Seven principles for creating effective, Immersive learning experiences
This post is an excerpt from our recently published book, Coaching for Learning: The Art and Practice.
These seven principles are at the heart of how dojos and other, similarly immersive learning experiences work.
1. FOCUS ON LEARNING OVER DELIVERY
Plenty of organizations run the risk of calling a dojo an accelerator or using similar velocity-related words, and that’s simply not the right language for what you’re doing. A dojo isn’t a place to go faster. Instead, you measure learning and the impacts of learning. Success is defined as accomplishing learning goals, not delivering an output. If a team does an experiment to foster learning, and that experiment fails, it’s not viewed as a failure by the team because they will have learned from it. There is more learning gained in a failed experiment than in a successful one.
2. HELP TEAMS LEARN COLLABORATIVELY
We are very much for teams learning together collaboratively— helping and supporting each other while figuring out how to work together. People on teams often learn as much from one another as they do from the coaches, multiplying the impact of learning in the dojo. (You can thank your mirror neurons for that.) Dojos are effective in spreading knowledge that already exists within teams, whether it’s the knowledge about the code itself, the business domain, the problem space, or the architecture, to name a few examples.
3. GROUND LEARNING IN THE CONTEXT OF REAL-WORLD WORK
It’s critically important that learning in the dojo isn’t theoretical—it must be done in the context of participants’ real work. This corresponds to Bloom’s taxonomy of the brain, which ranks higher-order doing tasks such as creating, evaluating, and analyzing above book tasks such as simply understanding or remembering. In addition, learning must include all the real-world constraints that go along with the team doing their work—from technology constraints, to organizational constraints, to political constraints. You want all those constraints to be there. What good is it if when the team leaves the dojo, they must operate in that real world of constraints, and we haven’t taught them how to do that?
4. MAKE LEARNING HOLISTIC AND SPAN MULTIPLE PRACTICES
We encourage teams to take a systems thinking approach to their capability improvement efforts. When teams focus on improving a single capability, they run the risk of missing out on improvement opportunities that could be more impactful. What’s worse, they also run the risk of sub-optimizing their product delivery which could lead to an overall decrease in their performance.
Learning in a dojo is holistic. Teams learn how to focus on the capability improvements that will have the most impact. They see how practices relate to each other. For example, they understand how DevOps practices help them get feedback on product ideas faster instead of thinking of DevOps as only a tool for removing errors from the delivery process.
Remember: the neurons that fire together wire together. It’s not as simple as one practice—it’s about how the practice impacts other parts of the value stream. Seeing how practices relate to each other helps build new connections and learning within the brain.
5. PROVIDE ASSESSMENT, FEEDBACK, AND COACHING
It’s critical for learners to receive frequent feedback as early as possible in the process. When you’re learning, you can’t assess yourself. So anyone in a learning environment needs a coach who doesn’t just teach, but who assesses progress and provides feedback for improvement in real time.
Dojo coaches have multiple skills, including assessing where a team is at, providing feedback to teams as they’re learning or improving practices, and coaching teams to be more effective. They’re not just facilitators—they are people with deep skills, practitioners who are themselves capable of doing the work that they’re coaching teams on doing.
6. PROVIDE SUFFICIENT TIME FOR REPETITIVE PRACTICE
Dojos are about practicing just as much as they are about learning. Remember that the word “dojo” comes from Japanese martial arts—it’s “the place of the way.” The place where both learning and practice occur.
It’s not enough for teams to intellectually understand a practice or an improvement to the way they currently work. They must practice what they learn to make it stick—and the practice needs to be repeated. Remember, your teams are battling the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. By taking advantage of the spaced repetition learning technique we introduced in Chapter 1, you can strengthen neural connections and solidify what people have learned.
In the age of Zoom, people often want to cut short this aspect of practice. There’s no reason why a coach can’t log off Zoom while the team stays on—working together and practicing what the coach has gone over with them. In fact, we believe if coaches are there all the time, they risk becoming a crutch for the team. Dojo coaches should never become a crutch— stepping away for a while is beneficial for the team’s growth.
7. ENSURE LEARNER SAFETY
For a dojo to be effective, there must be learner safety, both for the team and the individuals in it. People must feel they can experiment and learn from their mistakes, as well as from their successes, without fear of retribution. They must feel their boss and the other members of their team support them, that they have their backs. And they must be comfortable in the physical (or virtual) space provided for the dojo.
In a virtual world, ensuring learner safety is especially challenging. When you go virtual, and especially when you go global, you may have a hard time making sure everyone feels safe. You can’t tell if a team member turned off their camera because they’re generally more comfortable being off-camera, or because they’re uncomfortable right now in this particular situation, or simply because they needed to step away from their computer for a minute.
You can purchase Coaching for Learning here.