Learning Agility, it’s Critical in a Transformation
- group Admin
- event_available 17-Oct-2024
To many, the term learning agility is just another buzzword. Ignorance of the term or
misunderstanding its meaning is a key reason for why transformations struggle so often,
especially one’s involving Agile and DevOps. To clarify, let’s dig into the traditional
training playbook that has been run in Agile and DevOps for years by practitioners and
the certification factories.
First, let’s consider the typical flow of practitioner training. It may look familiar to you!
Whether you decided to become a coach, scrum master, DevOps engineer, product
owner or any other role you probably at some point in your career became aware of the
various certifications available for those roles and decided to sign up. You paid for the
training and attended in order to become certified. For your certification, you most likely
attended in-person or online training with an instructor from one of the certification
factories. Over the span of two, three or perhaps even five days, you sat for the lecture
and maybe took part in a few exercises. Once the training concluded, you were sent off
with your class packet and notes to prepare for the certification exam. You then took an
exam, and you received your shiny new certification.
As a newly certified practitioner, you sought and gained a new role, and you
experienced your first Agile or DevOps transformation. Over the years though, the
frustration and finger-pointing inevitably sets in as you witness wave after wave of failed
transformation attempts.
If that scenario is eerily familiar, you are not alone!
Let’s now examine the training path for individuals in organizations tasked with
becoming Agile or doing DevOps. In many organizations, you may have been
“volun-told” that you are now a scrum master, kanban lead, product owner etc.
Typically, an army of coaches joins the organization, or the organization hires a
consulting firm to guide (and train) everyone. As you are mapped to a team that has
embraced Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or another framework, you are eventually required to
take some new training. The big day comes and you either attend an in-person or online
training facilitated by the coaches or consultants. Over a few days you do your best to
pay close attention to learn the material. You perhaps participate in a few exercises and
then quickly thereafter are sent off with your course packet and notes and told to
become Agile or do DevOps.
The reality is that you do your best, but due to numerous obstacles you watch as
individuals, teams and the organization struggle with the transformation. You probably
become a bit bitter and at this point are just trying to hold onto your job, but you also
realize that the transformation is going nowhere at this point. Yes, there will be multiple
attempts to restart the transformation, but they will continue to fail.
It’s time to ask the question: what has gone wrong with the traditional playbook we
described above, and how does this involve learning agility?
We should first highlight a few of the multiple problems with the traditional playbook
before we dive into the role that learning agility plays.
First, the certification factories and practitioners have completely failed to understand
that in order to successfully run a transformation, you must learn and understand
multiple concepts well beyond Scrum, Kanban or SAFe. Transformations involve
weighty and potentially complex concepts such as organizational culture, strategic
management, organizational alignment, change management and others. None of these
are taught by the certification factories! And more important is understanding that simply
adopting a framework or incorporating a tool will not change culture or bring alignment.
In his article “The five biggest challenges facing Agile” acclaimed leadership author
Steve Denning makes the following point: “Large consulting firms are now entering the
Agile field en masse, and adding to the quantity of marketing literature.”
What this means is that the consulting firms and certification factories are producing lots
of quantity in terms of material, but none of it is quality that looks at transformations in a
systemic – and systematic – manner!
A big piece of missing learning for successful transformations is learning agility.
Learning agility is a collection of complex skills that enable us to acquire new knowledge
in one setting and then effectively and practically apply that knowledge elsewhere, in a
wholly different environment. Looking closely at the traditional training playbook we
discussed above, the traditional approaches utterly and completely fail to provide the
keys to unlock learning agility. Therefore, attendees naturally struggle to apply the
newly-learned concepts to their own, unique workplace situations and organizational
culture. In traditional training the attendees are sent on their way with a course packet
and notes and then days and weeks later, they have to somehow attempt to apply (and
remember!) the key learnings. This simply doesn’t work and never will work.
The ADAPT program from the Helix Group is different. Through immersive learning with
cohort groups, ADAPT showcases two effective mechanisms to overcome the pitfalls of
the traditional playbook. The first is the Quest board that becomes the nerve center of
each learning cohort. Each week the cohort learns new concepts and techniques and
implements each concept. Learners are tasked with running an experiment utilizing the
learnings and tracking the experiment objective, measures, workflow and results on the
Quest board. By using the Quest board and immersive cohort groups, the learners are
able to experiment with these concepts and tools in real time and try to apply them to
their unique situations. In addition, this ingrains a culture of experimentation into the
organization in a grass roots manner that has a ripple effect as more and more
individuals go through the program.
The second differentiator of the ADAPT program is the cohort structure itself. By
organizing the learning groups into collaborative cohorts, the learners share their
individual experiences and collectively challenge each other and develop an incubator
for insights and solutions within their own workplace situations. The notable outcome
here is that cohort members become comfortable in running experiments and using an
empirical, collaborative approach to solving all sorts of problems that they encounter,
not solely those within a transformation. Learners develop the skills and encouragement
needed to truly embrace the new concepts and to effectively put them into practice
shortly thereafter. This is the power of ADAPT and this is true learning agility!
Check out the Growth and Agility Skills Portrait (GRASP) from The Helix Group.
Individuals can take the skills portrait for FREE and assess themselves on the 42 skills
needed in a transformation.
Coming Soon
PIVOT – Assesses the seven dynamic attributes needed in a transformation by every
organization.
ADAPT – The first of its kind, systemic immersive cohort based transformational
learning agility program.