Learning Culture

DevOps, Westrum, and Agile all focus heavily on learning as a necessary trait for high-performance cultures. At Merely, we evaluate our culture by our everyday behaviors, not programs or technologies. For us, we fill every day with learning. It’s encouraged and, more importantly, expected. Yes, we have an online learning platform available to everyone on the team. But that’s not what makes learning a part of our culture.

How We Make Learning Cultural

Before launching Merely, Inc, I focused on bringing together a team capable of delivering our first MVP and setting our cultural foundation. While courting one of our employees, they said, and I paraphrase, “I’m not sure I feel comfortable getting paid given how little I know of your tech stack and development practices.”

They’re someone who’s been a professional web application developer for around 15 years. Someone who helped me become a better programmer many years ago. They have traits, skills, and experience that are essential to our goals for this team.  

I said, “I’m not making you an offer for your non-existent skills with Dart/Flutter or extreme programming principles. I’m making you an offer because I’ve seen your commitment to learning, curiosity, humility, and generosity. We need that more than anything. And, your grizzled in-the-trenches experience is invaluable.” 

“I appreciate that, but I can spend some time getting up to speed first…” they said. 

I interrupted a bit rudely, “I appreciate and respect why you feel this way. For my part, I can’t just say that we value learning and then be unwilling to put our money or faith in the process. There’s much that we all don’t know yet. This is who we are. It’s your decision. I’ll support it, but I’d like you to put aside any fear related to what you don’t know yet and accept.”

The first principle is this: Is the decision we’re making furthering the practice of our values or working against those values? 

Put your money and faith where your mouth is!

Respect Each Other’s Capability to Learn

We believe that almost everyone is capable of learning anything given the conditions necessary for learning. As a teenager and young adult, I didn’t think I could learn to program. As a creative, maths and logic had a hard landing. If it weren’t for a boss who believed I could and gave me an environment to learn, it wouldn’t have happened for me. 

We aren’t alone in this thought. Benjamin Bloom, famous for Bloom’s Taxonomy, said this:

“After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” 

I’m not going to set aside my intuition in the face of forty years of intensive research by leaders in the field of learning. Instead, I’ll let that science validate my intuition. 

Respecting each other’s capability to learn can be demonstrated through:

• Allowing people to take on tasks they have little to no experience doing.
• Inviting others to shadow or pair with you.
• Investing your time in teaching, coaching, and mentoring. 
  

Don’t push people out of your sandbox, belittle, or dismiss their interest. There’s a sub-culture in engineering circles that celebrates holding esoteric knowledge and relishes in the ignorance of others. Pull that weed out by the roots! Encourage those who take on the struggle of learning something new, risk putting new knowledge to use, and show curiosity.

Learning is Part of Doing Complex Work

We aren’t doing project work at Merely. We’re a product engineering team. In other words, our job is sufficiently complex to justify an Agile approach. Inherent in this approach is the drive to make something with imperfect knowledge, inspect it, and adapt.  We learn through iterative experimentation.

There’s too much to know in our industry, and essential knowledge today may change tomorrow. Because of this breadth, depth, and constant change, we expect someone will need to learn something every sprint. That’s just baked into executing the work. We also express the need to explore unknowns and learn as uncertainties in estimation. We talk through what we believe we know about the stories and what we don’t know. That sets up pairing arrangements, reviewers, and reasonable estimates.

20% Time

We give everyone time to pursue their interests, whatever they might be. Will learning 2D art skills make you a better programmer? There’s a good chance it will. If not a better programmer, then some knowledge of composition and color theory will go a long way in improving those “dev UIs” we all know so well. 

Do you have a solid developer who reluctantly got into the field due to family pressure? Would they instead prefer to be working in a creative role? It’s better to train them into their passion than have them stew in their bondage to a decision someone else made. It’s beneficial for everyone. It’s good for the bottom line too. Have you ever calculated the cost of turnover? 20% is a fraction of the cost of employee churn.

While 20% is a significant investment, the ROI can be dramatic. I attribute it as one of the primary success factors in taking a service team with little or no programming experience and transforming it into a team releasing MVPs every six to eight weeks. That’s a story for another time.

The only requirement for 20% time is to push your boundaries and knowledge forward and share what you’re learning with the team.

Purchase Information and Put it to Use

I like to describe Scrum as a way to buy information. Planning, scrums (standup), sprint reviews, and retrospectives are the means of defining experiments, analyzing their results, and adapting. These events and the work involved in fulfilling their purpose is the empirical process to gain new information and put it to use. If your Scrum Events aren’t providing new knowledge to analyze, inspect, and adapt, it’s time to focus on finding the antipatterns and behaviors that are withholding value.

Programs and Initiatives

We aren’t against the programs and initiatives that often come from Learning & Development teams. I’ve worked closely with brilliant folks in L&D and cherish the work we did together. We love learning platforms, online training tools, and everything else the digital age has blessed upon us. We recognize that these tools cannot achieve their goals without a culture to provide support.

If there is one thing I generally caution against with learning platforms, it’s setting learning goals around course completion. These are great metrics for the providers of these software solutions, but they might not be an effective tool for nurturing learning. An astute manager will work with their employees to define objectives and milestones tuned to the learner. Those objectives might include course completion, and they might not. The caution here is against a top-down approach.

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