Anti-Patterns to Avoid When Growing Your Dojo

Dojos are a significant investment in people, time, and learning. It can be tempting to shortcut the team’s experience in the dojo when faced with organizational pressures.

Let’s look at three common anti-patterns when scaling your dojo.

Shortening the Learning Experience

To get more teams through the dojo, some organizations have shortened the learning experience. What was originally intended as a six-week experience for the team gets shortened to two weeks. Other times the six-week duration is maintained, but teams only commit to two hours a day or a few days a week.  

What gets lost? 

The team loses repetition and feedback opportunities. Practicing new skills over and over with feedback from a coach allows us to refine our learning. Practice enough and we can master our craft. Shortcut those repetitions and the learning doesn’t stick.

The team misses out on meaningful connections between practices. In the dojo, we often find teams connecting practices together to form a capability which is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a team learns that setting up a continuous delivery pipeline that supports A/B testing can help them with product discovery. If learning is too narrow, these connections don’t occur. 

The team mindset shifts from experimental learning to delivery. Condensed time frames often cause the team focus to shift from learning to delivering (e.g., finish the pipeline, finish automating the tests, or finish creating the lambdas). 

Overloading Your Coaching Staff

Organizations sometimes overload coaches with too many concurrent teams in an attempt to get help to more teams sooner. Dojos require a mix of product and technical coaching, and as a result, we need two coaches per team in most dojos. Using a staggered approach, it is possible for a coach to balance up to two teams at a time. 

What happens?

The learning between teams and coaches becomes formulaic. A key part of the success in dojos is the spontaneous nature of the learning that occurs between coaches and teams. When coaches aren’t with the team "in the moment", the learning becomes less interesting. “Schedule time with me this afternoon.” “I can come work with your team on Tuesday.” Meaningful learning requires two-way focus and commitment from coaches and teams. Without this commitment, learning eventually stalls.

The relationship between the coach and the team suffers. When done right, coaches and teams should feel like peers on a learning journey. This relationship slips into an acquaintance relationship without the necessary time and investment from the coach. Communication levels drop, and the team eventually stops asking the coach for help. The team walks away with mixed feelings from their dojo experience.  

Growing Coaches Too Quickly

Most organizations want to staff up their dojos quickly, but lack the internal capability to do so. 

A real constraint on the number of teams you can coach in your dojo is the number of qualified coaches you have available to work with teams. This is clear prior to forming a dojo, but even more so once there is ample demand. While coaching in the dojo is not completely different from other types of coaching, it requires a specific skill set and understanding of how coaching for learning differs from coaching for delivery. 

What is the impact?

The team experience is degraded without qualified coaches. When organizations try to shortcut coaching expertise, the team experience inevitably suffers. For example, a team that requires both product and technical coaching would not feel satisfied without a suitable technical coach in their dojo. Team learning goals go unmet and outcomes fall short. Yes, you get more teams initially through your dojo, but at what cost? 

New coaches become dogmatic and close-minded. Many new coaches take time to internalize dojo coaching. New coaches initially copy and replay what they see after watching more senior coaches in practice. They ask questions because they saw the other coach ask them. Coaching in the moment requires more than rote memorization. It requires observation and awareness that only comes through experience. When we circumvent that experience, we get dogmatic coaches and inferior team learning.

So What To Do?

It is great that organizations want to scale their dojos. It is important to keep the following in mind when scaling your dojo:

The dojo approach is highly effective at helping teams build long-term learning habits. Shortening the learning experience can negatively influence the quality and sustainability of your team outcomes. Don’t weaken those outcomes in an attempt to help more teams sooner. 

A large part of the success of dojos has been because of the connections teams make with coaches on their learning journey. Overloading your coaching staff can reduce meaningful learning and produce mixed results for your organization. Do not sacrifice team and coach connections for a false sense of going faster.

Qualified coaches are a real constraint and require time to internalize. Growing coaches too quickly can impact your team experience and stunt your internal coach development. Don’t shortcut your internal coaching growth needs in order to reduce reliance on external coaching.  

Scale your dojos intentionally, focus on the biggest impacts for your organization, and create an experience that teams won’t mind waiting for.