I attended Joseph Matsey's talk on building a culture of learning at Abstraction's last year. I really enjoyed the talk, and have been thinking about and implementing ideas from it over the past year. Here's a summary of my takeaway for the 3 different phases of culture building (with a bonus 4th phase, of "you have a culture")
Guerilla Learning
This is where a lot of places start - there isn't really any particular culture of learning, but some learning exercises and activities are supported
- High resistance to taking time from shipping
- Ad hoc learning
- Onboarding by oral tradition
- Few folks driving learning
Approach
- Think opportunistically
- Improve team members primary roles
- Seek fast returns with low investment
Examples
- Workshops
- Meetups
- Build a team library
- New hire buddies
- Try cross-team buddies
Dangers
- Buy in never starts
- Stay stuck in guerilla learning forever
Buy in Starts
This is a dangerous intermediate phase, where some culture building has happened, but it's not baked in or fully supported by management
- New hires have some kind of organized learning
- Team members want more, but aren't empowered
Approach
- Leverage internal experts (workshops, talks)
- Seed good role models (and shame everyone else)
- Mentor mentors (mentorship is an orthogonal skillset to what you do at work)
Examples
- Weekly talks, 4 15 minute talks
- Project updates
- Tech approaches
- Senior leadership talks
- Ops talks
Dangers
- Key folks leaving
- "Takes too much time" payout not obvious, track and figure out how to measure returns
- Mentor burnout
Making it Stick
This is the final phase, that takes management buy in, re-programming existing employees and enculturating new hires
- Boringly normal
- From "workshops are amazing" to "oh god a workshop"
Approach
- Momentum to sustain effort
- Sustained learning
- Make people forget the old way
Examples
- Learning/teaching as a KIP
- Apprenticeships
- 3 part onboarding
- Teach skills
- Teach processes, history and context
- Personal development
- 20% time
Dangers
- Payoffs hard to measure
- No one is responsible
- Losing the habit
Self Sustaining
At some critical mass point, it continues lurching forward. This point is when you have a durable culture of learning
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Credits
Thank you Mat the W for the photo of Hammerschlag
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