Originally posted at my blog

I attended Joseph Matsey's talk on building a culture of learning at Abstraction's last year. I really enjoyed the talk, and have been thinking about and implementing ideas from it over the past year. Here's a summary of my takeaway for the 3 different phases of culture building (with a bonus 4th phase, of "you have a culture")

Guerilla Learning

This is where a lot of places start - there isn't really any particular culture of learning, but some learning exercises and activities are supported

• High resistance to taking time from shipping
• Ad hoc learning
• Onboarding by oral tradition
• Few folks driving learning

Approach

• Think opportunistically
• Improve team members primary roles
• Seek fast returns with low investment

Examples

• Workshops
• Meetups
• Build a team library
• New hire buddies
  • Try cross-team buddies

Dangers

• Buy in never starts
• Stay stuck in guerilla learning forever

Buy in Starts

This is a dangerous intermediate phase, where some culture building has happened, but it's not baked in or fully supported by management

• New hires have some kind of organized learning
• Team members want more, but aren't empowered

Approach

• Leverage internal experts (workshops, talks)
• Seed good role models (and shame everyone else)
• Mentor mentors (mentorship is an orthogonal skillset to what you do at work)

Examples

• Weekly talks, 4 15 minute talks
• Project updates
• Tech approaches
  • Senior leadership talks
  • Ops talks

Dangers

• Key folks leaving
• "Takes too much time" payout not obvious, track and figure out how to measure returns
• Mentor burnout

Making it Stick

This is the final phase, that takes management buy in, re-programming existing employees and enculturating new hires

• Boringly normal
  • From "workshops are amazing" to "oh god a workshop"

Approach

• Momentum to sustain effort
• Sustained learning
• Make people forget the old way

Examples

• Learning/teaching as a KIP
• Apprenticeships
• 3 part onboarding
  • Teach skills
  • Teach processes, history and context
  • Personal development
• 20% time

Dangers

• Payoffs hard to measure
• No one is responsible
• Losing the habit

Self Sustaining

At some critical mass point, it continues lurching forward. This point is when you have a durable culture of learning

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Credits

Thank you Mat the W for the photo of Hammerschlag