An excellent and timely article from HBR about how to build a learning ecosystem in an organization, focusing on how redeploying people to new challenges can accelerate learning. Some notes from the article:

On the importance of learning in an organization:

Like a biological ecosystem, organizations are either growing or they’re dying. And organizations grow when their employees are learning. So if you want a high-growth organization, you need to create a learning ecosystem to support high-growth individuals — to expose them to new and challenging opportunities before their roles become stale.

On redeployments:

Companies need to see that a high-growth employee who loves to learn is a very valuable asset. Redeploying them on a new learning curve within the organization keeps their expertise in-house and allows them to share and build on it — a potentially exponential gain.

On other ways of promoting learning:

Job swapping is only one strategy to put employees on new learning curves, help break down silos, and maximize shared organizational learning. Ongoing training and educational opportunities, job sharing, mentoring and outreach programs are a few other examples. You can get creative in how you mix things up, move people around, and offer employees new opportunities.