Learning From Practice: Designing Conditions for Organizational Learning Across a Federated Nonprofit Network

Abstract

Life Science Cares (LSC) is a federated nonprofit network that mobilizes the financial and human capital of the life sciences industry to disrupt poverty. As the organization expanded across five affiliate sites and a newly formed National Team, its fast pace of execution often outstripped its capacity for learning. Although staff expressed a desire for stronger cross-site connection, shared resources, and opportunities to learn from one another’s work, LSC had not yet developed the structures and routines needed to support reflection, shared sensemaking, and knowledge transfer across sites. As a result, knowledge often remained local rather than becoming an organizational resource. This capstone examines the strategic project I led during my residency to create the early conditions for workplace learning at LSC. Rather than beginning with technical solutions such as templates or standard operating procedures, I designed and facilitated the Learning from Practice Group, a structured cross-site intervention in which staff examined dilemmas of practice, surfaced implicit knowledge, and reflected with colleagues across the network. The project was informed by diagnostic work, including a listening tour, survey data, retreat observations, and pilot feedback. The design of the Learning from Practice Group embedded adaptive and strategic leadership routines without presenting the experience as formal training. Across a four-session arc, participants encountered recurring learning practices meant to help them slow down, examine real-time challenges, surface tacit knowledge, and engage in structured inquiry. Participants were later invited to “try on” selected routines in other work settings, making diffusion in this project the spread of learning practices and habits of inquiry beyond the group itself. Findings from pre- and post-assessments indicated that the Learning from Practice Group strengthened trust, psychological safety, and participants’ willingness to reflect, ask questions, and learn with peers across the network. At the same time, evidence of diffusion beyond the pilot remained limited. Although some routines became visible in all-staff, affiliate, and functional meetings, uptake was uneven. My analysis suggests that broader diffusion remained limited in part because the intervention was still in an early developmental stage: participants were beginning to learn, adapt, and enact the routines, but had not yet had sufficient opportunity to model them consistently, receive feedback, and support wider uptake across the organization. This capstone argues that in federated nonprofits, organizational learning must be intentionally designed through shared routines, protected spaces for reflection, and structures that support diffusion. For LSC, this means pairing relational learning spaces with organizational mechanisms that help new practices travel. For the nonprofit sector, the findings suggest that the capacity to learn from practice is essential to sustaining mission-driven work over time.