What Your Organisation Is Learning From Other Organisations — and Why It Probably Isn’t Enough
Most organisations are remarkably insular in how they build resilience. They learn from their own experience — their own disruptions, their own recoveries, their own near-misses. The insight available from organisations that have navigated similar challenges differently, or the same challenge better, is largely left on the table.
The 2022 systematic review of 59 studies on organisational resilience and learning identified inter-organisational learning — the deliberate transfer of knowledge and insight across organisational boundaries — as one of the most consistently underused and most potentially valuable resilience-building practices available. The finding was direct: lack of appropriate collaboration with other relevant organisations deprives organisations of valuable opportunities to learn from others, and actively inhibits resilience development.
What Inter-Organisational Learning Actually Is
Inter-organisational learning is not benchmarking. It is not the kind of external scanning that happens when a leadership team reviews a competitor’s annual report or sends someone to a conference. It is something more specific and more generative: the deliberate creation of shared learning relationships between organisations, where genuine experience — including failure — is exchanged openly in the service of collective improvement.
The research identifies it as central to organisational resilience because of a specific mechanism: organisations that are navigating similar conditions from different starting points, with different approaches, generate insights that no single organisation can produce alone. The variety of perspectives, strategies and outcomes creates a collective knowledge base that is more robust and more adaptive than any individual organisation’s experience.
The Support Network dimension of The Resilience Wheel applies at organisational level as directly as it does at individual level. Just as individual leaders need a developmental network — relationships where genuine challenge and support are available, beyond the functional relationships of the immediate role — organisations need the equivalent: relationships with other organisations where honest exchange about what is working and what is not is both possible and practiced.
“The organisation that learns only from its own experience is limited by the range and frequency of its own disruptions. The one that learns from others compounds its resilience without waiting for the next crisis.”
Learning from Leaders from different Organisations is key. How are you doing this? Photo Getty Images Unsplash
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
The barriers to inter-organisational learning are real and well-documented. Differing resources, objectives and learning experiences across organisations make knowledge transfer imperfect. Competitive dynamics create reluctance to share. The trust required for genuine exchange of difficult experience — including failures and near-misses — takes time and intentionality to build.
The research identifies trust and inclusion as the foundation of effective inter-organisational learning systems. Without them, organisations share successes and manage the presentation of failures rather than exchanging the honest account of experience that would actually be useful. The result is a veneer of collaboration that produces the appearance of inter-organisational learning without its substance.
This is why the peer cohort model — a structured, facilitated group of leaders from different organisations who meet regularly to share genuine experience, challenge each other’s thinking and build collective capability — is one of the most effective formats for inter-organisational learning available. The trust is deliberately built over time. The facilitation creates the conditions for honest exchange. The structure ensures the learning is captured and applied rather than simply discussed.
The Forward Table: Inter-Organisational Learning by Design
The Forward Table — the peer leadership programme co-founded by Russell Harvey and Christine Simms — is built on exactly this principle. It brings together senior leaders and business owners from different organisations who share comparable challenges but not competitive relationships, creates the conditions for genuine exchange of experience, and provides the facilitated structure that ensures the peer learning translates into individual and organisational development.
This is not networking. It is not a panel discussion or a conference. It is a deliberate, ongoing inter-organisational learning relationship — precisely the kind that the research identifies as one of the most underused and most valuable resilience-building practices available to senior leaders.
The Resilience Wheel is the shared framework that gives the conversations structure and the learning precision. Instead of vague exchange about general challenges, The Forward Table creates specific, Wheel-grounded conversations about what is genuinely developing and what still needs to change — across seven dimensions, across multiple organisations, over time.
A Question for Your Organisation
Where does your organisation currently learn from the experience of others? Not from published case studies or conference presentations — the polished, selective versions of other organisations’ experience. From the honest, specific, unedited account of what another organisation tried, what happened, what they learned, and what they would do differently.
If the honest answer is "not really, or not systematically," that is a gap in your resilience architecture that is worth addressing. The Organisational Resilience Diagnostic surfaces this specifically — within the Support dimension, which at organisational level asks whether the organisation has the relationships and structures that enable genuine external learning, not just internal review.
Ready to have a conversation?
Start with the Organisational Resilience Diagnostic — a structured, honest snapshot across The Resilience Wheel.
Organisational Resilience Diagnostic:
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