Continuous learning organization

A Continuous Learning Organization

Growth Mindset has brought the transformation from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. This was an incredibly powerful shift for individuals. We should ask ourselves, “what is the corresponding evolution for an organization?”

When software was a “shipped” product, it made sense to train people on how the shipped version worked. You could reasonably expect that knowledge to cover a significant portion of that product’s lifecycle. Updates were often relatively infrequent with only incremental changes. In this world, you build training before the product or update launches and have those who need it consume the training around the time of launch. In this model, you are basically done training once you have gone live.

Contrast that world with the X as a service model of the cloud where releases happen throughout the day. The number of interconnected services has increased and they are all constantly changing. The train-once-and-execute model cannot keep up with the modern software environment. A continuous release cycle necessitates continuous learning at the organizational level.

What does it mean to be a continuous learning organization? Does it mean you don’t prepare for product launches? No, these are still valuable opportunities to learn and to generate excitement around new capabilities. But, launch readiness by itself is not enough. Technical teams need to operate as their own learning and development organization. No one else is close enough to the details to prepare training. Traditional training is not the answer to support real-world technical knowledge in a run state.

So how do we build operational processes and rigor on team-led technical development? You need to schedule regular meetings where the entire team meets to discuss technical knowledge gaps. Any time you schedule a meeting with a lot of people, there is a cost. We better be able to justify the time (cost) investment of these meetings.

The reality is that for most enterprise solutions, you simply cannot document every single combination of elements that can occur in all real-world environments. You do your best to cover known scenarios, with the expectation you don’t know everything. Technical knowledge gap meetings allow a Just-In-Time prioritization of undocumented issues for the people who actually need them. You plan to build the knowledge as you need it. This of course takes some time and effort but ensures you don’t waste time documenting knowledge that is never used.

These meetings serve as a classroom where the technical team has the ability to learn, is empowered to teach, and can quickly get problems solved by the collective wisdom of the group. People can waste a lot of time problem-solving on their own. It can be difficult to ask for help without a formal channel to do so. You will be amazed at how efficiently a meeting like this a few times a week will create a culture of organizational learning and accountability. A continuous learning organization figures out how to solve its own problems.

Cloud software is not a particularly new development. You might ask why the focus is on continuous learning right now. Content is the fuel that drives the engine of AI. Without content, AI cannot generate the value we expect it to deliver. It is unrealistic to expect that traditional content creation teams will be able to build all this content and keep it up to date. The true virtuous cycle for a continuous learning organization is for it to capture the new knowledge it builds through technical gap resolution into a format that can be scaled out through AI. If you want to realize the maximal benefits of AI-generated assistance for a technical product, you need a team that can invent and capture that knowledge continuously. You need a continuous learning organization.


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