From Knowledge to Capability

A remarkable amount of learning happens in projects. People try things, gain experience, exchange knowledge and develop new solutions. And after a while, a surprisingly simple question often remains: What has actually changed in practice?

I have encountered this question in very different areas of my work — in cultural and urban development, European projects, organisational development and, more recently, in the sustainability transition of cultural institutions.

What interests me is not simply whether a project produces knowledge, but what happens to that knowledge afterwards. Who can access it? How does the experience of individuals become available to others? What can travel into another context? And when does a good experience become something an organisation is actually able to do differently?

Sustainability in theatre makes these questions very concrete.

The general direction is clear in many cultural institutions: resources should be used more carefully, materials should remain in use for longer and production should become more sustainable. How this can work under the particular conditions of an individual organisation is another question.

There is experience to draw on. Some theatres have worked with material cycles, reuse and different production processes for years. Technicians, designers and production managers have developed knowledge that is often highly practical and specific to their context. Research, networks, pilot projects and a growing number of tools are beginning to collect and make some of this experience accessible.

But this knowledge is not simply sitting on a table waiting for every organisation to pick it up.

It is distributed. It lives in people, individual organisations and projects, in routines and accumulated experience. It first has to be found, understood and related to another organisation’s particular situation.

And even then, the question remains whether an experience developed in one place can become a changed practice somewhere else.

Imagine a theatre that wants to reuse more materials from previous productions.

At first, the task appears relatively straightforward. The theatre needs to know what is available, record those materials and use them again in the next production.

In practice, the decision begins much earlier.

When a set is being designed, information about available materials already needs to exist and reach the right people at the right time. Existing materials need to be identifiable, accessible and suitable for adaptation. Workshops may need additional time to modify them. Production planning and budgets need to accommodate that time. And at the end of the next production, the same question returns: what happens to the material now, who decides, and who is responsible for it?

Suddenly, this is no longer only about material.

It becomes a question of information, time, responsibilities, cooperation and decision-making — in other words, of how an organisation works.

For me, this is where the more interesting question of transformation begins.

Knowledge is not yet capability

In Toulouse, I encountered the same question again from a very different direction.

While studying Economic Complexity and Innovation Policy at the Toulouse School of Economics, I returned to an idea that César A. Hidalgo describes particularly well: our societies are able to produce highly complex things even though no individual possesses all the knowledge required to make them.

An aircraft is the classic example. No single person masters its design, materials, electronics, software, manufacturing, logistics and all the other knowledge and skills required to make it fly. Knowledge is distributed. What matters is that different capabilities exist and can be organised and combined.

The longer I think about this, the more useful I find the idea for thinking about organisations.

A theatre also depends on distributed knowledge. What happens on stage is possible because very different professional capabilities interact. Direction and dramaturgy, stage and costume design, workshops and technical departments, production planning, communication and administration each follow their own professional logics and still have to work together to make a production possible.

Theatres are remarkably good at this. Over decades, they have developed sophisticated routines for coordinating complex production processes.

A sustainability transition therefore does not begin with an organisation that knows or can do nothing. It begins with an organisation that is already capable of doing a great deal.

The more interesting question is: Which existing capabilities need to be connected differently — and which ones are still missing?

For more circular production, technical knowledge may already exist while information about available materials reaches the artistic process too late. Reuse may work well within a workshop but fail at the level of production planning. Shared storage between several theatres may make sense, but the relationships, responsibilities or organisational agreements required to make it work may not yet exist.

The perspective begins to shift.

The question is no longer only what additional knowledge an organisation needs. It is what enables it to act differently with the knowledge it already has and the knowledge it acquires.

This is where, for me, Economic Complexity meets organisational learning.

How does an organisation learn?

People learn. They accumulate experience, change their judgement, acquire new skills and carry what they have learned into the next situation.

For organisations, it is more complicated.

Imagine our theatre taking part in a multi-year project on sustainable production. Staff visit other theatres, exchange experiences and test new approaches. In one production, materials from previous sets are successfully reused. Perhaps a tool is developed to make existing materials easier to find. Perhaps a team changes part of its planning process after realising that certain decisions need to be made earlier.

All of this is learning.

But at first, it is people who are learning.

Whether the organisation has learned becomes visible later, when an experience no longer depends on the presence of exactly those people who took part in the project.

Perhaps the next artistic team receives information about available materials at the beginning of the process. Perhaps production planning routinely allows time for adaptation and reuse. Perhaps a responsibility that existed only for the duration of the project becomes part of someone’s regular role. Perhaps two departments continue to work together differently even when there is no longer a project meeting bringing them into the same room.

At that point, more has happened than an increase in knowledge. Something has changed in what the organisation can reliably do.

For me, this is the crucial distinction.

It also explains why knowledge transfer is much more difficult than the term suggests.

Experiences can be shared. Reports can be circulated. Tools can be published. People can show one another how they approached a problem.

But a practice cannot simply be moved from one organisation to another.

What works in one theatre also depends on how productions are planned there, which professions and capabilities are present, how decisions are made, which resources are available and which relationships have developed over time. Another theatre does not necessarily need to adopt the same solution. It needs to understand why that solution worked and develop its own response from there.

Perhaps transfer begins precisely at this point: not with copying a solution, but with translating an experience.

Projects can create particular spaces for learning

This is one reason why I value projects.

The everyday work of a cultural institution is organised around making things happen: the next production has to open, the festival has to begin, the programme has to be published, the budget has to be managed. There is often little time within these routines to examine more fundamental changes.

A project can organise time differently for a while.

It can bring together people who rarely work on the same question in their everyday roles. It can create the opportunity to interrupt an established routine and try an alternative. It can provide access to additional expertise and bring experience from other organisations or countries into the work. At its best, it allows something that regular operations often struggle to accommodate: trying something without knowing in advance exactly what will work.

For me, this is one of the particular qualities of project-based work.

Projects can provide impulses and create spaces for experimentation. But their longer-term value does not depend only on whether the experiment itself succeeds.

What becomes interesting is what happens afterwards.

If our theatre successfully produces a set using existing materials once, we know that it was possible under those particular conditions. A second production begins to tell us whether it can also work with another artistic team, another design, a tighter schedule or different technical requirements.

The approach may need to change. One part may prove robust while another does not. The first attempt may turn out to have worked only because particular individuals invested far more time than could reasonably become standard practice.

Repetition, then, is not simply doing the same thing again. It is part of learning.

And this brings time into the story.

Projects need time to learn

We tend to plan projects very precisely. We define work packages, activities, milestones, results and deadlines. This is necessary, particularly where public funding is involved.

But if a project is also intended to be a space for learning and experimentation, this timeline alone is not enough.

A project architecture should therefore define more than what is delivered and when. It should also consider when there is room to experiment, repeat, reflect and adjust — and when decisions are made about what should become part of regular practice.

A pilot that takes place shortly before the end of a funding period may produce an excellent idea. From the perspective of organisational learning, however, the timing is difficult: there is little opportunity to work with what has been learned.

The situation is different when enough time remains between an initial experiment and the end of a project to adapt a practice and try it again. Only then can an organisation begin to distinguish what depended on the particular circumstances of the first attempt from what may actually be robust enough to continue.

This also changes how we think about continuation beyond the project.

It should not begin three months before the funding period ends with a search for follow-up funding. It begins much earlier, with the question of which parts of an experiment are worth continuing at all — and what they would require in order to do so: time, responsibility, resources, changes to regular processes or perhaps cooperation with others.

Not everything needs to remain. Finding that an experiment does not work under particular conditions is also a result. What matters is that a project provides enough time and space to recognise that difference.

A question for funding

This also brings the architecture of funding into view. If projects are intended to provide spaces for experimentation and learning, we need to ask whether the conditions attached to funding actually support that process.

Public funding requires clear objectives, transparent budgets and accountable decisions about the use of public resources. At the same time, projects intended to explore innovation or transformation inevitably contain a degree of uncertainty that cannot be planned away in advance.

A genuine learning process may lead to assumptions being revised, procedures being changed or an originally planned route being abandoned. That may be precisely where a project's learning value lies.

A project that looks exactly as anticipated after three years is therefore not automatically the more successful project. What matters is whether changes can be explained and justified through what has been learned.

I want to continue thinking about this in a separate Field Note. The question concerns more than funding. It also touches on what we mean when we call a project successful.

And what remains?

For the moment, let us return once more to the theatre. The project has ended, the final accounts have been completed and the report submitted. A few months later, a new production begins.

The more interesting place to look now is not the report, but the first production meeting.

Perhaps none of this looks particularly spectacular.

Perhaps the longer-term effect of a project lies precisely in the fact that something that began as an experiment eventually stops looking like one. It has become part of practice.

Perhaps organisational learning can be recognised precisely in this: not only in what an organisation knows, but in what it can now do with that knowledge.