Leading Organizational Learning

Chapter Nine

Informal Learning

Developing a Value for Discovery

Marcia L. Conner

It may surprise you to learn that more than 70 percent of learning
experiences in the workplace are informal or accidental, through
activities not structured or sponsored by an employer or a school.^1
This learning is continuous and all-encompassing, arising from
everyday activities and events. Sometimes it is spontaneous; other
times learners organize it as they do their work. It is not limited to
a predefined body of knowledge (what is known) but instead
emerges and is constructed from the spontaneity and serendipity of
personal interactions. It happens whenever and wherever people
do their work: around a conference table, on site with customers,
at a laboratory bench, or on a shop floor.
For leaders to elicit its potential, they can allow for some learn-
ing of their own: they can discover how to encourage the vast
amount of informal learning already going on so that they and their
organizations can learn, and innovate and excel, even more.

Informal Learning on the Job

Work is profoundly social. As we work, we learn informally through
listening to others, making mistakes, talking about what we’ve read
and done, and paying attention to our daily activities. Informal
learning generally arises at work as a means to achieve individual
and organizational goals. Some informal learning develops from

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