Declan Whelan is a local-ish Agile Coach who has started to appear on the speaking circuit (which is a Good Thing). One of his talks is ‘Building a Learning Culture on Your Agile Team’ which he has done at least a couple times before Agile Tour landed in Toronto. That practice showed as he was confident in the front of the room and knew his content; unlike my umms and aaahs. His main argument is that high functioning Agile teams are ones that are good at learning. This makes sense with the traditional doctrine of spikes to learn, releasing quickly, etc. While learning isn’t the only attribute that is important, it is I think an important one.

  • Learning is the bottleneck on teams – JB Rainsberger
  • We need to find effective ways to respond to change. That’s learning.
  • There is no short circuiting the learning process
  • If we get really good at learning, we can reduce the learning cycles. And thus deliver value quicker.
  • Learning and Long Term Value are two sides of the same thing. Think Yin and Yang.
  • Need to make the environment safe for learning to happen
  • Book – Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • Learning is the acquisition of knowledge and the continuous practice of it
  • Book – The Fifth Discipline
  • We learn in three different ways: auditory, kinesthetic, visual
  • Visual learning needs to be an actual image; just ‘seeing’ words is not enough
  • Book – Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
  • Shu Ha Ri
    • Wow, I am sick of this. Though in most cases it comes of as ‘Hey! a cool idea from Japan! Let’s take it!’, but it made sense here. I’m still sick of it though…
    • The way you learn and the way you coach are different at each level
    • The expert may not be the best teacher
    • The Curse of Knowledge
  • In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki
  • The opportunity for learning is deeper in the beginner than in the expert
  • Paper = Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind: Embrace Inexperience
  • Stuff from the Fifth Discipline
    • Personal Mastery – know yourself, biases, models
    • Mental Models – be able to articulate and put up for critique
    • Shared Vision – goal and purpose
    • Team Learning – align learning around the bottleneck in the system
    • Systems Thinking – end-to-end thinking is better than thinking in terms of silos
  • Tinkering School – go watch the video.
  • Agile leadership is not about directing, but learning it in the right direction
  • Learning need…
    • to be intentional
    • an infrastructure
    • is incremental
    • safe
  • The single most important thing in Agile? Honest retrospectives
  • James Shore’s Etudes
  • Book – Fearless Change
  • Tribes Learning Communities – “After years of “fix-it” programs focused on reducing student violence, conflict, drug and alcohol, absenteeism, poor achievement, etc., educators and parents now agree, creating a positive school or classroom environment is the most effective way to improve behavior and learning”
  • Functional teams are like a nurturing family
  • Our tendency is to be interested in something that is growing in the garden, not in the bare soil itself. But if you want to have a good harvest, the most important thing is to make the soil rich and cultivate it well. – Shunryu Suzuki