Learn to learn

Some organizations associate some failed things as a storm, impeding the skill to reflect on learning from these things and generate value for organizations. This skill depends on the mental models developed in each of the members of the work team and influenced by their culture, languages, reality, personal story, etc.

Unfortunately, appropriate learning for people is unusual. One of the greatest speakers of knowledge management, Pablo Belly described it. He commented that companies such as Rover Cars, a well-known UK company, determined that there should be less emphasis on technology and more focus on learning.

In a meeting, I listened to a team speak among themselves about the same problems and noticed that they were delivering value to the organization’s users. Nonetheless, some of this great added value was made at an inappropriate time due to misunderstandings, frequent changes, and rework, which closed the door to valuable lessons learned in their conversation.

The work team was made up of 12 people with different roles, such as Quality Analysts, Test Automators, Leaders, and the Director of the area, whose responsibility is to verify the Quality of various software products for a company in the Financial sector.

Looking inside my toolbox to help the work team, I related this problem to a workshop practice that I took months ago with a great Management 3.0 trainer, Guillermo. There, I learned from a practice to celebrate learning from failures and successes for promoting a safe environment in work teams.

Its name is Celebration Grid. If you want to know more about this practice, you can see it here.

The objective of this practice is to celebrate learning by reflecting on the things or actions experienced in a team in order to determine if they had failed or were successful. Additionally, it was important to display what lessons learned were obtained by the team for visualizing them on a board.

Below, I want to share the steps with you:

Step 1. Preparation. The environment for practice was prepared in a Miro Collaboration tool with the celebration board. This board has 4 columns: errors, experiments, good practices and new experiments.

Step 2. Reflection and actions. Each collaborator remotely accessed using the Miro Collaboration tool and Microsoft Teams. They wrote the things, actions and experiments that happened within a specific period of time.

Step 3. Categorization. Each action was categorized by each collaborator as an error, experiment or good practice and it was placed in the corresponding column. I explained the meaning according to the Merriam Webster and Collins dictionaries of:

Error: An act that through ignorance, deficiency, or accident departs from or fails to achieve what should be done.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/error

Experiment: the trying out of a new idea or method in order to see what it is like and what effects it has. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/experiment

Practice: to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/practice

Step 4: Successful or failed. Each collaborator determined if the actions, experiments or good practices were successful or unsuccessful. That means the successful errors, experiments, good practices and things moved from the top of the diagonal line of the columns. After that, the failed errors, experiments and good practices moved at the bottom of the diagonal line. By consensus, the work team decided on the categorization and classification according to their common understanding of each item.

Step 5: Next, I explained the meaning of the colors:

Red: Actions failed or they did not work well.
Green: Actions promoted learning.
Gray: Actions that considered errors and they were successful, or good practices were failed in our current environment.

Step 6: Encourage experimentation. The team was encouraged to propose new actions to experiment.

Additionally, when we were doing the practice, an environment for discussion and consensus was generated among the members of the work team for common understanding. Besides, the proposal was to vote using the Roman vote for the categorization and classification. Finally, each of the steps was limited in time.

I have never really stopped learning, so as a facilitator I learned that from all decisions with results successful or unsuccessful, I can get new knowledge.

I took the task of asking the team members, what learning did you take away? They wrote:

· I learned that there are new and different ways to do things.

· I understood that there is always an opportunity for improvement and innovation.

· I learned to recognize that there are things that we are doing correctly.

· I understood that different perspectives facilitate making better decisions.

· I noticed how the work team is working to strengthen different areas.

As I like the experimentation, my next experiment with this practice will be to adjust the timeboxes to facilitate discussion and decision-making about actions, experiments and good practices by the members of the work team. In the same way, we are going to celebrate learning to learn with a good Colombian coffee, a soda or a beer.

Also, I would adjust the timebox of step 6 for prioritizing and would allocate a responsible for each new experiment. As well, I would change the timeboxes for steps 2 to 5 according to the number of participants.

Here, I describe some of the results obtained by the team:

· The team lived in an environment of trust to express its opinions.

· The team understood that there is always an opportunity to improve in everything.

· The team was sensitized due to they identify painful situations from some of their colleagues.

· The team identified and interpreted that the failures are opportunities that they should take advantage of them.

Dear Reader, if this is the first time you read about this practice, I encourage you to investigate them in order to have fun responsibly and achieve a common purpose with its work team. That is means to listen to each other, value each other, and learn to celebrate their learnings.

If you know about Management 3.0 practices, I encourage you to learn to celebrate successful and unsuccessful personal and team learnings.

If you have used this practice before, I encourage you, dear Reader, to reflect on each action, experiment, or good practice, and identify how each of these things generates value to the work team and the organization.

It remains for me to encourage you to promote a culture of responsible experimentation in your work environment, let yourself be surprised!

Finally, I want to invite you to use the Celebration Grid to promote spaces in your area or department that allow you to identify, value and learn to celebrate the knowledge learned by each employee, by the work team and the organization. That is “Learn to learn”.