Quoting Renee Troughton from AGILE FOREST2: “Think about how the team may feel knowing that there is four months of work hanging over their heads. They are unlikely to feel inclined to innovate knowing that there is so much that the product owner still wants delivered.” This is when the mindset has to change to “I don’t know how, let me learn.” Admitting ignorance is what this agility brings light to the Agile Manifesto, “Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation.”
Fulfillment and exploration need courage plus new intelligence. Discovering values and needs from the beginning by active participation and understanding the basics takes you to the top. To grow, openness and ideas afresh are paramount. Once an individual admits ignorance generating interest within oneself and actively participating to keep up with the trends for new discoveries, that then brings fresh and valid values for an organization. The ache to learn more constantly and the willingness not to ebb is a trait that every organization has to condition their teams and employees with. Leaders and managers with strong learning agility, always willing to learn new information can rapidly study, analyze, and understand new situations. New business problems to understand difficult challenges can strengthen innovative possibilities by making fresh connections.
Agility is about trying new things and discovering new areas, which can help people to become better. We decided to include Learning Agility in our model because it is fundamental to be open to new learnings and experiments. This is when we can start formulating our hypothesis and make them real, valuable, and impactful. Learn and check high-potential hypothesis fast. As an example of how to make Learning Agility easy, we can introduce Design Sprint which was developed by Google Ventures. The design sprint3 is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, benchmarking, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Design Sprint is a shortcut to learn without building and launching. Many huge brands like Slack, PwC, etc., use Design Sprint.
When we learn fast, and check our hypothesis fast, we can also fail fast and failure is just
the beginning. Failure creates new opportunities
to learn.
A fairly new concept Amazon has pursued is physical grocery stores, such as their own store in Seattle and their purchase of Whole Foods. “Whole Foods has no customer database. Amazon has tremendous details on its customers who purchase online, but it begins its transformation of Whole Foods with no historical customer information. Amazon is going to need to win over Whole Foods employees and help them adjust to a new way of making decisions”.4 A large amount of data will be needed to be collected in order to see if the store is generating enough interest from consumers to further pursue the creation of more physical stores and the advancement of Whole Foods. Amazon will need to improve their IT department and provide training courses to those employees and teams responsible for analyzing the data collected. There will be a two-week course geared toward showing and teaching the employees specific trends and how to analyze the needs, wants, and interests of their consumers regarding the future of their physical stores.
We feel that the answer to the question “how does one stay open to new discoveries and learning opportunities?” lies with both developers and investors when it comes to total success. Both must understand that they need to have the courage to admit that they do not know everything. For example, the construction industry tends to keep slow change of pace as architecture and materials change very gradually. In order to be innovative, leaders should be open to learning from other industries. It could even be from the IT industry, for example, the microservices architecture principles. In other words, it can be explained as a modular construction.
The honeycomb (as shown in Figure 6 below) is an ideal analogy for representing the evolutionary microservices architecture. Each cell in the honeycomb is not only independent but also integrated with other cells. By adding new cells, the honeycomb grows organically to a big, solid structure. When creating a new solution for customers and users the investment in the interdisciplinary team of engineers from different industries could be crucial. The more perspectives we have the more creative we are.
Figure 6
Therefore, being courageous enough to learning what you realize you need more knowledge for and admitting the path is to grow more in specified areas to perform a project to the fullest details. This is learning agility in our minds. To analyze data better and more proficiently as the individuals and teams learn to rip apart information and analyze the vast amounts of data is a simple example here.
To have the learning agility honed, some of the remedies that can be employed are:
- Be courageous to try, test, and be open for new learnings. Question everything.
- It is ok to learn and fail. Failure is just the beginning. Failure creates new opportunities to learn.
- Challenge the status quo in an attempt to make improvements.
- When faced with something new, look for similarities between the situation and things you have done in the past. Draw on these similarities to frame the new challenge.
- Make time to critically reflect on your past experiences.
“Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.”5
Industry Applications by International Practitioners and Academia for Learning Agility
Agility is about learning and adapting which involves experimentation and adjusting the performance empirically to improve the results and impact. The curiosity to learn and improve continuously is the key for improving the outcomes. The learning capability helps in building a good knowledge base and allows better problem solving by evaluating different approaches to identify and decide the best approach.
Adaptability to enhance the skillsets in digital world will bring better results in dealing with uncertainty and technological changes. But at the same time measuring the business performance will radically shift from traditional or plan-driven approaches to empirical and evidence-based approaches. It’s not only important to survive but to thrive in the world of uncertainty in order to gain the competitive advantage over others and to improve the quality of sustenance.
Gaurav Dhooper (PAL-I®, PMI-ACP®, SAFe4®, CSM®, LSS-GB)
Program Manager, RPA & Agile Practitioner at Genpact
INDIA
Our department has understood and acknowledge that we do not know everything and that we can do things better than we are currently doing. We understand that we should take advantage of all these opportunities and learn quickly with agility to design, plan, execute, manage and control our projects, using new technologies, methodologies, knowledge, etc., so that it will make our performance and in general our organization more competitive and efficient. The first step in the process will guide us in our new journey in the ocean of adaptation of our existing methodology in Engineering Design, Procurement, Project and Construction Management.
Rafael De La Rosa, Project-Portfolio Management Consultant,
PT. SMART tbk
INDONESIA / SPAIN
The data world is exploding with a multitude of tools, technologies and data trends requiring a culture of (constant) learning. Encouraging, and in some organizations, creating a culture where stakeholders and business users constantly seek to gain insight into what data is available, why strong data governance and analysis means, and more importantly, the ability to think forward about the key business outcomes they need to generate.
Patrick N Connally, Director, Teradata, Philadelphia,
USA
Some say we learn by our mistakes, some say there are no mistakes just lessons, and both are right. Some leaders say they forget their mistakes, but they never make them twice, while others continue to repeat them endlessly. In my company I advocate experimenting and learning from these experiments. I also say “Don’t hide when an experiment fails and it becomes painful, this is your chance to relearn. Stop fearing failure, instead be open-minded. Because when you learn from these experiences whether they are successes or failures, you learn to recognise the signs and red flags in future settings. Adjusting via observation is an important quality”. Finally, “failure” is only a thought construct, and it is nothing other than our subjective assessment of the reality which is what I have experienced in my company.
Joanna Staniszewska CEO, You’ll Ltd.,
POLAND
Leading the way now is learning agility. In the new economy formal learning no longer plays a major role. The only way to survive the ever-changing environment is the readiness to learn and adapt. Accepting that you do not always know everything, having no fear of change and openness to learning are key.
Makheni Zonneveld, Future Readiness Coach,
NETHERLANDS
Even if it’s the case when they meet, there is nothing new to say, they will say it anyway. Why? Because it is their actions that speak loudest, not their words. In effect, what they are doing is demonstrating learning agility, they have curiosity and they discover fast what’s working and what’s not!
But when demonstrating personal agility and perhaps most importantly of all, when it comes to whether the chicken or the egg came first; they know that the philosophical question is not what came first, but what comes next
Paul Hodgkins, Executive Director, Paul Hodgkins Project Consultancy,
UNITED KINGDOM
Having the courage to understand that we are not good at everything is a good reflective practice. Understanding what you do not know leads to new discoveries and learning opportunities. Understanding peer perspectives helps change our assumptions thus opening our minds. A learning agile environment is what you want to create in a classroom and on a team.
Professor Linh Luong, Program Director of Master of Science in Project Management, University of SEATTLE