The ABCs Meet the Workplace
I start my workday with a one-email-a-day routine. Out of the avalanche that lands in my inbox, I pick one to read. Might be poetry, history, economic analysis or something spiritual. Today I landed on Seth Godin.
He was writing about bad employees and bad bosses, and one idea stopped me: creating the conditions for learning, commitment, and resilience is the boss’s job, not the job of the people you hired to follow along.
I think about learning a lot. First it was popping around the country to visit schools for CompetencyWorks. Now, in writing Wired for Brilliance with Sydney Schaef (coming early 2027), I think about it nearly every day. We boiled the research down to three conditions schools need to develop into the ABCs of Learning: agency, belonging, and competence. (Yes, they’re grounded in Self-Determination Theory from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, along with cognitive and social-emotional research.)
It makes perfect sense, of course, that the learning sciences should drive how schools are designed, because learning is the core industry and product. (Although the idea that the core service is sorting students for college entrance keeps dragging on and dragging school effectiveness down as it undermines learning along the way.)
But after reading Godin’s piece, I started wondering…
Are the ABC’s of Learning a fundamental workplace capacity? Or should they be?
I realized that somewhere along the way I had developed the assumption that corporate investments in supporting employee and organizational learning was a nice-to-have, something that depends on your industry, your product, or whether you’re chasing a competitive edge. Godin doesn’t see it that way. He treats learning as a core condition of any workplace. If he’s right, then understanding the research on learning matters just as much to a company as it does to a school.
Sydney has already seen glimmers of this. Human resources folks have told her that the framework in Wired for Brilliance (Head for cognition, Heart for social-emotional, Heat for engagement and motivation, all woven together to create the ABCs) helps them be smarter about organizational culture and professional development design. And it’s definitely true for teacher professional development: designing with the learning sciences makes it possible for teachers to experience the strategies they’re being asked to use.
Godin’s one little sentence has my head spinning. I’m going to go dive into how organizational capacities like resilience and commitment (topics I’ve never thought about) relate to how Sydney and I are thinking about the learning sciences. Stay tuned!
Over to you….
Should agency, belonging and competence (the opportunity to master new knowledge and skills) be considered as core capacities or conditions in workplaces?
How well do companies, in the public and private sector, know the research about how we learn?
How deeply are they using it to design their organizations and professional learning? Are they picking and choosing what they are focusing on or is their more of an integrated approach to embedding the learning sciences into their organization?