Focus on Learning

In addition to better understanding your team as a CAS when planning a liftoff, another way to help strengthen your liftoff design is to follow the Five Rules of Learning.^[3] In their book, The Five Rules of Accelerated Learning [LL15], Willem Larsen and Diana Larsen develop the Five Rules of Learning to enhance and recognize learning wherever it takes place.

The Five Rules of Learning

Apply these Five Rules of Learning in every liftoff to maximize learning:

• Keep it alive.

• Do it for real.

• Start obvious, stay obvious.

• Focus on flow.

• Put setting first.

Keep It Alive

Ask yourself, How can I foster more aliveness in the session I’m planning, designing, or facilitating?

For humans, aliveness generates energy for learning. Remember a peak learning experience. Peak experiences—whether physical, mental, or emotional—feel deeply nourishing. They connect us with our common humanity. Following the keep it alive rule directs your attention to the many ways you can increase the learning potential in a space or event.

Many things can enhance aliveness, including:

• A sense of urgency or intense need

• Relationships, friendships, or a sense of an intimate connection across generations.

• Silliness, play, humor, and anything cute (there’s a reason the Internet loves kittens; they embody all four)

• Feeling successful or the pride of mastering a new skill

• Physical comfort, rest, hydration, snacks

• A sense of risk and danger (real or perceived), physical and psychological safety, and consent

• Intense colors, smells, textures, tastes, light in the right amount, any appeal to our five senses

• Any aspect of our sense of being alive

For example, we bring plenty of sticky notes to our liftoffs. But we don’t bring just one color or shape or size. We use the sticky notes to help us generate a lively, game-like atmosphere. When team members use the notes to share their ideas or build a diagram on the whiteboard, they participate in adding color to the discussion.

In addition, we have long discussions with caterers about what snacks and beverages will best help the participants’ learning. We discovered that salty snacks can reenergize more than sugary ones.

Keeping it alive can result from simple, yet conscious and aware, choices in the kinds of activities, in the location, in the supplies, and in the way we speak to one another.

Do It for Real

Ask yourself, How can I better engage the group in doing real, relevant work? Luckily, a liftoff already carries much of this focus.

In a liftoff, you have the ideal opportunity to do it for real. The trap lies in the temptation to bring in non--work-related activities in your liftoff design. Learning about the product, the purpose, team members, and so on engages most people enough. Focusing on the real work to come compels attention.

A colleague once planned a liftoff that included a half-day ropes course team-building event before the team had a chance to learn about what was in store for them. The team felt it was a big waste of time and discounted all of the activities that came after. Stick to the real work wherever possible. If you must include an icebreaker, make it a relevant one. Pay attention to what’ll make your liftoff more relevant, including:

• Solving a real-world problem

• Building or making something together (such as chartering artifacts)

• Navigating social interactions with new team members and/or stakeholders

• Using professional tools and supplies in your liftoff

• Achieving observable milestones

• Tangible practice, practice, practice with useful behaviors, such as working agreements

Start Obvious, Stay Obvious

Ask yourself, How can I make the work of this liftoff more obvious? How can I strengthen the signal during the event?

Find ways to remove hesitation, awkwardness, and confusion. In a liftoff, when we ask team members to step into new, different work, reducing concerns about what we don’t know yet becomes even more important. Take the opportunity to clarify what’s been decided, what hasn’t, and what decisions the team will participate in.

As a facilitator:

• Speak slowly and clearly.

• Avoid jargon. Use commonly understood language.

• Provide plenty of light, air, and quiet time for thinking.

• Acknowledge and support the diverse abilities and disabilities of all the participants.

• Heighten emotions when it’ll help.

• Use familiar, iconic illustrations, materials, and tools. Employ colors, shapes, icons, and sounds to reinforce concepts.

• When in doubt, be as clear and as obvious as you can be.

Focus on Flow

Ask yourself, How can I focus on the flow of content so that it arrives in bite-sized, easily consumable pieces?

Help the group stay in the flow. Too much information or too many instructions provided too quickly can tip participants into a feeling of panic or of being overwhelmed. Too little challenge can lead to boredom and questions about abstract edge cases. Design your liftoff to introduce small chunks of new activities and information—bite-sized pieces—so that team members can consume them easily.

Keep in mind that new information and interactions will emerge during the session, even after your plans and liftoff design are complete. Stay alert and open to adapting your design to incorporate what you learn in the moment.

Put Setting First

Ask yourself, How can we improve and intensify the way the setting drives the other four rules?

With our choices of setting, including location, the room, furnishings, and decor, we amplify or dampen aliveness. Attention to setting might simply involve adjusting the thermostat, or you might have the opportunity to connect participants with the grandeur of nature. You can adjust the setting to strengthen learning in many ways, including the following:

• Support learning with a context that matches the environment where participants will use it. (It often makes sense to hold retrospectives in front of the team’s task board.)

• Remove all superfluous noise and distraction from the environment so participants can stay connected to the liftoff work. Look for visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other distractions. (Note: pipe cleaners and other so-called fidget toys can help maintain focus for some participants. Don’t automatically assume these tools will distract; know your audience.)

• Make it comfortable, secure, friendly, familiar, and humanized.

• Whenever possible, employ natural light and views of nature.

• Apply any of the qualities listed in ​Keep It Alive​ in the space.