About Community-driven Learning with Tsvetelina Plummer

Welcome to the first talk in 2025!

Session: Community-driven Learning - or How to Enable Learning across Silos
Speaker: Tsvetelina Plummer
Location: Europace AG, Heidestr. 8
Agenda: Doors Open 18:30, Start of the talk 19:00

Talk Abstract:
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.“ - Alvin Toffler

In any big organisation, maybe even small ones – how do you circulate new, highly-relevant knowledge quickly and effectively enough? Especially in a remote setting and while still keeping the old systems going?

In particular, how do we turn away from the old, boring and often not so relevant classroom trainings we’ve all been part of? How can we instead create learning experiences that keep our curiosity going and tap into our internal motivations. As with so many other things, it turns out that when you give people freedom within a set of constraints, they rise up to the challenge and take ownership!

Our approach was to ditch trying to answer the questions “authoritatively”, from some sort of a central top instance, but to leverage the wisdom and power of the community – in multiple ways. We created a marketplace-like community of trainers, supporters and learners who were able to regularly create learning experiences together, thus learning from each other and with each other. And we discovered quite a lot of benefits and opportunities, as well as misconceptions and pitfalls, only after we started it. So, I want to share with you our journey from kickstart to scale, what we failed at, learned from and changed, and what you can do to start something like this in your own org.

About the speaker:

Tsvetelina Plummer

Senior Agile Coach at GfK in Berlin. I was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria and moved when I was 19 to Berlin to study Computer Science at the TU Berlin. After spending some time teaching theory and helping students, I became interested in learning, teamwork and crafting spaces for innovation, which took me on a path outside of academia, into the practitioners' world. I am now an Agile Coach and help organisations surface and solve issues that block collaboration between teams.