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Learning in Networks with Naomi Martin

04/15/2025

A spotlight on the learning from the Wasan Huddle, 24th March 2025

Back in October 2024, the Wasan Network and Huddlecraft collaborated to kick-off nine Huddles over six months—peer groups of up to 12 people, pooling their skills, expertise and resources to learn together across themes like unlearning, working with tensions, case-making for relationships, and more.

In this series of Spotlights on Learning, we sit down with Huddle hosts and participants to harvest their insights gained and share them onwards with you. Here, in our conversation with Naomi Martin (iac Berlin) and host of the Learning in Networks Huddle she shares her reflections on the essential ingredients for learning, enabling peer learners to step in, the role of really getting to know each other, and more. Enjoy!

Join us in the shared Wasan Huddles showcase event on 16th April 2025, 9.30pm IST, 5pm CET, 4pm BT, 11am ET, 08am PT (2 hours). This event will be a chance to connect with other members of the Wasan Network and dive into some of the inspiring learning that happened through peer-driven activities, performances, story-telling and more. More info and RSVP here.

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What’s your full name and where are you sitting?
Naomi Martin, Berlin

What’s the golden thread through your life and work?

Learning, actually — although I only realized this recently. I’ve followed different threads in my life and work that have had to do with collaboration—supporting individuals and organizations to find ways to work well together towards a collective aim. At the heart of that is learning, because we have to unlearn previous ways of behaving and learn new ways together.

Which huddle did you host? And what was your learning question?

The Huddle is on learning with the question being: What are the essential ingredients for learning to flow effectively through communities, networks, and ecosystems? 

Before I heard about the Huddlecraft opportunity I already wanted to kickstart a learning journey on learning, with a more fixed idea of what the outcome would be. I was thinking about how we can measure whether learning is flowing effectively or not: what indicators can we use to check and nurture the healthiness of learning in communities and networks? 

How has the learning question evolved?

I would question whether we have a question now! The original question drew people in, but then we started following our intuition, interests, and experiences. What holds the journey together is still an open exploration around the ingredients that are essential for learning to flow. But along the way we´ve often had to ask ourselves: “Where are we going with this?” It’s been a dance between having a guiding question and letting ourselves stray outside of it to understand it better. 

What has been a high point of the Huddle for you?

The first time people started stepping in—it took a little while. Just before the end of the year I was asking people what they would like to offer but I was sensing a bit of reluctance at first. As soon as people started kickstarting peer-led sessions, it encouraged others to do the same. From that point I could step into a different role and start to follow my own interests more as a participant. 

An extreme example of this is when I had to step away for a few weeks. In this time, the Huddle found their own way of leading and sharing back from sessions, and the group dynamic had shifted when I came back into it. It was really great to see that it wasn’t just me holding the process anymore. 

What advice would you give to people who want to create spaces for others to step in?

Lowering the barrier to entry. At first, I might have unintentionally set it too high—or too vague—by asking: “What’s your offer?” But once I started giving concrete examples, and participants began modeling what it could look like, more session ideas began to emerge. It really could be as simple as opening up your specific learning question with the group or bringing a method you’d like to test out.

I re-framed it in two ways: first, as “What would you like to offer to the group—from your unique perspective, questions, and experience?” And second, “How would you like to use this group—almost in a transactional sense? How can you get the most out of your time here?”

It’s a balance: encouraging contributions that place peer learning at the center, while also recognizing what each person hopes to gain from the experience. 

What are three key insights that you gained so far? Three things that you would love to share with the wider Wasan community?

1. “The real challenge is the readiness to learn on both an individual and a collective level.”

As a participant, what resonated with me most was the idea that it almost doesn’t matter what tool, format, or methodology you’re using to facilitate learning or to help it to flow through a community or network. The real challenge is the readiness to learn, both on an individual and a collective level. 

This theme of preparing ourselves for learning came up repeatedly in our huddle. There was the sense that if people are truly open to learning, it will happen in every which way. I’m really interested in understanding and unlocking that readiness and openness to learn, because there are many things you can do as an individual—each person has their own ways—but the next challenge is figuring out how to do that as a collective.

2. Getting to know each other as an on-going process

We really took the time to get to know each other in lots of different ways—not just at the beginning, but throughout the whole process. It even became a kind of ritual in the group to reintroduce ourselves every now and then, each time sharing a new layer or nuance with one another.

From the very start, we were connecting on a more personal level. But after a few sessions, I remember thinking, “Wait – there’s a missing piece here – we don’t know enough about what everyone does professionally!” And yet, I really appreciated that the first part was more from the heart because it created this sense of trust that people could step in as themselves and then they could also put on their professional hat on. I think that it created an openness for us to really share our challenges and not feel that we had to always be in presenter or professional mode with each other. 

3. Externalising what I was navigating as a Huddle host 

Reflecting on my role as a host, one thing I learned was how helpful it is to externalise the tensions I was navigating. In past facilitation experiences, I might have tried to maintain the appearance that everything was going smoothly or that I knew exactly where we were headed. But in the Huddle, I was more open. I said, “This is as far as I can guide us. Here’s our opening question, here’s the wider framework, and now let’s see together.” 

The real challenge, then, was stepping back and allowing the group to shape what came next. As a host, it’s a bit of a dance between letting go while still caring for the overarching process. An example of this came during our session on belonging. We had a very interesting conversation about how each of us understands and has experienced belonging in our lives. It could have ended there. But from my position as host—with one eye on the bigger learning journey—I felt a responsibility to bring us back to our inquiry. So I asked, “And what does this have to do with how we can support learning? And then some incredible insights emerged. They were right there, ready to unfold – but after this more open exploration, we still needed a gentle invitation to return to our question and reflect on what we are learning. 

What are the three words that first come to mind when you think of your Huddle?

Caring, harmonious and unexplored. 

Any challenges in this learning process?

Being a harmonious group working on a meta topic, I wonder if we sometimes veer into group think or remain too abstract and vague. Sometimes we reached the point where we were asking ourselves:  “Are we having the conversations that we really want to have?” and “When are we going to get to the bones of the matter?” We felt that bringing out our inner antagonism might allow us to go further in our explorations and started asking ourselves: “What would the antagonist say? What’s unsaid that might provoke us?” So a question I hold is: How can you move beyond the need to build trust and harmony to be able to then go into more challenging learning spaces? 

Another challenge I’ve noticed is around expectations—especially when it comes to outcomes. We often come in with a learning question, expecting to work with a group of people to collectively arrive at answers that might be useful for our own work. But then comes the moment where you have to start letting that go. It’s less about  “What can I learn about this specific question?” and more about “What can I learn through this process?” This opens you up to perceiving and learning things you may never have expected! 

If I hadn’t huddled, then I would have never…

… have felt so supported in the process. 

What was holding me back from starting the learning journey that I’d been planning around this question was the feeling that I was missing the architecture. I really appreciated being able to lean on Huddlecraft for support. I found my own ways of designing the journey – but it was great to be able to draw inspiration from the wealth of resources that Huddlecraft has developed over the years. Even more helpful was knowing that there were other hosts beginning their own journeys around the same time, with different questions. We could exchange at a process level—talking through what we were each navigating in our roles, what was coming up in terms of content—and that sense of being part of something bigger really mattered. I had a lot of autonomy to do things the way I wanted to, but it was encouraging to know that I had somewhere to turn to and that Huddlecraft was there lightly holding everything together. 

Anything else you want to add?

I remember hearing from other people that often the end of the Huddle is the start of something else. I’m very curious to see what comes as we end in April—to see where the energy is, what naturally wants to emerge, what support that might need, and what role I might take!