Category Archives: Culture

Guide to Designing, Developing and Delivering Online Learning Experiences

Culture, Digital Transformation, General, Scaling

Online training can be horrendous. It can be an unsatisfactory experience for everyone involved: students, organizations and those that build and deliver the experience. Time and resources are wasted and, more tragically, poor training can generate a stigma around learning and negatively impact the culture of the organization. Getting to better (much better!) online learning (in contrast to training) requires us to improve how we design, develop and deliver the experience.

Introduction

Many years ago, I was with a team transitioning training from the classroom to online. We had a successful business for delivering in-person training, offering multiple curriculums and courses within. The topics focused on creating software covering everything from team collaboration, to requirements, writing code, testing and even managing the code. To quickly transition to online, we took the same materials, same instructors and added in some online lab capabilities and voilà, we had an online training component to our business. Reflecting on our approach and results with a critical eye, I see that while our efforts were strong for the time, there’s a big gap between those days and what we strive for today. And a big part of that gap can be seen in transitioning from “training” to “learning experiences.”

Crafting better online learning experiences is more important than ever. To be better, these experiences need to be engaging, effective, and energizing. Such experiences help us keep pace with change and orient us toward a culture of continuous learning, curiosity, and nimbleness. If we fail in creating better learning experiences, the culture will suffer and the organization will stagnate, lag competitors and fade away. Simply put, if you fail to learn, you’ll fail to earn.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to design, develop and deliver better online learning experiences.

Why “Experiences”

Staring with the title and throughout this guide, you’ll see use of the term “learning experiences.” Creating online training and having a goal of delivering training will orient our thinking and efforts to accomplishing just that goal. We ask: “Did we deliver the training?” and can easily state “Yes, we did deliver training” and consider it a job well done. The view is too narrow and leads to weak measures of success. We’re bound to underwhelm and have limited positive impact (if we can discern any impact at all!). There’s an experience, but it’s not as fulfilling, impactful or healthy.

Starting with the idea of a learning experience changes our perspective – we think about:

  • Who will be involved?
  • What would each party gain and contribute?
  • How will we measure success?
  • How might we encourage students to become lifelong learners?

Taking this first simple step of focusing on the experience is a great start. It changes our perspective from our course to our people. Ideally, it can help us think even broader as we consider the larger challenges we’re trying to solve. We end up transitioning from an inside-out perspective to an outside-in perspective. With this perspective in mind, let’s take a closer look at how we can design, develop and deliver online learning experiences!

Team Collaboration and Coordination

Designing, developing and delivering learning experiences is a team effort. To support the collaboration and coordination needed, I’ve found it best to adopt an agile mindset with a focus on strong team competencies:

  • Getting and receiving feedback from users
  • Focus on value and impact for the user and the team
  • Leadership expected from everyone
  • Operating with transparency
  • Always planning, learning and improving

Depending on the team you have, you may find that a continuous flow model or perhaps even aspects of Scrum helpful. I caution that you don’t get wrapped up in the mechanics of a specific model. It can be easy to get trapped into the details and formality and end up just going through the motions. If the mindset and key competencies are missing – it doesn’t matter what you call it, it isn’t going to work.

Design (and Innovation!)

Just having team collaboration and coordination isn’t enough. We can’t just form a team and start building the learning experience. Thinking about the design, or “design thinking”, is critical to our efforts. And, as a nice touch, design thinking aligns nicely with the mindset and competencies we just described above – further guiding our attention toward people, empathy, learning and handling ambiguity.

When we put on our design thinking hat, we really focus on thinking about the influences, interactions, and impact of our creation. A learning experience does not occur in isolation or independently. There are people involved that will participate in the experience. We need to think about them in this interaction. What do they bring with them to the class? Are there different types of people that will participate? Do we need to cater to different audiences? What are their expectations? Do they have concerns, fears or challenges that will come with them to the experience? And if so, how would that impact how they engage and react to the experience? We need to empathize with the people that will be involved in the experience. Feelings, interpretations and past experiences all come with the people as they engage with our experience.

We also need to recognize that we are going to have to deal with ambiguity. We will need to figure out which techniques, exercises, interactions, modalities, pacing and other aspects of the experience best meet our goals and resonate with our participants and help us to achieve our desired outcomes. There is generally some exploration, meandering and discovery as we figure out the design of our learning experience.

Going beyond focusing on the people involved, we can further broaden our perspective and consider the challenge that we are trying to solve. It can be helpful to consider the problems that we’re facing and try to reframe and re-orient. And, we should look for how we can engage learners in design activities. By engaging learners in co-creation and participatory design efforts we find a path to better learning and get buy-in for the experiences that emerge. There are some tools available that can help, including:

  • Canvases – Using a canvas can be a great way to collaborate, align and get buy-in. Rather than isolating yourself and writing a traditional document, use a canvas and pull together some colleagues, stakeholders or customers. Design together, making the ideas visible and moving sticky notes around to embrace perspectives and fluidity.
  • Personas and Maps – Personas, journey maps, empathy maps and similar constructs help us to better understand the people involved in our learning experience and their learning journey.

Constraints

We now have a great foundation that shapes our mindset and provides some mechanics for how we will innovate and create. But, we never – ever – operate without constraints. That is, there are limits to what and how we can create and deliver. While constraints can sound like a negative, I see them as a positive. Constraints challenge our thinking and lead to innovation. Some constraints to consider with online learning experiences:

  • Attention / Distractions: Attention spans for online material is around 5 minutes. This is especially relevant as you think about “telling” or “showing” types of interactions. If you are lecturing, demoing or even sharing a video – you just don’t have that much time before people lose focus.
    • Remember that you are competing with multiple screens and devices.
    • And, your learners have a day job. Work continues to come in and pulls the learner toward getting things done.
  • Engagement / Coordination: When face-to-face, it can be hard to inject and find a way into a conversation (especially as the group size gets bigger). However, as we transition to online, this becomes even more difficult. This is a big issue for course design. We need to find ways to keep everyone engaged in the learning. If we don’t keep them engaged and feeling part of the learning, we will lose them.
    • Sitting, staring and listening leads to disengagement. Movement and hands-on activities help people learn but are often overlooked when transitioning to online.
  • Resources: There’s never enough time or money.
  • Change: Life and work are not static. You are racing and competing with change. Our students, stakeholders, subject matter experts and facilitators will change their mind. You will need to accommodate and embrace change.
  • Definitions of success: Whether we look at an organization, groups or individuals, we’ll find a variety of definitions for success. If we define success too narrowly, we may overlook alternate learning paths and approaches that are valued by some of our learners but differ from our own views.
  • Distribution: Participants are distributed both geographically which, at a minimum, can bring time zone challenges. A broader geographic spread can also bring cultural differences.

Making Lemonade

As they say: ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!’ Recognizing constraints can be a good first step in challenging orthodoxies and sparking innovative thoughts and approaches. Let’s look at some possibilities:

  • Multiple Screens. Having multiple screens and devices can pose a challenge as students’ attention can be pulled elsewhere during the class. Depending on your situation, you may be able to design your experience to take advantage of multiple screens. For instance:
    • Laptop screen: Main class interface for sharing slides, class chat window, main audio / managing break out rooms
    • Second screen / external monitor: Class Kanban board, shared group workspace (Google Doc, Whiteboard such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard), or even a personal workspace that the class can visit (cloud-based workspaces for developers)
    • Phone screen: Polls, games, and other interactions can see the students using their phone as their voting/game controller. Results can be directed back to the main screen.
  • Distance. Your students are distributed. No one is in the same location. This can be a positive as no one has to travel and costs for the learning experience are reduced (no flights, no hotel, no classrooms to book). Recognizing this change, you can look at how to better drive learning. Trying to condense learning into a few days of face-to-face is not always best. Slow learning can be powerful and a big win for online learning experiences. Potential avenues of leveraging distance include:
    • Keep students’ attention by breaking the class into smaller time commitments.
    • Introduce asynchronous activities / work to go along with the synchronous class time.
    • Encourage students to practice new skills and share back with the class.
    • Provide students with time to create a learning journal / portfolio. There’s more time to apply, reflect and share back.
  • Engaging everyone. Yes, it can be hard to give everyone a chance to speak. We’ve all been on calls and talked over someone, did the random pause of silence and then talked over each other again! Recognizing this challenge up front, we can put energy into finding alternative ways to engage:
    • Chat: Not all communication has to be audio. Use the chat for live interaction.
    • Break-out rooms: Create smaller groups with their own audio channel (and screen sharing) to make it easier for everyone to contribute.
    • Asynchronous communication: Threaded discussions, videos, learning portfolios, and small study groups.
    • Polls: Offer the chance for everyone to share an opinion and engage.
    • Ask everyone to use video: It helps them to connect with you – and you can more easily connect with them!
    • Collaboration tools such as Google Docs and interactive whiteboards such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard: Make it easy for everyone to write/draw/create together – and see everyone’s contributions.

Developing Learning Experiences

While there’s a linear flow to this article, it is critical to recognize that we are building and proving ideas for our learning experience as early as possible. We iteratively and incrementally build the experience. Design shapes development, and development shapes design as we balance between intentional and emergent design. Taking small steps gives us the opportunity to deliver value early, adapt to change or stop when we’ve delivered enough value. There are many tools available to help us build learning experiences – almost as many tools as they are ways to experience learning.

Some tools that are important to keep in mind include:

  • Simple low-fidelity tools. Especially in early efforts. Low fidelity representations invite feedback, adjustment and drive us to focus on ideas rather than the fit and finish. If you and your team are co-located, find some walls and use that space, sticky notes, and whiteboards to start to build.
  • If your team is not co-located, give thought to the tools that you will use to coordinate, create, comment and discuss.
    • Slack and MS Teams to discuss, coordinate
    • Trello or other Kanban tools
    • Miro/Mural/Stormboard for engaging whiteboard experiences
    • G Suite for sharing and collaboratively writing documents and working on presentations
    • GitHub is a great platform to use for many of these aspects and offers versioning for all the content you’re creating.
  • There’s more to an experience than just the content and materials that the students will see. Keep in mind that there will be facilitator guides, distribution of materials (All materials digital? Physical materials?), facilitator training, and potential building out of environments to support any lab work (if the experience relates to use of any tools)
  • Additionally, we need to consider tools that support video, audio, gaming or mobile interactions (chatbots, messaging, etc.).

Delivering Online Learning Experiences

As we approach and execute delivery of the learning experience, we need to continue with the mindset that we’ve cultivated and established up to this point. This isn’t a race to get through materials, a need to check boxes, or to just complete some form of compliance. As teacher (or facilitator or instructor) – we’re focused on impact.

We need to connect with our students and support them on their learning journey. Here are some suggestions on how to make the most of this experience:

  • Get to know everyone’s name. Coming into the class, you should already have a roster, get familiar with the names and do you best to use students’ names.
  • Answer questions. This may seem obvious, but when a student asks a question – you need to do your best to answer. Further, you can also pull other students into the discussion and have them provide perspectives as well.
  • Tell (relevant) stories. People connect with stories. As an instructor you can connect with your students – and connect them with the content through stories. Stories also build your credibility (as you speak from experience) and help to bring the content to life.
    • And, ask students to share their stories! A good teacher learns from their students.
  • Have a co-facilitator. This is especially important in online delivery. Having one person run a learning experience is especially difficult. Work with your co-facilitator in advance and have clarity on where and when you need assistance. Expect to need assistance with:
    • Monitoring chat during synchronous interactions
    • Setting up and supporting break-out rooms
    • Helping students debug technology
    • Setting up polls, opening them up and making sure that results are captured/shared
    • Capturing notes and feedback
    • Updating parking lot
    • Updating the class Kanban board
  • Pay attention to energy levels. The class is set up with a plan. But, as a teacher, you need to be ready and able to adapt as needed. Each class is unique and will have ebbs and flows in energy, engagement, and progress. Pay attention to:
    • Prompts from your co-facilitator that the class needs a break. The co-facilitator is seeing the chat window and icons that suggest a break (coffee mug, snoozing emoji, pace indicators, etc.)
    • Be wary of silence.
    • Keep an eye on the “attention measurement” feature of your training software. While not perfect, it can provide clues that you’re losing the group.
  • Be mindful of culture and time zones. Being online, you may have a much broader distribution of students which introduces time zone and cultural challenges:
    • Your class should be designed for frequent interactions and breaks. Recognize the time zones you’re dealing with and be prepared to adjust. In some cases, it may be helpful to consider shutting down early and asking folks to do a bit of homework.
    • Culture may also lead to different student expectations/behaviors. Do your students feel comfortable asking questions? If not, consider how you can confirm progress or engage in discussion and interaction.
    • Lingo and cultural references. Whether from the domain you’re teaching or just a regional phrase, be aware that not all cultural references translate well or easily. You want to bring yourself to the classroom, but you also don’t want to alienate or confuse your students. If there’s a phrase that reflects “you” and helps to convey an idea, consider how you can use it and be inclusive.
  • Stay on topic. Yes, there can be some deviations from the main topic. But, teaching a class is not all about you. You are there for the students; consider any tangents from their point of view. What value is the tangent adding? If the value is questionable – consider sharing it during a break of outside of the class. Sharing can help forge bonds, but students have goals and definitions of success for their participation – don’t get in the way!
  • Stick to the schedule. Your students have commitments beyond the classroom. These commitments could be work related or family related. Either way, you have made a commitment to them about the time boundaries for the class.
  • Building on the course content, create a list of topic-aligned questions to generate purposeful discussions. Good questions are important. Try to stay away from “Any questions?” or “Did that make sense?”, and move towards “What are some challenges you can see with doing X?” or “Can you think of a scenario where you might use Y?”.

The Interconnectedness of Design, Development and Delivery

These three dimensions of creating an outstanding learning experience are interconnected. As we learn more about development or delivery it should feed back into design and future iterations of the experience. Just as design leads us to select tools and techniques, the tools or techniques we chose bring constraints and capabilities to the mix that impact design. Be open to learning, recognizing the impact of choices and adjusting. To create a learning experience, we must be open to learning.

Further Reading

There’s a book called “The Design of Everyday Things” written by Donald Norman that I encountered as an undergrad – and I’ve been passionate about design ever since. I highly recommend the book as an entry point to thinking about Design. Some resources to consider include:

  • Design Council’s Double Diamond
  • Change by Design, Tim Brown
  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp

If you’re not familiar with Agile, I recommend starting with the Agile Manifesto. You’ll see lots of references to software (that’s where it started), but the values and principles in the manifesto apply to all kinds of solutions and scenarios. From there, look at the Scrum Guide and the basics of Kanban (additional background). Using Trello or MS Planner can be helpful for making work visible and staying aligned.

Teaching TDD: Experiences in Pivoting

Culture, Scaling

Going beyond the classroom to drive TDD impact. While constraints may restrict us to traditional learning approaches (in the beginning), a focus on impact supports pivots that lead to better approaches and outcomes.

I was excited to be taking on a new client challenge, introducing Test Driven Development (TDD) within a large financial institution. The effort focused on a group that drove their digital and innovation efforts (web and mobile). If you’re not familiar with TDD, the idea is that we write a test before writing the code for the solution. We take small steps and grow our tests and the solution code, bit-by-bit. In doing so, we get insights on quality and validation, improved design, and code that is easier to test (and in turn understand, change and maintain). TDD guides practitioners to think about what is being built, why and how. This exploration leads to group discussions driving insights and alignment across the group. And, as a bonus, TDD leads to executable documentation (which stays in synch with the code and helps us understand the ‘why’ behind the code).

My collaborator and lead from the client-side, Sunil, was focused on driving impact in his group. The group was early in a journey to improve how they work. They were primarily waterfall-oriented and finding that they couldn’t move at the pace needed by the business. So, while the journey to Agile and DevOps ways of working would take some time, we could introduce TDD to nudge the group forward. And while the group had about 1000 developers, we would focus on working with 300 developers and 50 managers. Within this group of 350 people, we had cohorts focused on Java, .Net, iOS, Android and relational databases. The foundation built in this effort would support the remaining folks in the group.

As we embarked on this journey, we were well aware of our challenge and constraints (funding and time). We focused on being a team that would collaboratively design a program, execute together and pivot when and where needed. We connected often, planned together and reviewed progress (and outcomes) along the way.

We took a small and simple step as we started. We introduced key senior leaders to TDD – covering details on what it was and why it was important. At a minimum, we knew we’d need support for the initial investment. And, we knew we’d need further support as we introduced a change in how people would work and think.

We focused our first efforts on a classroom-based approach. We introduced two classes: a two-day Java developer class and a half-day manager class. The developer class had solid learning objectives, good discussions, and we spent over half the class time in hands-on labs. We delivered a couple of sessions and took a pause. While feedback from the students was good, they went back to their day-to-day and fell back to old habits. This wasn’t shocking – a couple of days in a classroom cannot overcome a system oriented to legacy thinking and approaches. Old habits are hard to break!

One memorable moment was a debrief that we held at the end of one of the classes. Sunil joined us for a debrief, and we were asking the students questions about what they had learned and what they would take back to work. One student shared her thoughts explaining: “…once we get perfect requirements, we’ll then…” and my heart sank. After a couple of days of great discussions, interactions and practicing – we were still seeing a mindset that was stuck. We had been optimistic that we could light a fuse and get change started. We needed to adapt. As an experiment, the client asked another vendor to deliver a session (using that vendor’s materials) to see if it was the class itself. The result? A different class with different materials didn’t make a difference. So, we re-engaged and continued to discuss ways to further our impact. We wanted to see evidence day-to-day of TDD adoption and application. There should have been more unit tests created, better written code, and more discussions.

Constraints are an amazing ingredient driving innovation. We had a challenge (more impact!) and many constraints (funding, timing, number of people, variety of platforms) and needed to come up with better approaches. We had more Java-focused classes to run as they were the biggest cohort. And, the smaller cohorts of iOS, Android, .Net and DB developers still needed support. As a team, myself, Sue, Lance and Sunil worked through ways in which we could adapt to lessons learned and our constraints.  We recognized that this was more than just picking up a new skill. We were running right into culture, mindset and “that’s not how we do things!” We needed to take a more innovative and broader approach (and figure out how to scale). Our solution focused on tactics across: Classroom training, Coaching, Collaboration, Community, Time & patience, and Culture.

Classroom training: We still needed to use some classroom time. We didn’t need to drop it; we needed to augment that experience and think bigger. One small step was creating a video of a training delivery. This video then became available to the rest of the organization – and – an asset that the team could revisit as needed. For the other cohorts, we would need to make further adjustments. We’ll get to those in a little bit.

Coaching Developers: We needed to have a coach onsite to support students as they went back to work. Students needed more support to transition from the classroom back to their day-to-day. The coach supported the team on technical topics and “softer” topics such as dealing with change and uncertainty.

Coaching Coaches: We had constraints. We had one coach, lots of people and a small budget. So, we identified developers within the teams that “got it” and had the potential to be good coaches. And, we coached the apprentice coaches. We built internal support for TDD to drive long term success and self-sufficiency.

Collaboration: This is where things get interesting (and impactful). We injected more collaboration into the approach. We focused on collaboration between coaches, students and managers. We needed to learn together, and we needed to learn by doing. We needed a model for the smaller cohorts that used non-Java skills. Supporting other languages, toolkits and platforms was a big challenge. And, it is difficult to find one coach that can support TDD across all these technologies. We decided that we would adopt this model:

  • Have our coach and the apprentice coach co-create a half-day training session for each technology.
  • Incorporate Katas (self-paced exercises) to drive further practice. We emailed a problem description to students and asked them to take a TDD approach to create a solution. The exercise was set up to take between 30 and 60 minutes. Once completed, the student would email their solution to the coaches. The coaches would review each solution, provide feedback and highlight the best solution. We gave a coffee shop gift card to the creator of the best solution. It wasn’t a big prize, but it was nice to have some fun and a bit of competition.
  • Host a Dojo that followed a round-robin, paired programming model with a small group. The session started with the coach and a student working on creating a solution using TDD. After a bit of time the coach would rotate out and then it would always be two students working together using TDD. We projected the main coding screen to make it possible for everyone to follow along. As they developers were pairing, they talked through the code and thinking as they went.
  • Include one-on-ones to provide team members with a chance to ask questions, share challenges and get further support.

Community: We provided guidance and support as a TDD community was established. The community had a website for sharing training materials, videos, and the problems that supported katas and dojos. And, live sessions were set up for sharing experiences (successes, challenges, and approaches).

Time & patience: A two-day class is inadequate for such a challenging change. There needs to be time to reflect, practice, discuss and revisit. And, there needs to be patience from all involved to support the team as they embark on this journey.

Culture: Everything I’ve shared above started us down the path of impacting culture. Further, this was all supported and embraced by the organization. This reflected the importance of new ways of working, thinking and learning. We continued to support leadership in understanding the changes and how they could support the change effort. And, we maintained a focus on metrics and impact.

This was a great experience of learning, adapting and continuing to learn. The partnership we had as a team, our apprentice coaches and our students allowed us to continuously improve and make a difference. And, I like to think that the approach illustrated provided a model to support future changes.

A Story about Learning, Gaming and Winning

Culture, Digital Transformation, Gaming
“When we’re playing a good game – when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles – we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness – our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centres – are fully activated by gameplay.”
 
― Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
 
Growing up playing games, I enthusiastically embrace the idea of learning and games. The fun, intensity and gratification that comes from playing a great game (and winning!) beats the heck out of the drudgery of old school learning. Sitting through long, boring lectures is a demotivating and ineffective way to learn. Gaming, could be introduced as a new and improved learning approach. But, we can’t assume that all games are good and will be effective (and in a similar vein, not all classroom experiences are bad).
 
In an earlier attempt at this post, I started down the path of discussing what makes a good game. In that effort I discussed theory, frameworks and concepts. This included looking at Vygotsky, Piaget, Papert, Playcentric game design and “magic circles.” Gaming theory and frameworks are interesting (and fun!), but there can be a long path from theory to impact. So, I pivoted – and we’ll look at the impact that a great gaming experience can have on learning.
 
I like to highlight that ‘being’ digital requires new ways of working and – new ways of learning. But, new doesn’t mean that we throw away the old. We bring forward what makes sense, adjusting it as needed to improve and have a bigger impact. Yes, we need to increase focus on social and informal learning. But, we don’t have to abandon formal learning. To enhance the impact of informal learning, I like to include games. Sometimes, these experiences are short and focused on a specific concept. For example, the coin game is quick and fun while highlighting the importance of batch size and the theory of constraints. Sometimes, the games are much bigger and take most of a day to play. The key is to have good games that are impactful. Doing so can impact culture and help organizations achieve their digital maturity ambitions.
 
With this background, I’d like to tell a story about impact through gaming. The story focuses on playing the G2G3 DevOps Simulation. Here are some details about the simulation:
  • This is an all-day learning experience, featuring 3 rounds of gameplay. There is a scoreboard, there are rules and it’s competitive. We remind attendees to take breaks and step away from the game.
  • Each round of gameplay includes planning, doing, reviewing and some best practices (Theory).
  • 20 people can play the game.
  • Each player gets a role: Business leader, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, QA, Release Engineer, Operations or Service Desk.
  • To win, each role has to collaborate with the other roles.
  • The scoreboard provides everyone with views on their progress, challenges and performance.
  • Each role has a type of puzzle to complete to do their “work”. And, like the real-world, there’s a need to collaborate to be able to succeed.
  • There are two main types of work: new development that the business requests and incidents that come in via the Service Desk.
  • As work moves through the “pipeline”, one of the facilitators is bridging the digital and physical worlds. Paper cards flow through a “pipeline” and the facilitator confirms the work. The facilitator also gets to play the role of “chaos monkey”, so to speak, and gets to break servers – leading to service incidents.
  • Work from the business arrives via the Business and Product Owner roles.
With this background in place, I’d like to share one of my favorite stories about this valuable experience. My team was facilitating the simulation at a well-known, global technology company in San Jose. We had a group of senior managers and directors participating. They were in the early days of their division’s digital transformation. This company lives and breathes technology every day. But, they still found that they needed to improve and adopt new ways of working (…and learning, thinking and leading…). The agenda for the day included a two-hour overview session followed by the simulation. In total, we had a very full, 8 hour day planned.
 
I led the overview session. This goal for this session was to drive alignment on Agile, DevOps and ‘connect the dots’. The session included lecture, Q&A/discussion prompts, and a video session with their boss. The video session reinforced the importance of these efforts and highlighted the support for our day. It was during this session that I first met “Simon”. Simon sat in the middle of the room and he caught my eye. He was paying attention, rather intently, but he also had his arms crossed and was leaning back – and was radiating doubt. In introduced the benefits of DevOps: improved collaboration, better quality, and enhanced customer alignment. And, that’s when Simon jumped in: “So what – we’ve seen and heard this before! Each new approach that shows up offers the same thing. Bigger. Better. Cheaper. Faster. Why should this time be any different?” At that point, I felt the spotlight turn to me, get more intense and the focus of the room follow along. How to answer? How could I convert Simon? And, how could I avoid losing the group?
 
Pausing for a moment, I realized that I couldn’t convert him with words. I shared some thoughts and stories – but I could see the disbelief radiating from Simon. There was a bit more dialog with others in the group joining in, but we weren’t making much progress. Simon wanted proof he could touch, see and experience.
 
We completed the overview section and moved on to the simulation. We put Simon into the Scrum Master role. The intent of the assignment was to give him direct insight into how work was flowing and engage him with both business and technology roles. He was going to get his proof!
 
Round 1 of the simulation is chaotic as participants only have a little bit of time to prepare for gameplay. Simon worked hard in Round 1 and in the debrief shared his views on the results, challenges and how everyone worked together. After everyone debriefed, we discussed ways to tackle identified challenges. We provided guidance on techniques and ways of working. We empowered the group to be the driver for continuous improvement. The team had to take their experience and the practices we provided to come up with better ways of working. We repeated this pattern at the end of Rounds 2 and 3. However, for Round 3 the goal was to carry forward lessons learned into their day-to-day work. I won’t go into details of the techniques, approaches and thoughts shared (I don’t want spoil the sim for you) – but I will highlight that we made an impact. Throughout the day, Simon changed. His demeanor went from doubtful, frigid and a bit antagonistic to warm, smiling and passionate. Why? He was able to get his proof. He experienced the changes that happen as we take on new and better ways of collaborating. He felt empowered as he and his colleagues made their system work better. Data and debriefs along the way showed them bottlenecks and highlighted issues. And, new ideas on practices fed into experiments that led to solutions. For me, this was a huge win. In traditional training and coaching situations, I don’t see such a transition in one day.
 
The simulation wasn’t the end of their journey. People don’t leave as DevOps experts. But, the sim sets the stage for pulling more learning, for igniting pursuit of improvement and culture change.
 
I’ve had the chance to run the sim at some other companies and would like to share from those experiences. In one sim, my then client and now friend Keith Buehlman was a participant. Keith was the leader of the organization’s transformation. I asked him to reflect on the experience and he shared the following:
“One of the best parts of the DevOps simulation was the opportunity to go through realistic scenarios and, in the process, refine skills and learn best practices that can be used immediately. The DevOps simulation was an important piece of the overall transformation strategy as it comes to understanding the culture that was needed to really operate in an agile fashion. It truly supplemented the hands-on training and day-to-day coaching of the employees.”
I especially like the reference at the end of his thoughts. The simulation is not a one-off, silver bullet that solves all transformation challenges. But it’s a piece of the puzzle that also includes other training and coaching. And – as much as this is about skills and practices, it reinforces the cultural changes needed.
 
Other participants have highlighted that they found it motivating to see the connection between their work and impact. For others, they walked away understanding T-shaped skillsets. One participant shared his surprise that people would cheer for improvements in MTTR. And, as we put participants in roles different from their day-to-day; they come away with a new appreciation for their teammates. Empathy for others can go a long way to making the workplace more hospitable and receptive to change.
 
Through game play we have an exceptional day of learning. The energy is high, passion is evident and the time flies by. And, we create ripples in the organization that support us in driving a bigger change. In wrapping up, here’s a great quote from Ralph Koster that speaks further to the power of gaming and learning:
“Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. In other words, with games, learning is the drug.”
I hope this story sparks interest in adding games into your formal learning events. If you’re already using games, which ones are you using? What impact are these games having? Are you creating any new games that are specific to your organization?

Distributed Teams and Learning

Culture, Scaling, Teams

Working in distributed teams with members dispersed in multiple locations is a common reality for many of us. It presents some extra challenges as we try to improve how we work and learn. If we’re going to succeed in scaling learning (number of people and frequency) we’re going to need to succeed in engaging everyone – regardless of location.

Here are a few tips I’d like to share based on experience. First let’s look at how we can leverage technology to help:

  • Use video as much as you can. Seeing a smile, a look of confusion or a twinkle in the eye as someone teases can overcome misunderstandings, keep everyone in the loop and make the team feel closer. And, by seeing everyone, we can also better gauge openings in the conversation – or even create one with raising our hands (or other gestures!).
    • What if some of the team is together and just some team members are remote? I’ve found it helpful to ask the co-located team members to congregate together. In doing so, we use a single audio channel for the co-located team – and – have each person use their laptop/device to capture their video. This keeps the video set up simple – and everyone can see everyone. I’ve been using this approach recently in some of my projects. And it’s been a great way to see everyone and be seen by everyone.
  • Consider using tools such as Sococo as a way to provide some structure to a virtual world that everyone can co-inhabit. The Sococo floorplan metaphor makes it easy to understand spatial mapping between the group members, without getting bogged down with unnecessary details (or dimensions). Here’s a couple of ways to use it:
    • Use a floorplan for day-to-day interaction. Have team rooms, break-out rooms and even some spaces set aside for one-on-ones. Encourage the team to stay connected throughout the day, occupying the space that reflects their work focus. If they need some private or small group time, use a break-out room and close the door (Note: that if someone wants to talk to a person behind a door, they knock to make the request). If you’re wanting to chat, hangout in a social area.
    • Mini-conferences: Set up some time focused on sharing interests, results, problems and failures. And much like a real-world conference, set up your floorplan to have a main hall for major topics and then break-out areas for specialized topics and smaller audiences. Be mindful of the space and consider using techniques to engage the audience as it fits the context.
      • We used this approach with one of my consulting teams. It led to a great afternoon of sharing, interacting and feeling closer than we did in just using traditional web presentation tools. Also, we all enjoyed having a choice of sessions running in parallel and being able to easily navigate our conference hall (virtual as it was!).
    • Record your meetings / presentations. This is a benefit to having a distributed team. Analog meetings are a thing of the past. As you’re all in the digital space, take advantage of the capability to record the session. This makes it easier to come back to the discussion later or include those that couldn’t make it as scheduled.
      • Tools such as Otter.ai look intriguing as an option for taking digital audio and getting notes created. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet – but am looking forward to experimenting and adding it to my selection of tools.
    • They are many other interesting digital tools that can help with sharing, collaborating and researching:
      • Consider how you can leverage chat, video and podcasts as ways to share personal experiences, questions and lessons learned. A short video or podcast is a great way to share knowledge with the team.
        • I’ve used Flipgrid to engage a group via video in traditional learning settings. It might not be the best fit for a single team, but if you’re following a model that includes pods and guilds, this could be a great way to scale and cover distances.
        • And your phone typically has capabilities (or can be augmented with a simple app or two) to create short podcasts or videos.
      • And, seek out tools that support collaborative editing and creation.
        • Google Docs is great for writing together.
        • Tools such as Mural and Miro provide great team workspaces.
        • Tools such as hypothes.is are intriguing ways to collaborate with your team as you access articles, papers or even documentation. Annotating the web can provide a great way to asynchronously learn together.
    • Take care of the basics. Make sure that you have good audio and video capabilities. Using mute to keep out background noise when appropriate.

And that concludes the easy part. The bigger challenge is the people side. We need to be willing to try new tools, connect, collaborate and learn in new ways, be patient, be vulnerable, and be generous. This is a long list of asks and changes. Be mindful of the amount of change being introduced, prioritize and take time to learn and adopt. Here are a few more people-oriented considerations:

  • Don’t forget the Team competencies that I discussed in Teams FTW. A good team is a good team – regardless of distance and dispersion.
  • Have a good facilitator that actively keeps sessions on track and keeps everyone involved. The facilitator should be mindful of participants that like to think out loud and those that like to think and share after they’ve heard others talk. We need to hear all voices.
  • Make sure that you’re setting up clear working agreements. For example, as a distributed team, you’ll need to be mindful of time zones. Set up core working hours that overlap in availability as much as possible.
  • Leverage retrospectives to identify ways to improve, and follow-through on improvement plans. Continuous improvement is a key ingredient of new ways of working.
  • And last, but not least, there will be many opportunities to learn from failure. There will be connection issues, audio issues, timing issues and likely some background noise. Learn from the failures and keep finding ways to leverage the learnings.

These tips all come together to help the team operate, work and learn. And while technology helps, this is still a people challenge. We need a mindset where we embrace the ability to connect, share and learn as a team. Together, we create a space where learning is supported in our activities throughout the day, when we socialize and even with more formal activities.

What are your favorite tips for working and learning in distributed teams? What do you find most challenging when working as part of a remote team?

First Peoples Principles of Learning

Culture, Digital Transformation

As we start this conversation, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.

This seems like the right way to start this post as we’ll be taking a look at the First Peoples Principles of Learning – produced by the First Nations Education Steering Committee. If you’ve not done so already, I highly recommend reviewing this resource. When thinking about Digital Learning (aka new ways of learning), it can be beneficial to look broadly for inspiration and embrace diversity.

First Peoples Principles of Learning
First Peoples Principles of Learning

This has a been a great resource for helping me to think about learning – both for myself as an individual and as I think about impacting learning across an organization. Here are a few of my favourite parts:

  • “Learning involves patience and time.”: Yes, the pace of change is faster than ever – and accelerating – but it still takes patience and time to (truly) learn. We need to have patience for how we learn and as we design new learning ecosystems, we need to incorporate time and patience into the ecosystem itself. In the discussion about MS Teams, I highlighted how we introduced patience and time into an Agile Coaching Academy.
  • “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational….”: I see each of us, our teams, and endeavors as part of a larger ecosystem within an organization. Further, we also are part of the larger ecosystem of our individual lives, governments and other organizations. Our interconnectedness brings the potential for enormous complexity and nuance. To learn, we need to be able to reflect, experience and relate our efforts to other people, organizations, situations, and ideas. It is interesting to see how many of these ideas (“see the whole”, retrospectives, experiments, etc.) are embedded into agile and DevOps approaches.
  • “Learning requires exploration of one’s identity.”: Knowing who we are as learners can help us to find better ways to learn (which reminds me of the Introverts Guide to Mobile Learning). Further as someone creating learning solutions, we need to be mindful of our learners. Drawing on design thinking and human centered design are reflections of the need to explore identity.
  • “Learning is embedded in memory, history and story.”: We’re surrounded by context, experience, relationships, legacy thinking and our stories. Our learning is shaped by these aspects and then shapes them for future learning.

And considering the set of items above (and the larger set of principles) – it highlights the importance of considering our culture (values, norms, behaviors) as we embrace and support new ways of learning.

Which of the principles resonate most with you? How would you use them in your learning? How would you use them with your organization? What other principles do you consider in guiding how your organization learns? How do they guide your learning?