When it all seems too much — Focus on what really matters.
The importance of building a learning culture.
In a world that is sometimes so chaotic and continuously evolving its easy to get overwhelmed. Where do we start? What do we focus on? I wish there was an easy answer — but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. All I have found is what works for me.

Organisations are complex. They evolve, they grow, and not generally in a predictable way. Yesterdays decisions, the ones that were made well before you got here, present themselves in the culture of today. An overreaction to an event 3 years ago has everyone too scared to take even the smallest risk today. Hundreds of these have occurred — which is what gives you the strange intertwined thing you see today. So what do you do? If you just do things the way they have always been done, you will be ok. Makes sense. An easy rule to follow — except — you can’t. You want more. You want to encourage people to create — to innovate, to challenge the status quo.
You want to be believe there is a silver bullet out there that will solve these problems. Of course becoming a lean, system thinking, 3 star fluency hollacracy organisation with OKR’s is going to fix everything! It’s easy to get caught up in the latest craze, except, chances are it will solve nothing, because the problems are too deeply entrenched for that.

When introducing and embedding something as complex as agile ways of working. What really matters? What do you really want to achieve? What does good look like? Chances are not every suggestion will be wholeheartedly embraced en mass so which are the ones that you can postpone, and which are the ones that are core?

For me the one thing that matters — the one I don’t want to compromise is learning. If I am working with people / teams / organisations that are dedicated to learning, to growing, then the rest kind of falls into place. On the contrary, even with the most receptive workplaces, where people embrace and follow every thing asked of them, but aren’t interested in the intent and instead just want to be told what to do — it never really worked out. Sure, the novel new approaches are followed for a while. Then they usually regress. Even when they stick, they never reap the benefits you are after. That’s because people are just following ‘the new process’. Here’s the catch. There was never anything inherently wrong with the ‘old process’. It was just used as a one size fits all. It was never really understood so was incorrectly applied, followed for the sake of being followed. That’s why it didn’t work. There is no process, no framework, that can fix that. The only thing that can is people understanding the why.

For me learning is the answer. Unfortunately we forget how rewarding learning is over time. We park it as a luxury that we rarely have time for when dealing with life’s necessities. It’s the thing we will “get to tomorrow”. How can it be any different? Our leaders model this to us. I have seen numerous “guilds”, “bookclubs”, “learning chapters” in my time. They start off strong, get great momentum — then die. Of course there is the obligatory “reboot”. Then the cycle starts again. Why does this happen? Because people get too busy.

When this happens people are actually getting good at doing the right thing — prioritising. Unfortunately, learning is not a priority. I’m not here to get too preachy about making time for yourself etc. etc. You have heard it all before. What I am here to do is ask managers and leaders (yes I am one myself) to have a good think. When you stop going to one of these events due to “deadlines or pressure” you send a very clear message that this is a nice to have. When you ask someone to not attend a guild because they have to fix or finish something urgently — you reinforce the message that this is a luxury for when people have spare time. If you want your team / organisation to grow — to thrive, this isn’t a nice to have. It’s a necessity. You need to treat it as such.
Meet the learning wall.

Whilst we have implemented quite a comprehensive learning culture piece here, most of the things used are not novel or new so I am not going to share them now. The one that is a little different is the above. It is part of a wall we use. Now before I explain it, the wall space itself is significant. It is our largest, most prominent wall. It is in the location with the most traffic (right next to the kitchen). Most of our peers have this as their Portfolio Kanban wall — tracking initiatives progress — the important thing that deserves the greatest attention. We have it as our Learning Wall. We want to be clear — Learning is the most important thing we do here.
If you take a look at the wall you will see 4 swim lanes feeding into our learning loop. They are Team, Customer, Delivery and Quality. Last year, when the team was asked what we could measure to know if we were doing a good job — these 4 categories are what came up. If the team is happy, the customer is happy and we are delivering high quality software — then we believe we are doing a good job. What can I say, we agreed. These are our metrics that matter. What we do is we create a backlog of experiments which we (the team) prioritise and run to see how they move the needle.

On the left of the board which isn’t shown we have a variety of core measure we use to understand how we are progressing in this space. This is key for validation. As the experiment progresses, completes and is validated / invalidated it is these metrics we are measuring against. We found early on if we allowed validation to be free, we were getting a lot of vanity metrics validated. Our experiment was validated, but it didn’t make a difference to any of our core 4. Did our change make the customer happier? Did it have any unexpected impact on the team?
I know what you are thinking — this really sounds like a Continuous Improvement / Experimentation board. What has this got to do with learning? Great question. Well, when we put this system into place we had to answer a hard question. We wanted people to take this seriously. To get really involved. Our hypothesis (experiment) was that the best way to do that was to ensure we rewarded and recognised people who were getting engaged in this system. To remove some of the focus on delivery, and put a lot more in the improvement space. Makes sense? The problem is what do you reward? The person who happens to get lucky and moves the needle the most? The person who takes on the most experiments? The person who has lots of useful suggestions?

Our answer was the person who shares the most learning — learning which is critical to our success. It became obvious quickly that our biggest benefit didn’t lie in the validated experiments. They were great, but often they were obvious. It was the ones that were pivoted or perished that made the real difference. This is because we found unexpected things along the way — generally organisational things. The process of sharing the learning was invaluable. Whilst the initial person who was shepherding the experiment may have given up at this point, with the new information they gained along the way someone else from the team created another hypothesis and we tried again. And again. And again. Each time getting closer to our goal. We were excited, we were energised and we were making a difference. Through learning and sharing we were unwinding that ball of yarn that seemed all too difficult, and we were making meaningful progress and change towards the things that mattered.
That’s all for today. I hope you learned something.
