The Power of Emergent Learning and Seamless Onboarding Experiences

The Power of Emergent Learning and Seamless Onboarding Experiences

Introduction:

In today's rapidly changing world, organizations must embrace emergent learning to thrive in the face of uncertainty and disruption. By creating an environment that fosters reflection, sensemaking, and collaboration, organizations can unlock the potential of emergent learning. Additionally, seamless onboarding experiences play a crucial role in engaging users and ensuring their success. This article explores the six enablers of emergent learning and examines four standout examples of onboarding experiences in popular apps.

Enabling Emergent Learning:

• 1. Seeing the Larger Picture: Emergent learning involves connecting the dots between specific details and overarching patterns. By understanding the bigger picture, individuals and organizations can make sense of complex and novel challenges.

• 2. Embracing Technology and Collaboration: Today's technology-facilitated and boundaryless world offers opportunities for emergent learning through the power of networks, social platforms, and collaboration. By leveraging these tools, organizations can become platforms for emergent learning.

• 3. Shifting to a Living-Systems View: Organizations need to move away from a mechanistic view of organization design and embrace a living-systems perspective. This shift allows information to flow freely, enabling sensemaking and creating shared awareness of the context and ecosystem.

• 4. Generative Conversation: Building the capacity for generative conversations is essential for emergent learning. These conversations involve holding space for something new to be born and encourage diverse perspectives and inclusive, focused, and alive approaches to problem-solving.

• 5. Collaboration Across Diversity: Welcoming paradoxes, embracing cognitive dissonance, and discarding the idea of a single right solution are critical elements of emergent learning. Collaboration involves holding space for diverse perspectives and moving towards the best solution that emerges.

• 6. Comfort with Uncertainty and Ambiguity: Thriving in ambiguity requires letting go of fear, listening deeply to the context and each other, and staying with the ambiguity to allow the next step to emerge through collective sensemaking.

Seamless Onboarding Experiences:

• 1. Reflectly: Reflectly offers a soothing onboarding experience that promotes self-reflection and well-being. By guiding users through a series of prompts, it encourages users to engage in reflective practices and build a co-creative experience.

• 2. Duolingo: Duolingo sets the standard for onboarding with its gamified language learning platform. Through microinteractions and a minimalistic design, Duolingo creates a captivating core experience that keeps users engaged and motivated.

• 3. Twitter: Twitter's onboarding process focuses on simplicity and engagement. By displaying follower counts during account setup, it taps into the bandwagon effect and encourages users to follow more accounts. This approach enhances user activity and fosters a sense of belonging.

• 4. Shazam: Shazam offers a unique onboarding experience that can be completed in a short time frame, ranging from 15 seconds to a few minutes. This quick and efficient onboarding process allows users to start using the app immediately, ensuring a seamless transition to the core experience.

Actionable Advice:

• 1. Foster a culture of reflection and sensemaking within your organization. Encourage individuals and teams to engage in generative conversations and embrace diverse perspectives.

• 2. Embrace technology and collaboration to create platforms for emergent learning. Leverage social platforms, networks, and collaboration tools to enable information flow and shared awareness.

• 3. Design seamless onboarding experiences that engage and guide users effectively. Focus on simplicity, gamification, and quick time-to-value to ensure user success and satisfaction.

Conclusion:

Emergent learning and seamless onboarding experiences are crucial elements for organizations and app developers seeking to thrive in today's complex and ever-changing landscape. By incorporating the enablers of emergent learning and adopting best practices in onboarding, organizations can create thriving, anti-fragile environments that embrace change and disruption.