We have all read the “keeps me up at night” data about the rapid shrinking life expectancy of enterprises today, including the disappearance of 50% of Fortune 500 companies that were around just 20 years ago.

Many lost their Juice.

They failed to remember that enterprise life is either a juicy, creative, and discovery journey of continual renewal and transformative growth or it loses its mojo and limps along on old legs of past glories, eventually destined to give up its life force.

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enterprise life is not an exception. It too is a journey…a journey of made up of the interweaving of many journeys.

We have found there are three essential, enterprise-renewing journeys…Learning, Innovation and Strategy journeys.

These three tend to set all other journeys in motion (like Customer, Brand Building, or Expansion Journeys).

One of the most essential journeys that too many companies fail to take is the Learning Journey. It’s the inspirational, insight sparking, eye-opening journey that feeds the Innovation and transformative Strategy Journeys that integrate with it.

“We are too insular”, “We are too often talking to ourselves”, “We don’t take the time to find out about industries and tech that are three steps ahead of us”.

These are some of the comments we too often hear from enterprise leaders.

The way to overcome these self-limiting issues is to take a Learning Journey.

“Understanding is a path, not a point. It’s a path of connections between thought and thought; patterns over patterns. It is relationships.” — Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Talks, Designer, Information Architect

Learning Journeys

If you want a juicy experience, rich in creative understanding, thought provoking, transformative and filled with human-to-human relationship collaboration, go on a learning journey with our French-American friend and business colleague, Christian Forthomme.

Christian takes leaders from around the world on learning journeys where they learn about innovation, digital transformation, sustainability, regenerative business, and personal/professional change from Silicon Valley/Bay Area companies setting the pace in their various fields. These are immersive two-to-five-day experiences that awaken individuals and teams to new ways of thinking, perceiving, and creating value for all.

Christian and his RealChange team guide entrepreneurs, business and change leaders on a journey into curious, unknown worlds that can open a new future. Over the years, they have led 230 learning journeys with 3,300 global leaders.

In his 25 years of leading learning journeys for leaders and leaders-to-be, Christian has learned that:

The learning journey must be a rich, juicy, immersive experience that personally touches each person.
People want to discover their new potential in unseen possibilities.
It is about exploring with experts (those who know secrets) and those who are doing what you want to do next.
Placing emphasis on the development of the journey group is as important as the development of the individual…when people learn together, they grow exponentially.
When people journey to a new place and a new environment they open themselves to new thinking.
Learning journeys are best when they are cross-disciplinary, ecological and systems thinking in perspective.
Journeys can be in person and augmented with virtual learning and exploration…visuals, video, and digital all play an important role.
Like all things worthwhile in life, love is at the basis of any journey…love of curiosity and discovery, love of relationship connection, love of co-creation, love of becoming and growing, love of purpose and making a difference.
The eye-opening journey must lead to insights and actions that change things when people return to their enterprises…like all great stories, the hero is transformed and compelled to share her/his learning “boon” with her/his community upon return.

When we shared our model for learning journeys (see below) with Christian, he said, “Yes! We must engage people at all six levels of the Learning Journey”.

Six Levels of Learning Journeys

Here is our menu of learning journey approaches that gives you a sense of the depth and breadth of high impact, transformative learning journeys:

1. Learn From More Advanced Enterprises

Learn from those who are doing what you want to do. Learn from their business model, tech platforms and core competencies; discover how they create enterprise advantage…customers, company/brand, culture, capabilities, collaboration; gather pivotal insights about their “how to” in functions…marketing, operations, people, sales, tech development.

2. Learn From the Future

Gather the latest thinking and insights of what is coming. Discover the trends and future disruptors. Explore the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) and the emerging new Regenerative Era. Open the lens to culture changes, the arts, and new sciences not necessarily in your industry. Work with Universities to learn and co-create. Create as clear a picture as possible of the environment in which you will be working in the future.

3. Learn From Those Who Know Secrets

Visit or bring in people who are experts, people who have a wisdom beyond your team; gather peers and learn what they know that you don’t; bring younger generations to your strategic table and learn how they see the future.

4. Learn From Experimentation

Create new approaches to solution making. Actively experiment with new ways and processes; prototype new systems, solutions, and products…try it, fail, learn, try again, succeed; play with new thinking and exploration; envision new possibilities; be like scientists who relentlessly pursue a new truth that will reveal new disruptive insights that give birth to new, unexpected solutions that “come from out of the blue”.

5. Learn From Expanded Consciousness

Find better ways of Being, developing from the inside to the outside. Practice presence, attention, and mindfulness; let experiences open you to what nature teaches (our ultimate teacher from which all knowledge flows); learn from what the body teaches…Yoga, Tai Chi, Meditation, Bodywork; seek and discover breakthrough therapy/personal transformation, sound healing, or somatic agency development. Draw upon the subconscious, the intuitive…“go cosmic fishing” as Buckminster Fuller called it. There is more available to our learning and insights than what we carry in our brain bucket. Expand your own insights by mentoring and sharing what you know…there is nothing like teaching a subject to be able to deeply learn the subject.

6. Learn By Contributing To Others

Many quickly discover that in helping others learn, leaders learn a lot about themselves as well as the world. Volunteering and organizing for change expands your horizons of seeing and doing. Today more and more enterprise leaders are actively building higher purpose and community/world impact organizations. They are learning how giving to something greater than themselves can open parts of themselves that are more receptive to new insights. Insights preciously valuable to their enterprises.

As we have written before regarding brand building (link to “Branding — What has love got to do with it?”), any experience worth its investment should evoke a reaction of “Oh, Wow!”, “Ah, Ha!”, and “Hey, You!”. Use this as a test for your journey’s effectiveness.

In our work with clients from all sectors, we have seen first-hand the immensely valuable return on well-orchestrated learning journeys. We encourage all organizations to “re-juice”/revitalize their organizations by exploring new ways of learning.

One large, multibillion-dollar company, bought five companies that were competitors and had very different viewpoints and capabilities. They asked us to help unite, build synergy between them and create shared future strategy.

We first helped them understand that they were no longer competitors and needed to learn a fresh language of collaboration. The new CEO over the companies said that, at first, the leaders were distrustful of each other and some wouldn’t even look at one another in a meeting.

So, we took them on an internal journey, to discover who each of them was as a leader. We had real, human discussions that opened insights into one another.

We also played. There is something about people playing together that opens them to honest vulnerability that is essential to true collaboration. When they could laugh together and at themselves, they could then start to work together.

After a few days of working together and seeing big leaps in thinking that they were capable of as collaborative team, they could then begin learning journeys to expand their horizons.

The CEO began guided learning journeys by first visiting one another’s company sites. This opened their eyes to new possibilities of co-creation and cross-learning.

Later they took learning journeys to suppliers and companies of other more advanced technologies where they learned from “others who knew secrets” that they wanted to better understand.

This model of learning was so successful that other divisions in the mega-company adapted it and the CEO over the five companies was invited onto the Board of the parent company.

There are stories of learning journeys that are too numerous to recount here but we want to spread the word that they work and can create enormous leverage for growth and future building.

We encourage all companies to integrate learning journeys into their planning and transformations. It is low risk, lots of fun, and produces powerful results.