An insightful alternative to the dreadful jargon “learnings”
“Learnings” is a corporate buzzword intended to describe what you learned from some work activity. It sets my teeth on edge.
You might feel the plural “learnings” is a perfectly legitimate word. After all, we have no problem talking about the teachings of Richard Feynman or Charles Darwin. And it’s perfectly understandable to discuss corporate earnings. If learning and earning are verb forms that have become nouns, why not learning?
Because it reeks of corporate jargon. Among a large proportion of your audience, when reading about “learnings,” will tune out or resist. And that doesn’t accomplish your goal of communicating without generating an emotional backlash.
I recently encountered this sentence in some text I was editing:
That learning can be actioned in the next sprint.
“Sprint” is a precise term for a step in Agile development methodology, but “actioned” is both passive and unnecessary (“acted on” is just fine). That, combined with “learning” as a noun, meaning something learned in a corporate setting, made me sigh and shed a single tear.
Why “insights,” not “lessons,” is a better substitute for “learnings”
The conventional choice for a substitute word for “learnings” is “lessons.” But I think the connotation doesn’t match. “Lessons” connotes either something you’re obligated to do in an academic setting, or something learned from a failure, as in “The lesson he took away from the Zoom layoff meeting was that it’s a lot better to deliver bad news in person.”
I think that “insights” is a better substitute in most of the settings in which writers are using “learnings.”
For example, how would you rewrite, “Please write up your learnings from the completion of the project in a memo?”
“Please write up your lessons” seems pedantic and reduces the memo to a chore.
But “Please write up your insights from the completion of the project in a memo” tells the staffer that they’re doing something important, documenting insights.
Instead of “The offsite workshop generated a host of learnings” or “. . . generated a host of lessons,” you can write that “The offsite workshop generated a host of insights.” That’s sounds like it was worth the effort.
And the sentence I criticized above becomes:
You can act on those insights in the next sprint.
Same meaning, fewer alarm bells.
What learnings, er lessons, um, insights can you take away from this post? I’d love to see your answer to this poll:
Words matter and I think you have some good observations here. I have heard this before and it always sounds awkward and manufactured as a phrase.
Good post. “Learnings” is definitely “AWK” which my BU professor used to write in the margin.
We all have legit pet peeves. I’m not fan of “impactful” though is see it used more and more. And also, who needs “lastly” when “finally” is a perfect good [and real] word? Would you use “firstly?” I think not.
Yeah! Whatever happened to “effective?” When I was young, “impact” was a noun and “impacted” referred to a wisdom tooth gone rogue.
Another pet peeve of mine is the insertion of “better” into an infinitive: as in “to better develop relations” when either “to develop relations better” or “to develop better relations” is far less klutzy. Better yet: “to develop relations” – no need for “better” at all. The word has become a crutch word to make something sound more impressive than it is or needs to be.
Definitely corporate-speak – a klutzy means that corporations use to CYA – they think it makes them look like they are engaged in training and such, but whatever training – or “learnings” – takes place is token lip-service to government workplace policies and requirements.
A new space for writers opened a year ago in a neighboring town, calling itself “Writers Collaborative Learning Center.” The place offers private work space, courses, critique-group membership, and so forth. Yeah, “Learning” grates me, too – the name would work just as well were it called “Writers Collaborative Center. One assumes that those who collaborate with other writers at the center are highly likely to learn something.
Buzz words and phrases, so often overused to the level of annoying (at best), are like burrs: They are very sticky and hard to evict.
If you’ve got a problem with “learning” as an adjective you’re more hard-core than me.
You make good points about insights vs. lessons. You convinced me.
I love the use of insights instead of learnings. To me the word ‘learnings’ suggests something past tense. Things that we have learned. Great. That’s all done then. Tick. Put them on the shelf and forget about them. ‘Insights’ on the other hand in my head has a future feel. Insights are things we can consider and act on to improve things. Maybe this helps us to avoid learning the same learnings over and over again?
I abhor the word signage. It is a sign or signs. Please stop adding ‘age’ to make either you or a task or a word sound more important. Learnings? That doesn’t sound intelligent. They should go back to their lessons and gain better insight.