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A Rough Guide for Running Learning Circles: Accelerating Collective Learning at the Frontiers of Sustainable Development
A Rough Guide for Running Learning Circles: Accelerating Collective Learning at the Frontiers of Sustainable Development
December 15, 2025
Learning circles are facilitated dialogues that unlock tacit knowledge, the insights people carry from experience, observation, and experimentation, but find difficult to articulate. The UNDP Accelerator Labs developed this approach to learn more about complex development challenges by tapping into the distributed knowledge held across the Labs' network. Learning circles convene diverse knowledge holders around shared learning questions. They create conditions for collective sensemaking that help us understand the dynamics shaping development issues and identify where we need to accelerate our learning.
This guide is for network curators, community facilitators, and anyone who facilitates collective learning and aims to activate and connect knowledge across distributed teams or ecosystems. It offers a practical process for designing, facilitating, and documenting learning circles, helping you surface what your network already knows and identify where to focus your learning efforts.
