Written by: Katherine Haugh, The Convive Collective
At Convive, we study how organizations learn. But if I’m being real, I still find it difficult—as CEO—to encourage people to set aside time for learning when there are tasks to finish, clients to support, and deadlines to meet.
Learning matters. But so does getting the work done. And the urgent work has a habit of winning.
So we decided to walk our talk and experiment with RAD Days: protected time for the people we work with to investigate something they wanted to learn about that could also make Convive better.
They chose three areas:
Looking across Pause & Reflect notes from our client projects to understand what they could teach us about Convive
Testing AI as a challenger within the Emergent Table format
Exploring automation platforms that might reduce manual work while preserving the personal touch we value
Together, this added up to 24 hours of protected learning time.
And honestly? The results blew my mind.
Looking across our Pause & Reflect notes surfaced things about Convive that I hadn’t seen. The automation experiment reduced one of my personal emailing processes from around ten hours to one. Ten hours to one hour. What?!
Using AI as a challenger exposed assumptions guiding our work that we hadn’t named—or even realized were there. It helped us turn those assumptions into explicit hypotheses that we can now examine and test.
All of that came from 24 hours.
And the people involved loved it. They had space to follow their curiosity, try something new, and contribute to Convive in ways that the usual flow of project work doesn’t always allow.
I’m not sharing this because we have protected learning figured out. We don’t. I’m sharing it because I’m usually the person wondering whether we can afford to pause the task list—and this experience reminded me to ask a different question:
What might we be missing when we don’t?
For us, 24 hours created new insight, challenged our thinking, saved time, and generated genuine energy. That feels like a remarkable return on investment in learning.