 As Peter said, I know I am the person standing between you and food. So I will be extremely conscious of that fact. So what are we here to talk about today? We're talking about what a learning organization is. Whether or not a learning organization is an important thing. Is it really a thing? Is it important? And what does it look like? Just quick check, how many of you have heard of the term learning organization? Okay, so good number of us, awesome sauce. Just so you know who I be. My name is Nivia, I'm an Agile Coach at Spotify. I've been in the game so they say for 15 years, mostly on the product and people leadership side. And these are the two things that make me happy and excited to go to work. Look at him, look guys, look at him right now. Look what he's doing. Yeah, yeah, I show the slide at every presentation and whatever he's in the crowd that's his reaction. He's adorable though. Okay, so here is what the internet says is a learning organization. It's a term given to an organization that facilitates the learning of its members. And it's a mechanism for continuously transforming itself I think it was Jack Welch who said that the only real competitive advantage is out learning your competition, right? And so that concept has been congealed into a philosophy called the learning organization. And sort of the leader of that movement was a gentleman by the name of Peter Senge. And he wrote a book called The Fifth Discipline Back in the 90s and he introduced us with maybe not new concepts, but a new pattern of those concepts. So from his standpoint, a learning organization was comprised of systems thinking, like thinking about your whole system, right? As opposed to the individual components or groups within your organization. Personal mastery, taking an investment and a viewpoint that personal development to achieve mastery is key. Using mental models as a way of understanding your context, sharing your vision and making sure that vision is well disseminated. And of course, team learning, I collaborate all the things. So for me, I don't have a lot of space in my brain and so I basically absorbed that philosophy and decided to put it back out into the world as three things. Cause three is easier to remember than five. That's the only real rationale for it. So for me, a learning organization is about three things. It's about creating safety. It's about creating the space for learning and it's about using safety as in a feeling safe and comfortable in wherever your context is, having the space to learn and then using that to drive a purpose and relentlessly deliver against that purpose. So, when we talk about safety, what are we talking about? So if you, I'll stop for just a second. Who feels that they are in a learning organization today? Yep, yep, cheers to you. So when you are in a learning organization or if you want to know whether you're in a learning organization, here's some pretty simple questions to ask. First of all, do you feel safe to challenge whatever pre-existing organizational axiom in your context? So for example, I was sitting at an organization and the CEO said something like, no, our customers would never do that. And I was fortunate because I was in a learning organization and someone fairly junior in that meeting said, are we sure about that? So that's the ability to challenge the never's, challenge the truisms in the organization. And that is a sign that you feel personally safe to do so because you know the CEO isn't gonna say, walk your little butt out the door, right? You feel safe to do so. A safe organization is also a place where you feel that you can discuss important things openly. So that may look like town, oh, I have a story for this. So I was at, I was consulting for a large bank and I'm talking about a 50,000-person organization and they have these town halls and the town halls are massive, right? They're held at convention centers, it was that big. And during that town hall, during Q&A, it was the CTO, one person raised their hand and go, I don't quite understand what you do. Like this is to the CTO and for the very, very, very, we're like, oh, no, this is gonna go bad, this is. But it didn't, right? Why? Because I didn't think that was a learning organization. However, I feel that that person was fortunate to maybe have had a microcosm of safety where they felt that I can challenge this and the CEO reacted positively. CTO, excuse me, he said, you know what? That's a problem. If you don't know what I do on a day-to-day basis and I'm supposed to be your leader, that's a problem. And that was a great demonstration of safety even though it might not have been a learning organization. That's also an example of showing our true selves, right? If you feel as though you are able to bring your whole self to work and it's appreciated, then you will probably perform accordingly, right? And of course, my favorite one is, are do you feel safe failing without burning down the ship? So I think I'm allowed to use this example at Spotify. So at Spotify once, there was a person who will remain nameless who accidentally, you know, did a bad thing on production that resulted in some loss at revenue. And this person felt terrible, like he was ready to burn himself at the stake or whatever. And the answer was, from Spotify once, it was our failure because we created a situation where you could have had this kind of impact. So that's what I mean here by failing without burning the ship. If there's a really beautiful quote on the internet, but I'm tired and I'm having a lot of coffee, so I don't remember it. I butcher it by saying, you know, if you can bring down your organization, then that means that you are not in an organization that is, I told you I'd butcher it. Like that's not an organization that's safe. So how would we make it safe, right? So one way to make it safe is to have some explicit working agreements or WoWs, ways of working. How many people have within either their team or their organization some explicit working agreements with members of their teams? Super cool. Do you wanna, Christopher, can I put you on the spot? Do you wanna give us an example? Yeah, we just have an overall team agreement on how we perform our work, specifically, you know, if you write some code, somebody has to review your pull request, you know, you can't improve your own, you can't merge your own changes. You know, really basic stuff like that, but it covers documentation. Excellent. And some ways you could supplement that to make it a place where you feel safe, is you could say things like, give people the benefit of the doubt. Like, whenever a mistake happens, let's not assume the worst intentions here. Let's just give our peers, our teammates, the benefit of the doubt. Like, that's a great working agreement, and having it public or having it visible in your team area helps remind people so that when the tempers flare, you can sort of walk back, it's like, remember we agreed that I am not naturally an asshole? Like, this is where you give me the benefit of the doubt? Like, this is super helpful to have, right? Another safety mechanism is not weaponizing your language, right? So what does that mean? What does it mean by weaponizing your language? What would be an example of a weaponized term or language? Any? Yes? Pretty much, unless it's you did awesome, then yeah. Right? So another one could be like, one that's fairly common that people aren't thinking about is risk, in other words, you're risking, or this is so risky. It's not to say it's not important to talk about risk, but when we talk about it in that language, what we're really saying is that risk is bad. Risk is not always bad, bad risk is bad. And so the idea here is that you have to be careful because language matters. So you have to be extremely cognizant of using terminology that pushes people away and make the environment feel like it's not safe to learn to experiment. Another safety mechanism is providing structured forms of input and feedback. In other words, town halls are one way to get feedback, but it's a very public way and not everybody might feel comfortable with that. So there's some pretty cool apps nowadays where even before your town halls, people can post questions or post feedback, some anonymously, some not. And what that does is for those who feel as though, I don't quite wanna give the feedback or I don't quite wanna ask a question in a public forum and have that attention on me, they also have a mechanism to do so and that makes them feel safe to be transparent. And then lastly for safety, how many of us have heard of the term Anzen or Anzenir? Woo-hoo, I wish I had prizes. I don't have anything to throw at you, I'm sorry. But, so I love this concept. So it was by a person named Joshua Kirkorav, I'm probably butchered his last name, but he took the Japanese term Anzen, which means safety and engineering and combined them. And the idea here is that there are ways to implicitly build safety into your organization, both on the qualitative and the quantitative side. So one example might be, in one way he used it to Anzenir, was that he looked at whether or not people felt that they had enough environments in order to deploy. So I'll use my example, because that map's better, but so I was working at a place where we only had like one path to prod. So we had a dev environment, QA staging and production. And so what happened is like when hot fixes came in and we were already working on the main line, the dev line, we had nowhere to test it. What does that have to do with safety? Well, what happens is when hot fixes came in, we ended up having to do a lot of fixes on, like we just fixed it on our local machine, pushed it to dev and then shipped it straight to production. And so we were using production as our test environment because we feel like we had nowhere else to test things. So that's an example of feeling of not providing a structure where you feel like you can fail because then it's a very high risk if you do have a bug. All right, makes sense? Okay, so let's talk about space. So what do I mean by space here? I don't quite mean this, although I just wanted to use this picture because it looked awesome. I wanna walk into work feeling like this, like I own this universe. What I'm talking about here is creating a physical space for learning. So how do we know that we have had space and really time? And according to Einstein, they're really the same. How do we know we've had space, time for learning, right? So the questions you can ask yourself when you get back to your desk is, do we prioritize learning at all levels? In other words, it's great if at the team level we're like, oh yeah, we're super learning oriented, but is that organizational wise? Can we identify learning at every step of the organization? Have we created environments that are conducive to learning? And also, have we taken on personal development as a professional obligation? Because in this context, I mean personal development and that we are learning new things and then we are going back and disseminating that information to our organization. Obviously, y'all have, cause y'all here, this is part of your personal and professional development, so that's a great sign. So once we've asked ourselves those questions and we still feel like, well, wait a minute, there's more to be done here, here's some of the things we can do to make space for learning. So at the organization level, we can tie learning to strategy. So I'll give another Spotify example, but I don't think Spotify is the only organization that does this, they have something called a bet. And it is what it sounds like. It is, it's almost like using the scientific method on a product or strategy. So they would make a bet based off of a hypothesis and they would, and that bet is not necessarily, the goal is not necessarily to execute or deliver on a particular product or strategy, it's to learn something, it's to determine whether or not the hypothesis has been proven true. It's a very powerful learning mechanism because what you're saying is, there's some things I have to do to sort of keep the lights on, but there are other things I have to do. There are things I have to learn so that I can prepare myself for the future. So this is, so doing something like that is a way to tie learning at the strategic level and that keeps you fresh and that keeps you looking forward as opposed to always thinking about specifically driving a particular strategy or delivering a particular product. Another concept I like at the organization level is learning consortiums and other or tech exchanges. Anybody participate in those? Oh, okay, good. If my husband doesn't raise his head, I will freak the hell out. Okay, and this is another way to learn and disseminate information and disseminate learning as well. At the senior level, I'm part of a learning tech consortium and the idea here is that we get together, these organizations get together, we have an NDA so I won't tell you much about who they are, but members of these organizations get together on a regular basis for free and transparent exchange of ideas. It's a powerful way to learn and it's a lower cost way to learn because you don't necessarily have to take on the risk of experimenting on every potential item. You can learn from what the other organizations in your learning consortium do and you've agreed to share that information quite freely so it creates a little bit of freedom. But even at sort of the lower levels, joining a tech exchange is a great way to do that. Just spend a day at another company learning what they do, observing what they do and finding ways to bring it back. At the group level, for me, it's really about building physical spaces that is conducive to learning. So this part you're probably all familiar with. It's important to have dedicated space for going and thinking alone, deep diving, being the lone wolf as you've mentioned. That's great to have private space to do that, but you also need shared spaces to collaborate, to mob together if you will or to do peer reviews together. And then at the individual level, making space for learning just literally means investing in personal development in your teams and your self-personal development. And it's also getting the F out of the building, like literally getting out, walking around. And this is extremely important to do because you don't wanna create an echo chamber within your own walls, within your organization. If you get out of the building, maybe not literally, like if you live on a mountain that probably won't help at all, but like if you live somewhere where you can go out of the building, work at a coffee shop, like work at a co-working space would be a perfect example of getting out of the building so that you can sort of learn through osmosis. So this is at the top left-hand corner is, I dropped the mic without even like intending to, like this wasn't, you know how like people dropped the mic, that wasn't it, I just dropped the mic by accident. So at the top left is one of a team that I support as an agile coach. And I brought it up here because I wanted to sort of contrast it with this picture I got from the internet about what is a conducive space for learning. So when you look at the picture on the top left, why do you think that's conducive to learning? Like what are some of the signals that tells you that learning will more likely happen in that picture than it would at the bottom? Yeah, no walls, people can see. Exactly, right? So even if they're not necessarily talking at that point in time, sitting next to each other and hearing each other sometimes think out loud, something as small as that, that's sort of the learning through osmosis, like the physical proximity is a helpful learning tool. So make sure, this entire point was to underscore the importance of having spaces that are conducive to that type of learning. All right, purpose. I'm doing okay on time? Oh, awesome, thanks. Okay, so once you feel like you have personal safety, once you feel like you have space and time for learning, the next thing is using all of that to really build a purpose. When I say purpose, what I mean specifically is being clear about our intentions, the direction we wanna take and the outcomes we wanna have, right? And I found this wonderful quote from the internet because I think this is where leadership can especially use help in creating a learning environment and leadership at all levels. The idea here is that creating purpose is not necessarily about specifically directing people. Creating purpose is about having a very strong and clear vision and mission and using that as what I like to call your lighthouse. So if you have a lighthouse, people will find their way towards it. When they're lost at sea and lost in a sea of information, if you have a very clear lighthouse, that'll bring people into you. You don't necessarily have to go searching for them or being the captain of the ship, if you will. So what does that mean having a lighthouse? For me, a lighthouse are a couple of things. First of all, having a very clear vision. Like people love hiring consulting companies that tell you like, we changed the world by inspiring synergistic missions. And I'm like whoa, I don't know what you just said, right? What do you do to make the world better? Like what are we here for, right? Being very clear and specific about that. And I'll give you one example in a little bit. Another way to create a strong lighthouse is to keep your measures simple. In other words, it's gorgeous to have like a dashboard of metrics that's like health and happiness and blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, it becomes, you sort of lose the meaning behind all of that information. I'm a firm believer in the three, like the rule of three, as you just saw, right? Like if it's more than three, I shit that I'm like, I don't want to hear it, blah. So for me, just having three simple metrics is key. And the metrics could be whatever is appropriate for your context, what I'm trying to relay here is the art of simplicity. The art of keeping things simple so that we can be very clear about our lighthouse. The other component of a lighthouse is the traceability of the day-to-day work back to that vision and mission. In other words, making sure that at every point as an individual contributor, I can trace what I'm doing back to the company vision or mission. So for example, if I am working on a particular feature, and all of a sudden a priority one bug comes up, if my company mission is about customer service and making great products, I will feel I will have less of a conflict of interest switching to that priority one bug because I feel that that better represents what the mission and the vision of the company is. If the mission of the, excuse me, if the mission and vision of the company is that we love our customers and we want to make awesome products for them, that means that they can't have a terrible user experience. So that helps keep things simple and clear right down to the individual contributor level. And then I mentioned this before, but having multiple feedback channels as a way of learning, of getting information from the masses, from your, within your walls, as well as outside of your walls. So again, to recap, in order to have a learning organization, and I don't mean recap like the whole talk because I have more slides, but in order to have a learning organization, people need to feel like they have safety, personal safety. They need to have the space and time, awesome, 10 minutes, space and time in order to learn, and they need to have a purpose so that they can orient their learning, channel their learning appropriately. So what is the proof that learning, doing those things will result in having a fan of money? I have a use case here of a company that I feel best represents a learning or accurately represents a learning organization. So think through learning. They are a small organization that provides math software for students. And here's why they're a great use case for a learning organization. In terms of personal safety, recently they decided that the whole team was gonna go into a cabin in the woods and sort of like tough it out for a few days. How many of you trust your coworkers enough to be like stuck in a cabin in the woods with them? Yeah? Not doing it. But that demonstrate that they feel they feel a high level of trust that they can do that. Another sign of safety, maybe not personal safety but environmental safety is that anyone can push a production deployment. Like anyone can deploy it abroad. Then we're able to accomplish that safety by making sure that they engineer their environment. They applied automation to their deployments. They automated their tests so that people can feel like they can hit the button to production without blowing up the company. Without kids not getting math. In terms of the space, their environment, they have pods instead of cubes. So they work in little pods of four or five people. And that's probably fairly common nowadays where modern technologists, if you will. And they also have areas that are for relaxing and collaboration, that's what the photo is showing here. And they also use chat ops, like many of us do Slack and hip chat and whatnot for a sacredness communication. So there's always like a place for them to freely communicate and a place for them to learn off of each other. So there's osmotic learning happening, there's individual learning happening and there's a dissemination of information happening through chat ops. Their mission is quite simple, like we teach kids math, right? So at the end of the day, they all know what they're coming in to work for. They also make their backlogs, their units of work extremely visible so that anyone in their organization, from engineering to tech support, has access to the backlog and is able to see what's important to the leadership, what's been prioritized. And they conduct client visits as a learning mechanism and I don't just mean the prod people or the sales people, engineers are able just as much as anyone else to raise their hand and go, I need to, like this isn't working, I don't understand, I need to visit a client. Again, that's a component of learning because they feel like they have a modality, they have a form in order to test their assumptions. And another way, another signal that this is a learning organization is that products and engineering, they work so closely together that they just decided, why are they sitting across the hall? Let's just sit together since we talk so much, right? So there's a high feedback loop between the product group and the engineering group. Microsoft wants me to register, I'm not doing that. Okay, so another example. So I saw yours slide, I was like, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, I think about it, but then I was like, I'll just leave it. I actually think that the show Silicon Valley, their Pied Piper organization is a learning organization. So that's an assumption I have and I wanna test it with y'all. So why do you think, what are the components of Pied Piper that you feel would be an example of it being a learning organization? Again, how do they demonstrate safety? How do they make space for learning? And how do they, how are they purposeful? So who wants to tell me some elements of Pied, like y'all watch Silicon Valley, right? Okay, good, good, good. So what do you think, what would be an example, Thomas? They work in an open environment. They work in an open environment, that's a clear example. Anyone else? Thank you, like yeah, they can deploy their own server farm. Not safe, I suppose. But they feel safe enough to fail because then it turned around and they were able to pivot to a new product. I watch this show religiously. And another component of safety is that they're able to challenge the CEO at any point in time. They call him on his bullshit. Like that's a side of a learning organization because they have the personal safety to do so. Any others? Yes, John? Well, that's a good point. I would say he was trying to bring in a new culture but because the existing organization, the other bros who were there, they were able to leverage their existing culture to rally and push him out. So I think that the new CEO was trying to instill a culture of a non-learning culture and they were able to just rally against it and say no, that is not the organization we want to be and you spoiled it. If nobody else saw season three, you told me spoiled it, John. You should have said spoiled or learned. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Okay, so what now? Like great, we talked about a learning organization. Maybe you learned something new about it. Maybe you didn't, but what do we want to do about this? Well, I have a simple model called let's start to start. I probably didn't come up with it. I steal a lot of things from the internet. But the idea here is just start to get started, right? Five minutes left, too great. Okay, so some of the things we can do in this room to move us towards a learning organization or if we're already in a learning organization, some things we can do to bring us to further along that journey. Just start a dialogue about safety. So just like I think Christopher, you gave an example about working agreements. If you have working agreements, revisit them and include components of personal safety. So it's wonderful that we have rules and guides about how we're gonna document, how we're gonna deploy. But do we have things about like, hey, I'm not gonna interrupt you because it feels rude to interrupt, right? That's a component of safety that you can use your ways of working to do. Add engineering tasks to your backlog. In other words, and you could Google engineer and find a ton of example, but like do, I hate the word audit, but I can't think of another word. Like do an engineering audit of your current processes to find opportunities to increase safety. So ask yourself, all right, am I forcing people to test on production because I don't have all the right environments configured? Or am I asking people to take on personal risk because they have to manually deploy? Like all those questions could be a set of questions you ask and check off and work towards and build into your current workflow and processes. The other one that's pretty straightforward and simple is making work visible. That's the purpose aspect of a learning organization. If people don't understand what their contribution is leading towards, there's no way they're gonna ever take the personal incentive to learn more and contribute. So making that extremely visible and ubiquitous increases your learning and increases the organizational's tribal knowledge. Having multiple feedback channels so that people can have different types of dialogue, open dialogue and open forums, excuse me, but also personal dialogues through one-on-ones, through surveys. I love it at Spotify, there's an annual survey where it's like four questions, but one of the questions is do you feel safe to fail? That's a great question, it's simple, it's binary and what it does is it allows people to signal that no, I don't feel safe to fail and so I don't feel, if you don't feel safe to fail you don't feel safe to learn, right? We don't like failure for itself, we like failure because we wanna learn something. I'm not saying failure is the only way to learn something but it is another, a good way to learn something. And lastly, what you're doing here, right? Participate in the community. So get out there and disseminate, it's the get out of the effing building, right? Go out there and disseminate information or participate in information exchanges. So through conferences such as these or finding out if your organization is partnering with another or can partner with another organization to build learning consortiums or text exchanges, those are all aspects of learning. Breathe, okay, so I didn't do much Q and A so I think I'll do that. I have enough time? Oh, okay, repeating the question real quick. So how do you apply, what is the juxtaposition between personal development and developing a personal brand, right? Okay, so what I would say to that is to me, as knowledge workers we have a default obligation in order to remain employed is to continuously grow our skills. So for me personal development is an obligation for us as members of the technology community. A benefit or a fringe benefit could be also developing your personal brand as you start to share that learning out. So to me there's a little bit of a Venn diagram and a correlation to them but they can remain mutually exclusive without ever, they can remain mutually exclusive as long as you prioritize your personal development first because if you're not, sorry, I'm having trouble with words today but if you're not working on continuously building up your skills you're probably not contributing back to your organization and that's regardless of whether or not you're developing your personal brand. Did that help or answer somewhat? I think that's a very poignant question. The way I'm interpreting it is I'm gonna add my own interpretation. Is building and prioritizing learning does it detract from productivity? Is that a fair way to state the question? Okay, my answer is gonna be somewhat controversial for giving me an advance and I'll buy your beer. I think it's more important to prioritize learning than it is to prioritize productivity. However, what you can do to make sure that at the end of the day that you're still able to pay your bills is to scope box it really. In other words, if you have a set of five company goals one way to do that is to just have one learning goal as well. That way it gives it its own space, it doesn't overlap and take time away from other productive delivery work but what it can do though is that one learning opportunity can translate into strategy and delivery in the future. So for me, the way to counteract that is to scope box it. Answered your question? Awesome, think I've run out of time. So with that said, let's hear it. We do have open spaces later and it can certainly continue the conversation or ask questions and give you afterwards. So there we go. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. Before we jump out of your seats we've got a few things to say.