Learning is culture, and culture is learning

We spend roughly one third of our lives at work, that’s around 90,000 hours. That’s a massive investment of time. So why do so many organisations treat learning as an afterthought, a checkbox in operations, rather than the core of culture?

Learning is far more than a skills programme. It’s how people absorb what a company truly stands for. It’s how they make sense of decisions and behave when no one’s watching. In essence, it is how culture is lived. When learning becomes disconnected, transactional, or siloed, culture fractures. Teams drift, values fade, and people narrow their vision to tasks not purpose.

The culprit is decentralisation without coordination. Without a guiding internal voice or coherent communication strategy, messages weaken. Priorities scatter across silos. There’s no central hub for knowledge, no shared platform for values, no system for connecting people around meaning. Inevitably, gaps appear, and frustration, confusion, and disengagement follow.

Yet the contrast is striking when learning is at the centre. It becomes the connective tissue linking teams, roles, geographies. It creates a shared language, a shared mental map. It helps employees understand not just what to do, but why it matters.

And yes, research supports this. Academic work confirms that cultures built around learning correlate with better organisational innovation, performance, and adaptability. Studies show that organisations with strong learning cultures are more nimble, better at absorbing new information, and less likely to fragment under stress.

There’s also evidence that decentralisation, when paired with strong culture, can be a strength, not a weakness. In teams where people learn collaboratively, decentralised networks sometimes outperform rigid hierarchies. But that only works if culture holds; otherwise decentralisation dissolves coherence.

Let’s be clear: you cannot plaster up a mission statement and call it culture. Culture is forged in the micro-moments: when people teach each other, when they test ideas, when they surface mistakes publicly and learn from them. A learning culture is, at its core, a listening culture — one that prizes curiosity, humility, collaboration, respectful dissent.

Organisations that neglect learning don’t just lose skill. They lose their compass. They lose unity. They lose their reason for being. Culture and learning are inseparable; when one erodes, the other will follow.