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

Credits

Thank you Mat the W for the photo of Hammerschlag