What is a learning partner?
So, what do you do for work?
Does that question make you grimace, take a deep breath, maybe even fill you with dread as you wonder what to say next? What do you put in the profession box on the form at the airport or when registering with a new health provider?
Are you, like me, jealous of people who can reply in one simple word: teacher; plumber; artist? Maybe you’re a knowledge worker whose job didn’t exist 20 years ago. Or a slashie with a portfolio career. Or perhaps you just have a bullshit job.
I’ve described myself as various things over the past decade. Coach, facilitator, researcher, educator, director, project lead, learner, strategic designer, social entrepreneur, consultant, trainer. The list goes on. None of them seem to make much sense to the hairdresser or taxi driver anyway. When a health practitioner asks, I now just say, ‘desk job’.
Recently I’ve realised that Learning Partner sums it up best. But no one seems to know what that means either. So let me explain.
What is a learning partnership?
I began using the term learning partnership to describe some of the work I do with an Australian university a few years ago. I wasn’t only delivering co-design training and coaching—we were starting to research and evaluate this work. We’ve been capturing and sharing what we’re learning about how we work together and the impacts of these engagements. It’s not only about supporting staff to build capability directly through our professional learning program.
I’ve noticed others describing their work as learning partnerships too. The Australian-based Centre for Public Impact team helpfully distinguish a learning partner from a typical consultant. While consultants offer simple solutions for complex problems, ‘learning partners seek to create an environment where it’s possible to embrace the uncertain, emergent, and responsive nature of [complex] challenges’. This work often begins with deep listening and involves lots of reflective practice to support cultural change.
A Public Money & Management article elaborates on this. Hesselgreaves and colleagues describe how public sector consultants are typically engaged for short-term resourcing of policy direction or reform. Consultants have historically driven efficiency-focused, top-down change. Learning partners work differently. They build internal capacity and support organisations to challenge their own assumptions, not just optimise existing ones. A learning partner’s goal is to strengthen an organisation’s ability to keep learning — about itself, its context, and the systems it’s part of. That's a fundamentally different relationship, providing a different kind of value.
While this work varies a lot in practice, Hesselgreaves & co describe learning partners as doing three main things – all part of the work we do at New Know How. Convening is how we create the conditions and occasions for collective sense-making and co-creation. Conversing involves nurturing the relationships that make honest reflection possible. And curating means capturing and maintaining the data, stories and shared memory that help organisations track and understand their own change over time.
When I rebranded this business 18 months ago, we landed on the name New Know How to reflect our focus on developing skills the world needs. We realised that learning is at the core of all the work we do.
From organisations to individuals
It’s not only about supporting institutions to become ‘learning organisations’. Our work with individuals and project teams can also be described as learning partnerships.
This was reinforced in recent training I undertook on professional supervision with Michelle Bihary. Fields like social work and mental health have mandated supervision practices that more emergent disciplines like co-design and social innovation are lacking. I was the odd-one-out in a training course targeting health and disability workers, because I know we have a lot to learn from these more established fields.
To my delight, Bihary frames professional supervision as a co-created learning partnership between supervisor and supervisee. Clearly distinguishing it from line management, she describes supervision as: “a process of learning and support, designed to build self-directed learners and increase workforce capacity through practice skill development and reflective learning.”
Even though my good friend KA McKercher has long been calling for co-design supervision, and we ran an event for CoDesignCo on this topic back in 2023, I’d been resisting the supervision label. After working various casual, part-time jobs when I was younger, I had negative connotations of the term ‘supervisor’.
But Bihary’s emphasis on adult learning principles and psychological safety really resonated with me. Her framing of supervision aligns perfectly with my approach to coaching and mentoring, for which I’ve been searching for relevant frameworks.
Frameworks from International Coaching Federation (ICF) accredited training are useful, particularly structures like CLEAR and STOKeRS, which provide a useful shape for coaching conversations. These are especially helpful in the early part of a session, ‘contracting’, by inviting the client to get clear on what they’re bringing and what they need from our time together. Rather than the coach/supervisor making assumptions about what will be useful, these structures put the client in the driver’s seat from the outset—which is very much in the spirit of a learning partnership.
I've also been influenced by a model I encountered early in my career in Aotearoa New Zealand, where Design Coach was a recognised role in co-design teams. At places like the Auckland Co-design Lab, teams working on complex challenges each had a design coach—someone who brought design thinking experience and offered practical guidance on skills like design research, concept development and prototyping. Although this type of design thinking coaching was developed and promoted by Stanford University and the Hasso Platter Institute, when I moved to Australia I realised it’s not a universal approach. But the model stuck with me: technical expertise offered in service of someone else’s learning, rather than in place of it.
Whether you call it coaching, mentoring, supervision, or something else entirely, these are all attempts to describe a similar kind of relationship. Learning partnership is the term I find most useful precisely because it cuts across all of them—keeping the focus on what matters most: the learning, and who it belongs to.
What this looks like in practice
Whatever you call it, a learning partnership between New Know How and an individual or team tends to follow a similar shape. We start with a conversation about goals, then design an engagement around them—usually a series of 60-90 minute sessions, online, at a pace that suits the client. Each session begins with some contracting questions to right-size the topic and focus our time together, and closes with reflection and concrete next steps. In between, I may send through curated resources or follow-up thinking. It’s structured enough to be useful; flexible enough to meet clients wherever they are.
There’s something in the word partnership itself that’s worth sitting with. Riane Eisler, whose work has influenced fields from social innovation to organisational design, describes a fundamental spectrum in how humans organise: from domination to partnership. In a domination system, relationships are structured by rank and control. In a partnership system, they’re structured by mutual respect and linked competencies, with power used to elevate rather than diminish. Most of us have spent our professional lives in institutions shaped more by the former than the latter, which is precisely why the relational quality of this work matters.
A learning partnership isn’t just a structure; it’s a stance. It assumes that the person doing the learning is the expert of their own context, and that the role of the partner is to create conditions for that expertise to surface—not to position themselves as an expert above the other.
So whether I’m working with an individual practitioner, a small project team, or a whole organisation, the work is the same at its core: creating conditions and spaces for learning that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Not delivering answers, but building the capacity to find better ones.
If that’s the kind of support you’ve been looking for—and couldn’t quite name—maybe now you can.
