BUILDING A LEARNING ENTREPRISE PART 1

Learning in today’s fast-paced world is crucial when everything is changing. Learning helps you keep up with industry trends and adapt new concepts, technology, and practices to your job. Agile enterprises learn continuously. This company knows its staff and consumers will make it successful. Agile emphasizes “individuals and relationships above procedures and tools.” Educating people may help the business adapt to environmental changes. Employees are the mechanics of the engine that provides value to the customer. Education in Agile enables the delivery of value to the customer such that the business prospers.

A company with a culture of continuous learning understands that learning can happen from many sources in many ways. This kind of company believes there is no limit to improving in Agility or understanding of what customers value. They realize that knowledge will always increase. They are also on a mission to ensure that they comprehend the range of education required to achieve their purpose and work to obtain that needed education.

Agile enables the delivery of customer value; therefore, education in Agile concepts should be central to instruction on how to deliver value to the customer.

Agile needs a cultural transformation in how you think about work; therefore, you must first master the Agile values and principles and understand why one must relentlessly focus on delivering business value. The Agile path requires cultural adjustments. Then the acquisition of Agile methods, techniques, and skills. Finally, you need a mentor (a coach) to assist you in adopting an Agile attitude as you experience Agile. Continuous learning requires feedback and adaptation to people’s educational requirements.

Education is Much More than Training

Does Agile education end in training? Or are there ways the Agile team can use training in combination with other factors to improve output? Several coworkers informed me they received Agile training in an hour, a day, or two days and were expected to master the material. Agile is not a memorization-and-application procedure. Will such short Agile training suffice? Insufficient training time hinders success in the adoption of Agile culture. Education is a people investment. A cultural transition involves gradual, time-based learning. One company’s success is another’s failure. Skills, roles, processes, culture, and behaviour education should be integral to your Agile transition.

When adapting your company culture, you need more than skill-building. Culture change is the most disruptive and time-consuming shift for a company. Educational factors enable Agile teams to obtain Agile skills, roles, procedures, and culture. For example, training, mentoring, coaching, experiencing, trying, reflecting, and giving back. Therefore, your cultural shift should involve education.

Training enhances employee skills, educates personnel in their duties, or enables the implementation of a procedure. It is event-driven and one-way. When you return to your culture, anything you have learnt might be undone or forgotten. Coaching reinforces training. Training might be instructor-led and planned or web-based and on-demand.

Reading lets people focus on their interests and pace, but it requires self-motivation. Physical books and e-books are available. Reading includes perusing articles, journals, podcasts, and blogs. Reading allows you to return to the article’s source if more information or clarification is needed. Book clubs provide an opportunity to deepen one’s interaction with knowledge by allowing people to read and debate a topic.

Coaching helps teams put knowledge about roles and processes and role knowledge into the kind of action that transforms culture. Coaching is a two-way process that allows for questioning. Without a coach, it is simple to misapply a procedure or give up and revert to the previous old and ineffectual patterns. A coach is familiar with the path he is trying to guide his coachee and can help the coachee implement the processes and build the proper habits.

Mentoring builds connections, confidence, and self-esteem. The mentee invests time by suggesting discussion topics. Deep learning can occur when the mentee asks questions and seeks answers from the mentor. Mentoring helps employees broadly and deeply understand the company’s culture.

Experiencing involves living in a new process, using new skills, and playing new roles. This education form gives people a first-hand understanding of what they have learnt, helping them comprehend behaviour changes. Deeper inquiry, research, and experimentation are possible and part of this educational process.

Experimenting involves briefly attempting something new to test a suggested change. The modification frequently begins with a theory on what may work better, followed by a quick test to evaluate if the new concept has the desired impact. Experimenting lets you explore ideas and techniques before making a change.

Reflecting involves considering what you have learned—a skill, method, job, or culture—and determining what you can do better and what you need to improve your learning experience. It is akin to an employee, team, or enterprise Agile retrospective. It is a feedback loop to assess where you have been and what you need to become agile and customer-focused.

Employees give back when they have adequate information, abilities, and experience. Helping others becomes a commitment because they have greater understanding and control, hence are motivated to be more deeply involved. The empowerment people get from ownership enables cultural transformation. In addition, giving back does benefit the firm, the environment, the community, and the world.

Agile culture requires educational aspects. These factors assist a team build skills, understanding roles, navigating a process, and adopt Agile behaviours. Develop a learning repertoire.

Agile Educational Framework

There are several ways to achieve an Agile mentality and build a reputation for delivering customer value. In the Agile framework, ideas are stated and prioritized, procedures get applied, and emphasis is placed on sustaining trust and motivation. In addition, this approach opens the doors to the unlimited learning potential of the team.

Agile teams may use different learning aspects based on the topic. Therefore, looking at Agile subjects from several perspectives helps learners grasp them. In addition, certain issues can help develop an Agile culture. Therefore, it may be better not to limit oneself to learning processes and role-related matters and focus on better understanding subjects that develop the agile culture.

How Education Readies the Mind for an Agile Transformation

The transition to Agile demands a cultural change. It requires a focus on the company’s culture to be effective.

Educating staff about Agile ideals, concepts, and behaviours are essential to enable the change. However, never allow wrong assumptions to take root. For example, there may be the misconception that Agile should be more about tools, techniques, processes and mechanics. This approach would be putting the cart before the horse. The team must first develop the mindset, mentality, attitude and culture before tools and techniques, processes and methodologies can work.

It helps to start an Agile transition process with a session on Agile ideals and principles. Some exercises help teams grasp the nature and importance of Agile and how the business can apply it to their organizational context. Employees may rank Agile values to spark debate. A facilitator goes through each Agile concept and asks if they agree, are neutral, or disagree. While directing the flow of the discussions, the facilitator should spend about five minutes on each idea to enable conversations rather than persuade. When building a culture or attempting to transform attitudes, it is more intelligent not to rush the process.

After establishing the fundamentals of Agile, the facilitator should discuss the Agile framework and enable participants to understand how it applies to their specific context. This discussion would be followed with expositions on the discovery mindset and enabling behaviours. Finally, the importance of self-organization and bounded authority gets reviewed with an eye on application.

When introducing a business or team to Agile, we do not stress processes or roles so as not to establish limiting perspectives. We focus instead on the development of culture, values and behaviours.

SUMMARY

Learning is essential in today’s changing world. However, learning should not be limited to training alone, even though training provides a significant level of expertise and knowledge and often determines productivity and effectiveness.

Other avenues of learning should also be explored, such as mentorship, coaching, experience, experimentation, and so forth, to reinforce the lessons drawn from training. This approach should also enable lasting reflections on subjects learned, supervised implementation and processing valuable feedback to ensure that education is wholesome and practical.

Educating teams on Agile should be based on enabling cultural, behavioural and attitudinal changes rather than memorizing tools, techniques, methodologies, processes and roles. While the processes, roles and mechanisms are essential, they are only as effective as the cultural contexts that support them.