Building a Culture of Learning
Most people know that for agile to work best, there has to be effort spent on continuous improvement, collaboration between team members, and a drive to iterate on the work and deliver value to customers frequently. With all of these things, I believe there is something in common that is required to succeed. I call this a “culture of learning”. So what does that mean and how are all these things connected?
Continuous Improvement
When an agile team matures, they make it a priority to focus on learning. One of the most obvious ways that shows up is through some sort of continuous improvement, often as a result of selecting an experiment to work on during a retrospective. Whatever it is they select will be based on what they want to learn to do better, what they seek to improve. It also involves them inspecting and adapting, and therefore learning from past mistakes.
Collaboration
Learning is a key part of collaboration between team members, as it is a natural result from pair programming or when any two team members work together on things; there’s bound to be some knowledge sharing. Teams that are dedicated to this practice will deliberately seek out the unique skills that exist in only one or two team members, and actively work to share that knowledge with other team members. The (unrealistic) ideal team is one where every team member has every skill required and any team member can take any card from the sprint backlog and work it to completion. While this sounds like a team of robots (as I said, it’s unrealistic), it would be the most flexible a team could possibly be… so, if a team strives to be even a small percentage more like this every sprint, it can only benefit the team!
Consider creating a “learning backlog” or some sort of skills matrix that highlights who on the team knows what and identifies who could teach a certain skill and who might be interested in learning that skill. The trick is making time for this style of learning. It’s best if the team blocks off time every two weeks or so to dedicate some time to working on addressing items on the learning backlog.
Iterating to Deliver Value
It can take a while for teams to write very small stories and learn how to truly iterate on the work they do. As you begin to think this way, you will ask yourselves questions like “What’s the smallest thing of value we can do to learn something from our customers?” This way, you eliminate all assumptions as you go and are hyper-focused on customer centricity and in garnering customer feedback often to help deliver the best product possible.
Most agile team members know that we think about failure differently. As we execute experiments in the form of user stories and feedback loops with stakeholders and customers, we are also learning. Especially when we “fail” or are surprised by the results of those conversations. And, well, best to learn sooner what works or doesn’t work in our products.
Building Culture
So, to build a culture of learning, a team should focus on a few new habits as I’ve outlined above. And you may already be doing some of these things. But the deliberate focus and explicit call out that learning is part of your team’s culture will not only make it “okay” but will make it expected and part of your routine. It should be normal for a team member, for example, to sit at their desk reading a book that contributes to their skills be considered part of the work the team does. Consider putting it in your working agreement or talking about the topic of learning at an upcoming retro.
Building a learning culture is like having an insatiable curiosity, an omnipresent desire to learn, and a passion for making data-driven decisions whenever possible. The best built products are driven by collecting data and learning through multiple feedback loops with stakeholders and customers. Teams that think iteratively, collaborate by default, and actively work on continuous improvement will inevitably build a culture of learning.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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