropy project is we're talking to learning leaders across very different foundations and we're asking them, tell us the story of how learning became a focus for this foundation. How did you embed it culturally, operationally? What value is it bringing to you? And one thing that's emerging from these conversations is the way that learning was initially conceived by the leader of the foundation sets the tone and level of ambition that learning can really take within that organization. So where I see it working the best is when a CEO or an executive director comes in to start a foundation or even take over an existing foundation, and they themselves as an individual have a very strong learning orientation.

So what that looks like is that they're typically very humble. They like to be challenged. They like when people tell them disconfirming evidence or have dissenting opinions. They look forward to that. They're very proactive with feedback. They're good listeners. They're comfortable to make mistakes where they're like, "Yeah, no, we're going to take risks. I made a mistake." And they say things like, "I used to think blah, blah, blah. Now I think blah, blah, blah." Or they make their thinking visible by saying, "The following experience led me to believe this, this, and this." And it's interesting when a leader has that kind of orientation, the amount of influence that they carry culturally and operationally is significant. I've learned about learning leaders. That's a well-studied topic of how influential they were. And I thought, surely it can't be that simple. There's so many other pieces, structure, resources, learning champions, psychological safety, but it really by and large is the most important indicator of how much that organization is truly going to value learning. For example, if you have a foundation leader who says, "Yeah, we value learning," but it's tokenistic, they don't really set aside staff time for it, they don't put any resources behind it, all of the things that I said actually model learning, that's how you'll see for the most part folks across the foundation modeling that same behavior where they'll say, "Yes, we value learning, but no time is set aside for it. Folks are not diving into reports, reflecting on their behavior." And my view is that that trickles down to the relationship that they have also with their partners where it becomes still tokenistic there. So if I was a partner to that foundation, I would be reading between the lines like, oh, okay, they say they value learning, but it's really more performative and tokenistic expressed than truly embodied and lived. So I'm not going to spend as much time reflecting and adapting necessarily in this partnership because it's just not as important as some other things.

Eric Ressler [00:24:15]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode, I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose-built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

What I'm reflecting on and hearing all of that is that it sounds like both internally and in a partnership-based way, it requires permission. And you use the term psychological safety and trust comes back to me again. Because if an individual program officer or staff member within a philanthropy doesn't feel like they can fail, and maybe we should talk a little bit about failure and risk-taking because I think they're basically inseparable from learning.

Katherine Haugh [00:25:25]: Totally.

Eric Ressler [00:25:25]: Then they'll never learn. Because you mostly learn not by being successful, but by failing and iterating in my opinion. And I'd love to hear your take on whether or not that fits into your framework. But that's what I see is when you get into these rigid like, "Well, we've always done it this way, this is the proven way, this is best practice. These are the metrics we're going for," you're predetermining the results at that point instead of being open to almost really a more scientific approach to this where you generate a hypothesis, you run iterations or tests or prototypes, you measure, you evaluate, you learn. In the best case, that's I think what we're pointing to. But if there's not the ability to fail in the same way that experiments in the scientific world are set up to fail, then the learning never actually happens and it just becomes performative.

Katherine Haugh [00:26:30]: Exactly. Wow, you've said it in such a beautiful way. I will say learning is so scientific the way that we're talking about it. Our clients love to use the language of hypotheses and we're testing this, we're experimenting here, we're taking a risk. And we've started to call it intelligent risk, like taking intelligent risks because we have some information, but we're going out on a limb. And actually the best thing that's going to happen from taking this risk is not the outcome, it's the learning. So we really have to pay attention to our learning. So I love how you framed it like that. That's really exactly spot on. And I will say there's two areas of our framework that we're starting to see are evergreen, which is if you don't have these two pieces, it's not really useful to start building in other areas because it's not supported. It's like a foundation that could collapse. And those two areas are leadership commitment to learning, that it needs to be there from your leadership, that they care about learning. It's a value, it's an identity. We are a learning organization, we're a learning philanthropy that needs to be there, not just spoken, but in practice.

And second, that there's a certain level of psychological safety across the foundation, any organization, any team, because it's just unequivocally true. If people feel stressed or unsafe, unsafe to be themselves, to offer a dissenting opinion, to fail or make mistakes in front of each other, they're going to be significantly less effective in their roles and almost never take risks. And then not really learning, following what's the safest thing that I can do to keep my job here or keep my social status. Those are two different elements of risk where people don't want to feel outed or ousted for who they are. So I'm glad that you brought that up because that for us is like you will hit a concrete ceiling with everything else that you tried to do. You can have excellent evidence, you can have the best sense-making process, but if your team doesn't feel safe to say what they really feel, it's all for nothing. So we really love focusing on that. That really is the foundation of a learning philanthropy.

Eric Ressler [00:28:45]: So we've been talking about this in the context of funders mostly, but I'm also curious because a lot of the listeners of our show are recipients of funds, they're executive directors or staff at nonprofits and social enterprises as well. And I'm curious, how does this framework or does this framework translate to practitioner organizations as well, or is it really more focused on funders?

Katherine Haugh [00:29:15]: I will say the framework is really focused on funders for the reason of really wanting to change funder behavior as it relates to learning. When we first started on this endeavor, we were like, "Surely something like this exists." We hear foundations say, "We want to be a learning organization all the time," but then they kind of secretly whisper after that, "But what does that actually mean and what does it look like in practice?" And so oftentimes they're copying and pasting from each other, "Oh, this foundation did this learning agenda or this foundation did this evidence tour." But we are seeing that that copy and paste method doesn't quite work because it's not really using the principles and understanding of what a total learning philanthropy looks like and adjusting that to your context, your goals, your learners, all of that. So our hope is that by building this framework and maturity tool and starting conversations around it, that this will create a place where foundations can look to for inspiration, for practices of excellence, for guidance that ultimately help foundations up-level their learning work, which ultimately would help their grant partners actually be in authentic learning partnerships with them.

So we were thinking a lot about that, if we should have two different frameworks or how to bring the pieces together. And to make my own thinking visible, that's what we're imagining is that's kind of our theory of change that it's our hypothesis that we will be collecting our own data on and experimenting with. And in our framework, we have a whole component on learning with partners. So this is an area actually where it kind of flips the relationship on its head in a really nice way because right now, typically most foundations collect information, data, even sometimes feedback from their partners about how's it going in this partnership or tell us what you're working on and what you're achieving. It's very rare that foundations are actually inviting their partners into a co-creative learning process around that information. It's kind of like, "Hey, submit your stuff. We will learn from it and then sometimes but rarely share back what we've learned." And so our orientation is if you are truly a learning philanthropy, you are gathering information, you're also sharing information with your partners, but that learning experience is co-created and of an equal footing. And so I hope that this tool will also give the opportunity for partners to rate their philanthropic partners on what's the level of maturity that they experience. Because for our foundations who have chosen that component to say, "Hey, we want to self-assess," that requires that their grant partners are part of that process. And it's hopefully creating a new way to say, "Yeah, actually I would put us in our partnership at a two out of five." And it's not so much calling out the foundation, it's more about how strong is our learning partnership between us and how could it be stronger so that we could be more effective together as a pair, as a duo? So I'm really excited about that element of it.

Eric Ressler [00:32:35]: Yeah. And to compare again to the scientific world where so much about doing science is publishing. I mean, actually even maybe to a fault where publishing becomes the metric of success. But what I've reflected on over the years in this space is we hear a lot about, especially philanthropies learning, but then there's very little publishing from philanthropies around what actually worked, what didn't, what's the hypothesis around why? And I think again, it comes back to this idea of being willing to fail in public. I think one of the things that works so well about the scientific world is that failure is not failure when it comes to science. Failure is learning. And I think that's the ethos that our sector is moving towards and needs to embrace. But it's going to require all parties to come together and say trying and failing is okay. I think the reason that that is hard to do is because sometimes in this space, failing means real negative impacts on humans. And the same is true for science when it comes to public health, certainly. So I wonder, is my hypothesis there right around why this doesn't happen? Is it really largely because it's like a PR disaster for foundations to publish failures in their grant making?

Katherine Haugh [00:34:05]: Yeah. It's even something I think deeper than that because not only do foundations may make big mistakes, it's often more a series of small miscalculations. It's not very frequent in our sector that there's a massive one huge decision that led to catastrophe. It's more kind of like a series of miscalculations, a series of misjudgments, tiny decisions that to be honest, I think is also hard to sometimes tell the story of when you're the one making all of those decisions. And you're kind of like, "This didn't quite work, but I'm going to construct a narrative about why it didn't work so it makes it not my fault." So it saves us as much face as possible. And that's what we see if we see anything at all. It's like, okay, kind of like a very polished, sometimes difficult to understand publication that says a whole lot of nothing. And we're like, "What progress was made? What happened here?" And I think also too, even for grant partners, they often don't have that experience with their foundation partner even behind closed doors to say, "Okay, actually I think we made a miscalculation." And I think that part of the problem is actually in the entire arrangement around the philanthropy making the decisions and having the strategy, because then it feels that all of the onus for the mistakes, then it becomes very quickly a blame game and it's a very unsafe environment. Oh no, it was this partner's fault. It was this part. Oh no, it was the foundation's fault. And it's like passing it around like a hot potato.

So I'm hoping, what I think is accurate about what you said, there is a massive fear of failure that permeates our entire sector, that prevents philanthropy from truly acting in a learning-oriented way. That means taking risks. That means working on things that are boring and not as promotional ready, not as easy to fundraise for. That means looking at precise measures that really measure change, not just gimmicky stats. And I think that part of what's needed actually is foundations to have cover in order to operate in this way. And one of the things that we're wondering about for the learning philanthropy framework, which is just one of many field-building initiatives that's trying to change the tide, is that by creating a body of evidence around why learning is connected to philanthropic effectiveness when you work in a different way, when you take risks, when you're comfortable with failure, you actually are more effective ultimately. That will hopefully start to change minds, change beliefs so that foundations are feeling more comfortable to adopt this ethos and this philosophy. Of course, it's going to need more than just our one small but mighty field-building project, but I'm excited about a sea change and thinking about how philanthropy could think differently about failure and create more safety all for the purposes of ultimately having a greater impact.

Eric Ressler [00:37:35]: So you have a cohort of five or six philanthropic partners that were basically the pilot of this framework that you co-created the framework with. What did you learn in that pilot?

Katherine Haugh [00:37:50]: So I have been describing this project as a passion project gone rogue because we never really intended for it to become this field-building initiative. It was something that came up through conversations with many different learning leaders that I started to sketch out on computer paper. Actually, what do we know from the literature? What do people commonly say? What could a learning philanthropy look like? And for our team, we started looking into the literature, doing interviews, and then we came up with version one and then version two of the tool. So by the time we reached that point, we were like, okay, let's pump the brakes before we spiral out into a land of detached academia, because it was kind of going in that direction. We didn't want to create another framework that just was going to be like, "Oh, that's interesting," and then carry on.

So this is when we started having coffee chats with our clients, folks that we looked up to in the field and said, "Hey, what do you think about this? Would you be interested in taking this from version two to version three? And the way we want to do that with you is actually that you take the tool and pilot it within your organization." And what I learned from that process was that I had severely underestimated the power of the tool. Initially, we thought that folks would use it as a self-assessment process. So they would say, okay, let's look across. Let's self-assess with a card game that we had developed in these two areas of practice, let's say learning mindsets and evidence curation. But actually the piloters completely blew us away by using the tool in ways that we hadn't anticipated. For example, one of them used it to pitch the vision for what organizational learning at their foundation would look like in five years and used the different behaviors that we had outlined in the maturity tool for their OKRs. So now it's built into their strategy, it's built into the way that they measure their own success, which is for us felt so innovative and exciting because it's not about outcomes necessarily out there in the world exclusively. It's also about what type of philanthropy are we being because we know that makes us more effective overall. So we love that. We also had another two foundations who took the entire tool and baselined their entire foundation. So they said instead of focusing on one or two areas, they were like, "We want to see how we're doing overall." And the reason why this was so exciting for them is because they could look back on five years prior and retroactively say, "Actually, we have made so much progress. When we first started here on learning, this is the behaviors we were seeing. And now it's been five years and we have seen change." And why that's so important for us, obviously we love measurements, so being able to do it about our area of work is obviously a joy and a thrill.

But it's also really important because I think learning right now is under scrutiny within foundations. It kind of goes up and down in terms of how popular it is. And right now, a lot of foundations are downsizing their learning teams, completely shutting down their learning teams because leaders are asking actually what's the return on investment on learning? And how do we know that we're actually making progress? We keep learning, are we actually moving the needle? Is it helping us become more strong? Is it helping us with staff retention, motivation, our culture becoming stronger, our outcomes being more sustainable? So we were really thrilled by those interpretations. And I'll say as we welcome in new piloters, folks are coming up with even more creative ideas that we hadn't considered, which is for us a dream come true because that's how you would hope something like this could be adapted and truly fit for purpose based on who needs it for different reasons.

Eric Ressler [00:42:00]: Yeah, we should touch just briefly before we wrap up on this concept of the maturity tool, because I think it maps into an idea that learning or being a learning organization or a learning philanthropy is not a binary. You're not either a learning philanthropy or not. It is a process. It is something that you mature and grow over time. So can you just speak to that area a little bit around what that looks like? And I think the tool is really good at mapping what does it look like when you're first getting started within any one component of becoming a learning philanthropy? And what are the goals in step one, two, three, four, five for each of those components?

Katherine Haugh [00:42:35]: Yes, absolutely. And I think to build on that, there's no one right way to be a learning philanthropy or one path towards becoming one. So in our research, we've found so far eight different archetypes of learning philanthropies because we know that foundations really need to play to their strengths culturally and operationally. The same is true for learning. So some folks may be actually our learners love evidence and we're really good with evidence curation and sense-making. Whereas another is we're really good with learning with our partners, receiving feedback from our partners, taking action. So we kind of see that foundations have their strong zones and their areas for improvement. And our recommendation is you don't have to be thriving across every area. You have to be the version of a learning philanthropy that's going to help your foundation be as effective and as healthy and joyful of a place to work as possible.

So that's something that we're excited about. As it relates to the maturity tool, that's I think the element that is most innovative about what we've designed because it takes these different components of a learning philanthropy and breaks them down into observable behaviors. So you might see as you're starting out, you're at a lower stage of maturity, but you want to advance and hopefully creates a language and a way to share with others like, "Oh, hey, I see you guys are really at a higher rate of maturity over here. How did you get there? And how did you move from one place to the other?" Those are the conversations we're excited to be facilitating. And maybe just to close, definitely it's not a binary to be a learning philanthropy. And I think the best and probably the worst part for our people is that it's a continuous journey. You're always becoming a learning philanthropy. It's not like you are one or you're not one.

And the metaphor that I like to use is leading a healthy life. There's many different ways to have a healthy life. You have maybe nutrition, you have sleep, you have your social life, you have purpose and passion, you have movement. And you might be like, okay, actually right now movement is really important to me. I'm at a higher degree of maturity at movement and socializing. And having a picture of what success looks like for you with an overall focus on improving your health and wellbeing overall is the same for learning philanthropy. And our people tend to love that because they're like, yes, having a healthy lifestyle is not something that you just achieve, and then you can kick back on the couch and not see friends and not eat well. You have to always keep doing it. So that's definitely the case for our work.

Eric Ressler [00:45:30]: Yeah, I think that's a powerful metaphor also because to me it says the goal isn't necessarily to have equal amounts of all of those things all the time.

Katherine Haugh [00:45:40]: Exactly.

Eric Ressler [00:45:40]: It's more seasonal. I know for me personally, as I work towards living a healthy lifestyle, sometimes movement is more my focus. Sometimes socializing is more. And overall, it just doesn't work in a practical way to have all of those things be equal all the time consistently. That's just not how life works. And I think that's probably true organizationally as well.

Katherine Haugh [00:46:00]: Exactly.

Eric Ressler [00:46:00]: So Kat, this has been so awesome and informative. Thank you so much. How can people who are interested in this get more involved, learn more? Where can they find the framework? Tell us a little bit about the cool stuff we're building together and how that's going to benefit the sector as a field building resource.

Katherine Haugh [00:46:25]: Yes, totally. So thanks to your amazing team and our partnership, we've built a whole website that looks absolutely stunning, is really easy to navigate and full of great resources. So folks can go to learningphilanthropy.com. And what they'll find there is the maturity tool card game, all about the learning philanthropy, our origin story, and case studies of how different foundations have used the tool within their organization, as well as some of the insights and patterns that we're noticing across stories of how foundations are becoming learning philanthropies and a very fun built-in quiz if you're curious about your learning archetype.

Eric Ressler [00:47:05]: Awesome. Thank you so much, Kat. This has been wonderful and highly recommend to our listeners to go check out the site. There's lots of great resources there. Yeah, and I'm so glad we got a chance to talk about learning. I think it's really important and really appreciate your time today.

Katherine Haugh [00:47:20]: Thank you so much. This was such a delight.

Eric Ressler [00:47:25]: If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.