The G/g Learning Paradigm: How High-Performing Teams Learn While They Deliver

Most organisations treat learning and delivery as separate activities. Learning happens in workshops, training programmes, and off-sites. Delivery happens everywhere else. The two run on parallel tracks — and learning almost always loses.

This is not a motivation problem. It is not a discipline problem. It is a structural one.

When capability building is separated from live work, it competes with it. The training backlog grows. The good intentions accumulate. And quarter after quarter, the team gets better at the work it is already doing — while the capabilities it will need next remain perpetually one quarter away.

The gap is not just inconvenient. It is destructive to the learning itself.

Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped this in the 1880s with his forgetting curve: without reinforcement, we lose the majority of newly learned information within days. The skill is at its most vulnerable precisely when it is newest — before it has been anchored to real experience, real consequences, and observed value. A workshop attended in January, with no application until March, has largely evaporated by the time the context arrives.

Modern cognitive psychology adds a second layer. The closer the learning moment is to the practice moment, the stronger the encoding. You are not retrieving a skill when you finally apply it weeks later. You are rebuilding it from fragments — and rebuilding takes time the work will not give you.

This is the structural problem G/g is designed to solve.

Where the idea came from — a Nokia story

In the early 2000s, I was running Studio XF at Nokia — a cross-functional innovation studio operating at the edge of what the organisation knew how to do. The brief was generative: find the next thing. The team was strong. The problem was not capability — it was the kind of capability we had.

We were designers and engineers who could build things. What we could not yet do was tell the story of what we were building in a way that made the people around us understand why it mattered. We lacked a documentary eye — the ability to look at ordinary human behaviour and see the insight inside it. And I had a sense, not yet a conviction, that this was the capability gap quietly limiting everything we produced.

So I made an unusual decision. I arranged for the team to spend time at Zentropa Films — at that point the most artistically serious and deliberately provocative film studio in Denmark. The studio Lars von Trier was actively working in. The studio with a particular relationship to the Danish film establishment that expressed itself in a now-legendary artefact: a row of porcelain gnomes on the lawn outside the boardroom. When Zentropa’s directors grew sufficiently frustrated with Nordisk Film or the Danish Film Institute — the gatekeepers of the establishment — they would go outside and urinate on the gnomes. A private ritual of rebellion that had become part of the studio’s identity.

The story that captures Zentropa’s culture best involves Catherine Deneuve, who came to film there. She spotted the gnomes from the window, declared them charming, and rushed outside to tenderly embrace them. Nobody told her. Nobody dared. The joke became something else entirely — a French cinema legend caressing the establishment’s symbolic urinal, finding it delightful. That story said more about Zentropa’s relationship to art, rebellion, and official culture than any manifesto could.

That encounter — the whole weight of what Zentropa represented — deeply affected the Studio XF team. Not the video editing skills we went to acquire. Something more fundamental: a way of looking at the world. A documentary instinct. The understanding that reality, closely observed, is more interesting and more useful than any brief.

We came back changed. But we came back without a G.

The holding pattern — when g arrives before G

This is the part of the story the G/g framework is built on.

The team had acquired a capability — visual storytelling, documentary-style observation, the ability to construct a narrative from real human behaviour. But there was no live project that demanded it. The skill was warm. The landing strip had not yet appeared.

What I told the team was simple: go home and start editing your family pictures. Practice the tools. Keep the eye active. The video storytelling capability was circling — trained, ready, but waiting for the right G to land in.

The g was not yet valuable. It had not yet anchored itself in consequential work. But it was not deteriorating either. It was waiting — circling above the landing zone until the right G landing strip would appear.

Then the G appeared.

Nokia needed concepts for a new product category: in-car additions for drivers receiving phone calls. This was before CarPlay, before Bluetooth headsets, before the phone had become architecturally integrated into the driving experience. Drivers were doing something genuinely interesting and genuinely dangerous — managing calls with a device in their pocket, at 100 kilometres per hour. We needed to understand what they were actually doing. Not what they said they did. What they did.

The Studio XF team deployed the capability we had been holding in reserve. We placed a researcher in the passenger seat. A video photographer in the back. Real people. Real cars. Real calls, received and managed in real traffic. No lab. No survey. No focus group.

The footage that came back to the studio was a game changer. Not because it was technically sophisticated — it was raw, documentary-style, shot from the back seat. But because it was true. People watched it and recognised something they had never been able to articulate before. The insight was immediate and embodied in a way no written research report had ever produced in that studio.

The g had landed. The capability anchored itself in consequential work. That documentary instinct — the ability to bring real human behaviour into the room and let it speak — became a permanent part of how the studio worked. It eventually became the Storytelling mindset in the Five Mindsets framework.

The idea — G and g

Every team operates simultaneously with two kinds of goals.

G — the big goals. The external commitments: delivery, outcomes, roadmaps shaped by market demands, sponsor expectations, and strategic priorities. These are non-negotiable. G drives the work. G is what you are accountable for.

g — the small goals. The internal learning backlog: capabilities the team knows it will need, skills that are currently thin, ways of working that need to evolve. These are important but not urgent — which is exactly why they never happen.

The G/g shift is simple in conception and disciplined in practice. When planning any initiative, you look at your learning backlog and ask a single question:

Where can this work become the training ground?

Each piece of delivery becomes a small bundle — an outcome to ship and a capability to practice. Not in sequence. Simultaneously. The work is the learning context. The learning sharpens the work.

Why G/g fits this moment

Previous generations of work were slower and more forgiving of the gap between theory and practice. You could attend a course in Q1 and find the application context waiting in Q2. Today, the work moves faster than that cycle allows. By the time the training has been planned, delivered, and scheduled for application, the problem it was designed to address has already mutated.

AI is compressing the time between “someone has a better idea” and “your customers have already moved.” The window between relevance and obsolescence is narrowing for everyone simultaneously. Capability that cannot be deployed in real conditions, under real pressure, in real time, is not competitive capability. It is expensive aspiration.

G/g collapses the gap by design. The learning context is the work context. The practice follows the introduction within the same initiative, often within the same week. Skills take root not because they were taught well, but because they were immediately exercised in conditions that mattered — and the brain registered the value in real time.

Where this sits in the literature

G/g is not a new idea. It is a precise one — and it has a long intellectual lineage worth naming.

The closest ancestor is Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s concept of double-loop learning, developed across a series of landmark works from 1974 onwards. Argyris and Schön distinguished between single-loop learning — fixing the problem within existing rules — and double-loop learning, which changes the governing values and assumptions that produced the problem. G/g is double-loop learning made operational at the team planning level: the g goal is not just “learn something” — it is “change how we work while we work.”

Peter Senge extended this into the concept of the learning organisation in The Fifth Discipline (1990). Senge argued that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than the competition — and that this capacity could not be bolted on. It had to be embedded in how the organisation actually operates.

Reg Revans, whose action learning methodology dates to the 1940s, argued that real learning requires real problems — that the classroom is structurally incapable of producing the kind of knowledge that changes behaviour under pressure. His formula, L = P + Q (Learning equals Programmed knowledge plus Questioning insight), anticipated the G/g logic precisely: the question only becomes real inside a live problem.

What G/g adds to all of this is the planning-level discipline — a specific, repeatable moment at the start of each initiative where the team asks: what one capability are we going to practice here, and how will we know if it developed? That question, asked consistently, is what separates teams that develop from teams that merely deliver.

The capability progression system

The g goal is not a task to complete. It is a capability to earn.

Self-determination theory, developed by Deci and Ryan, identifies competence — the felt sense of growing mastery — as one of the three core drivers of intrinsic motivation. The moment you name a capability as something to be earned, you make the growth visible. And visible growth is motivating in a way that “complete your learning objectives” never is.

The G/g capability progression system has five states:

The team capability wall

The individual progression states become powerful when they are made visible at the team level. The team capability wall is a living map of which capabilities the team collectively holds, and at what level. Not a performance management tool. Not a training matrix. A shared picture of where the team is building, what is circling, what has landed, and who can teach.

It does three things that conventional learning tools cannot. It makes progress visible in real time — a capability moving from Learner to Practitioner inside a sprint is a genuine organisational achievement worth marking. It surfaces the Masters — when the wall shows that one person has reached Master level, others at Id or Learner can learn from their colleague rather than from a course. And it connects the small g to the long horizon — the team can see what they are building toward, not just what they completed.

The operations system — how leaders and leads run G/g

G/g is a planning discipline. It lives or dies in the moment before an initiative begins. The lead holds three recurring moments — none of which require a workshop, a consultant, or a new process layer.

The earning language

The language of G/g is deliberate. You do not complete a learning goal. You earn a capability.

Each g goal should have a short, named title — almost like a professional credential earned in the field. The Documentary Eye. The Strategic Narrator. The Ambiguity Holder. The Quiet Closer. Names that mean something to the team, that carry a history, that refer to real moments in real work where the capability was tested and proved.

When a capability is earned, it is worth marking. Not with a performance review comment. With a moment of genuine acknowledgment — the team knows what it took, because they were there for the G that made it real.

This is not gamification in the superficial sense. It is the application of what we know about intrinsic motivation to the design of how teams develop. Competence, recognised and named, is one of the strongest drivers of continued engagement. The team that knows what it is earning — and can see it accumulating — is a team that finds meaning in the development, not just the delivery.

Templates and tools

The G/g planning template covers the four parts of the planning moment: the G commitment and initiative type, the g goal and culture quadrant fit, the evidence of progress with before-and-after behaviour, and the long horizon — what this small g is building toward when it has fully taken root. Access the G/g Planning Template →

The team capability wall template maps the full capability portfolio across Id, Circling, Learner, Practitioner and Master — with space for individual ownership and the quarterly review. Access the Team Capability Wall →

A different kind of learning organisation

Senge’s learning organisation has been an aspiration for thirty years. Most organisations have tried to build it from the outside — through training functions, learning management systems, capability frameworks, and off-site programmes. Most have found that it does not hold. The delivery pressure reasserts itself. The learning retreats to the margins.

G/g does not fight the delivery pressure. It uses it. The work is not the enemy of development — it is the only context in which development becomes real.

The Nokia story is the proof. A team that went to a film studio and came back with a documentary eye. That kept the skill warm through family photo editing while waiting for the right G. That deployed it in the back seat of a car on a Finnish motorway and came home with footage that changed how the studio saw the world. That small g — the documentary instinct earned at Zentropa and landed in a moving vehicle — eventually became one of the Five Mindsets. It compounded.

That is what a learning organisation looks like from the inside. Not a framework on a wall. A team that knows what it is earning — and is earning it, initiative by initiative, in the only classroom that has ever really worked.

The real work. Right now. With one small deliberate addition.

Further reading

• Chris Argyris & Donald Schön — Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Addison-Wesley, 1978)
• Peter Senge — The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday, 1990)
• Reg Revans — Action Learning: New Techniques for Management (Blond & Briggs, 1980)
• Edward Deci & Richard Ryan — Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (Plenum, 1985)
• Hermann Ebbinghaus — Uber das Gedachtnis (1885) — the original forgetting curve research
• Veldyaeva & Scheeg — A Taxonomy of Microlearning Applications for Organizational Learning (ACIS, 2024)