Peer Learning

What a business most needs to know is held by people who are not selling it: the first EU filing, the first plant in Mexico, the support desk that had to run overnight, the distributor who turned out to be a competitor.

Putting the people who hold that next to the people who need it is the fastest way we know to raise growth, and the cheapest: somebody else has already paid the teacher to learn it.

The alternatives cost more. A consultancy sells you the summary of what your peers told it. A conference gives you the version that survived legal review, from a stage, with no time for the question you came with.

The useful sentence is never in the case study. It is the one that starts “the part that went wrong in month two was”.

Peer groups. Eight to twelve members in comparable seats, meeting monthly for a year with the same people and a chair. You bring a live problem, not an update. Nothing leaves the room.

Peer-taught courses. Four short sessions on one narrow thing, taught by a member who has done it. We assemble and edit it, the member keeps the credit, and we say what it will cost them in hours before they agree.

Peer-contributed playbooks. The written version, with the numbers and the mistakes in it. “How we opened in Vietnam” is worth more than a chapter on market entry, and takes an afternoon to write.

Office hours. A member offers an hour a month on the one thing they know. Your Superconnector books it when one of your goals needs it, and not otherwise.

Ask the network. One question, routed to the five members most likely to have answered it in practice. The answers come back to you, not to a feed, so nobody is performing for an audience.

Gatherings and summits. Small dinners where the table is chosen rather than sold, and summits on the six questions the network keeps raising.

Your Superconnector builds one and keeps it current. It starts from your goals rather than from a catalogue, which is the difference between this and every course library you have ignored.

Say you are trying to sell into Germany by June. It finds the four members who have, the playbook two of them wrote, the course that covers the distribution question, and the peer group where three people are doing it now. Then it puts them in an order, because the course is worth more after the two calls than before them.

It stays short. Three things at a time, the next appearing when the last is done, and anything that stops bearing on your goals comes off unfinished. A half-read thing you no longer need is not a debt.

It fits how you learn. Some people read, some argue in a room, some want 20 minutes with one person who has done it. Say which once, and it stops sending the other kinds.

Least of the three, and it would be easy to write this page as though that were not true. The gatherings run and the summit dates are set. The first peer groups form as members arrive, because a group of four is not a group. Members are writing the first courses and playbooks now, and they are narrow on purpose.

If you want to teach rather than to be taught, say so when you join. That is the half of this that is short.