The changing role of training

Welcome to Definitely May Be Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave? I'm doing great. So how about yourself? Been a good week for you. It's been a good week so far. Yeah, I had to have had some fun, got to catch up with some friends, have some good conversations. It's been a good week. Yes.

How how about how about getting out and about finally? None of this uh virtual beer hours anymore, I guess.

Exactly, exactly. Of course, real beer hours, of course, then result in slower days the next day, occasionally.

So it's allegedly, yeah. Uh let me just pick up another um piece which is beginning to be more and more relevant, which is to do with that the training that happens as part of well, the work you do and the work I do when we're we're helping organizations transition from one state to the next. Now, training in some ways has had a bad rep, right? There's a lot of uh negative perspectives maybe in our industry around understanding how training can or cannot support what's going on. What's your interpretation or your uh observation on that?

Well, there is this kind of uh uh you've gone away for two days, you picked up the certificate, you're you're now a scrum master, and therefore you know everything there is to know about agile, and you can go out and like change everybody's organization, and you're fantastic. I I think we've largely, to me, though, in the industry, sort of overcome that, but it has kind of left a bit of a stigma around what training do we need? How should that training be approached? When is training valuable? And when we look at an organizational level where we might have thousands of people that we want to uh train, uh what are the things when are the times that we want to bring in training and for what reasons?

And and I I mean, as you know, certified Scrum trainer with the Scrum Alliance, I'm I've been certifying people for many, many years as well. 2013, I think, is I started uh hanging out my shingle to certify people. So in many ways, uh whether I'm part of the stigma or hopefully more involved with removing that stigma, let's uh work off of that. But one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is I think the the need or the purpose of training has shifted in the last few years. And I feel that that one is a recognition of the maturity of the market, of there is a need, you know, we think of training as being an educational element, which is definitely true. But I think that nowadays people know about what we're talking about. If you've been in the IT industry and the technology industry for the last five or ten years and you've never heard of Kanban or Scrum or Agile, then you're really in the basement with your headphones on, not taking note of what's going on around you.

Oh, for sure. And uh and I think I think where training's coming in is less about the general definition of the fact that these words exist, but more about what do they exist for in our context. How do we then take this from an understanding of the process and practices to talk more about what are the principles and values that underlie this and why are those, why should we be leading with those first and why are those more important and what does that mean in our context and how can we apply that to our work?

Yeah, so there's the context-based experiential learning, definitely a huge piece. And I think uh in many situations, I'm what I find really interesting now, I think before you get too buried into the principle-based piece, is that nowadays there's a need of just getting everybody talking about the same thing. Uh, the lexicon is you know, everybody has an interpretation and different experiences. And so being able to agree what your organization or your team or your product program is thinks about when they talk just one of the ones that we come across all the time epics and features and the difference. Is an epic you know larger than a feature or smaller than a feature? Well, it depends on what school that you've learnt various things from, right? And if you look at things like sprint planning, some organizations, some teams have certain experiences, individuals have one experience of it, and others have a different one. So there's an there's a need just to kind of clear everything off the table and agree what the terms are and how that works. Then there's a need to agree the experience of how they stitch together. And that point of how do you make sure that everybody is doing is understanding that it isn't, you know, you must do a stand-up or you must do, you know, limiting work in progress or whatever the the the sort of practice is that is uh is being discussed, but actually understanding the the principles that underpin that and how they operate.

Right, precisely. And and that creating that common understanding and putting every getting everybody onto the same page is essential for alignment. It's essential for us to uh know what we're talking about when we're communicating with each other, because it reduces the explanation. If I have to come to you and explain every single time what I what I mean as a feature, because then or if I if right or even worse, if I I say the word feature and you interpret it as something else entirely in your context because you're you're coming at that from a different space, then that uh that creates a lot of confusion and uh bad things happen over time. So there there's this is where I think training helps. And uh and you brought up the the term experiential earlier, and I think that's that's definitely a key part of where I've I've seen um training evolve into more um learning through gameplay, learning through uh uh interaction with the material, learning how this um applies and how it works, and what what can I use it for? How can I look at my own work and immediately start to say, okay, I can see how I can apply this and and what this might do for us.

Well, and and this is that interesting mix that if you think about the alignment, the reality is you can probably get some you know well thought out and crafted videos that you just plug and play to communicate terms across an organization and agree on alignment around definition. But how they are used is something that you're only going to get in an experience where, like you said, you learn through play. There's a simulation, there's role modeling involved. And a lot of that is about um breaking through the sort of automated responses, what I think of as mental muscle memory, uh, that we need to be able to clean up so that we can um we can help people recognize and learn new mental muscle memory responses, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, completely. And I and I know that both of us have had a lot of success running these kinds of programs in large organizations across thousands of uh people and teams, and and uh I it's uh it's it's always a fantastic experience, and you you always learn so much every time you go through these these classes and interacting with people.

It's uh I I really find it interesting that you because I was just thinking exactly the same thing, thinking it is incredibly rewarding to be involved in the delivery for one side, but also for those on the client side where they're seeing the sort of adoption and change and the mindset and the curiosity that can result of uh um the right training, you know, at some scale perhaps. Now, is there anything else that you look at? Like we talk a little bit about training sort of on the individual level almost more than anything, but now you're talking about something more at scale. Is there some other need that you see or you've seen change in the recent engagements you've worked on?

Uh so I don't know if this is this is a change, but this is something that we we do with the along with the experimental and change, you also need uh some element of coaching to help support and guide it. Like the so we I I know in our in our agile thinking programs we uh we do the experiential learning, we do the classes, we go through that, you you get to see how you'll apply that to your work, but then but we always do the follow-on session, like a few weeks later, we bring the group back together, we and we say, Well, well, how has this changed what you've done? How are you now looking at things? What do you what do you recall from the course? What have you learned? What's been useful and valuable to you? And uh those those follow-on sessions, because that's reinforcing the learning, that's really um is uh it's very valuable. So I I I think what I draw from that is we've we've learned a lot more about um I don't know if it's more, I mean, I think some of these were known for quite some time, but uh taking them and applying them in this way to start to uh understand what are the these trainees, how can we help bring people along on this journey? How can we help them uh understand that and internalize the material more deeply?

I I um what I'm thinking when you're describing that is there was a period of time when training was rubber stamping. It was it was the you know, you've you've got the stamp somewhere in your book to show, yeah, I've done it. And we must have done well because everybody here has the rubber stamp in the book. And what you're describing is almost going back to understanding that training is one channel of many for eliciting change. And the sort of training that we're talking about when you're looking at experiential change, it needs follow-on, you need repetition, you need people to come at you, you know, to to sit down with two and four and six and eight weeks after you had that initial injection of information and knowledge to help apply it in the real world. And I think that's sort of coming back. It was there before, then for many few years, let's say, many years it was not. It was like we've thank you, we've done the training, thanks a lot. And now it's a recognition that training is a program, and training is one piece of that, and there's more to it.

Yeah, for for certain. Um, how how would you sum this up in in some three points for our listeners?

I think one is there's a change, there is a sort of appreciation, a renewed appreciation for the value of training, which which for a period was a little bit um there was that stigma that I hinted at. So there's that one one aspect we all are seeing a resurgence in appreciation for it. And that appreciation translates into trainings more than a couple of days, go away, do the training and come back, and is more seen as experiential learning, learning through play, learning through simulations. It's seen as a a part of a package where you've got follow-on support and consulting coaching and mentoring, whatever that might be. Um, and there's a uh more a deeper focus on principles. But then I I'd say the other two things is really uh the need of training changing between one of alignment. We all know the terms, so the educational element is not there so much, it's more alignment. And then that second one being the experiential practices, principles and practices, the difference between principles and practices and understanding application of the principles.

Yeah, I think those are that sums it up very nicely. I think the the other piece, the the the some of the reason behind doing this as well, uh, which we touched on earlier, was creating that common lexicon, the the common language, the common uh communication across the organization, so that when we we talk about these different things in terms of values and principles and even the process and practices, we're all on the same page of as to what we mean by the the words that we're saying. Sounds great. So so is that thank you very much, Dave, as always. I always enjoy these conversations uh and uh look forward to next time.

Excellent, thanks again.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.