Learning Feels Like Fun, But It Is Work

Every time I go to DOES I end up writing to you guys and raving to my own team about so many topics from how this year Psychological Safety and teams were mentioned in nearly every talk, to the awesome feeling Gene Kim’s “scenius” brings, to the battlefield stories that apply to all of us or that we can recognise ourselves in, but maybe most of all, about learning. Not because I am all of a sudden reminded we should learn more and be better in a theoretical way, but because I feel selfish to be the only one of us to have had the pleasure. And this pleasure is why it takes guts to keep learning. 

One thing that maybe we don’t talk enough about, is how continuous learning takes courage. Let’s face it, learning is fun. So much fun that it feels wrong to do it on the company’s dime, one of our many modern paradoxes in terms of what we believe is asked of us as professionals that Learning and Development teams everywhere struggle with. When we are kids, it isn’t a choice as school is mandatory but as adults, any time we learn something new intentionally, we open ourselves to risk and we feel guilty. The risk comes from the fact that any new information that challenges the status quo may lead to painful change - and it’s one of the reasons I most admire the dedication to learning in the DevOps community when what they are building takes so much sacrifice and focus already- and the guilt, comes from how it almost always feels like we can only be getting paid to be doing monotonous if not painful tasks and whenever something -such as learning- is pleasant, it feels counterintuitive and unnatural in a work context. 

In technology, learning is a lot more “inbuilt” because of the speed of change where methods and tools become obsolete with breakneck speed and keeping up-to-date with all that’s new is a survival imperative. Even there, many times people end up having to do it “on their own time” as if it’s a personal endeavour and not one that’s needed to remain productive. In other industries, or job functions, it is even harder to usher in a culture of continuous learning and it takes even more bravery at an individual level to seek or even demand it. 

Aside from the organisational level relative blindness and lack of courage towards the discourse, on an individual level, it takes having to overcome a series of unhealthy behavioural norms that amount to what “being professional” is. First and foremost, learning as a professional takes overcoming impostor syndrome and impression management (fear of looking incompetent and fear of looking ignorant as well) both from the point of view of having to admit you don’t know something to learn something new and from the point of view of feeling like you’re wasting your employer’s time when doing so. Even self-employed professionals and entrepreneurs, while by definition in charge of their own time and acutely aware of the importance of new data, can feel this way. 

So what can we do to help? We can make it easier. We can make it need less of the courage. Be less risky, less counterintuitive, less daunting and minimise the quilt - aka “breed a culture of continuous learning”. 

I’m sure most of you reading this, know about the importance of the Target-championed Dojo concept in Agile. If not read more about it on the Dojo Consortium’s page but -without doing it justice -let me try and explain. Dojo is Japanese for “place of the way.” The concept refers to both the physical and the metaphorical space where teams can come to learn agile principles. Each enterprise implementing these have interpreted them in various ways, so there is some variation from where they are placed -whether in an Innovation Lab or a Learning Center or a DevOps Greenhouse (yes, that exact nomenclature exists) and in the focus and emphasis in terms of remaining close to the principles or understanding new tools and processes. The common denominator is that there are short sprints, there’s teaming (many of these people never worked together before) and that everyone is asked to bring to the table real-life problems. This results in people not only intensely learning about these things, but experiencing what it means to do so together. 

The Dojo learning concept at its core, beyond its many pluses, has a higher function I believe. I think it offers an enterprise-level of permission in terms of learning that is the equivalent of the famous Google 20% time in terms of innovation. -At Google in their IPO letter in 2014 the founders said “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google as it empowers them to be more creative and innovative” which was then exposed as more important in the way of theoretical idea and effect on the morale in “Work Rules!” than it was in terms of exact execution.- (Another example of a good enterprise-level permission is Novartis’ #BeCurious/#IAmCuriouis campaign, worth learning more about that:)

So not only do people going through a Dojo learn about Agile in both theory and awesome practice, but they fall in love with it. Which is stupendous and why everyone should do this. But above this, they also get the message that it is now desirable to learn. Even more, they get to experience the pleasure of learning and of being a team and be rewarded for doing so. It’s an intensely powerful feeling and one we don’t focus on enough to build a said culture of continuous learning. 

One of the components of Psychological Safety that we measure in our Team Dashboard is Learning. It’s not there as a permanent moralistic indicator that people should do better (although its implied “it’s ok to be learning, it says it’s encouraged here on this dashboard” value can not be understated) but it is there because, we know that if people feel they are learning they also feel “in the zone”, they feel validated, and like they are fulfilling their purpose and making an impact. When it is learning “as a team”, it also implies a dimension of “belonging” as we acknowledge we have shared those positive emotions and have seen others be courageous and vulnerable at the same time while adding to our future performance. A magical, powerful combination of team endorphins. Acquiring information is almost a side by-product of learning, the feeling we get from doing it, and the impact it has on our wellbeing as an individual and as a team, is of far greater value.

“What are you doing for learning this week?” should be something we routinely ask each other whether in or out of work but in a team, whether the answer is “my podcasts”; “an online hackathon”; “reading X book”; “attending some online course” or “having a debate with you guys”, its mere existence is a sign of a win. For the next few weeks my own answer is still “finishing up the Yale course on the Science of Wellbeing” and I plan to use this time to overcome the feeling of guilt I get from doing it as it’s so immensely pleasurable it can not possibly be work-valuable. Since we’re in a safe team-like-bubble here, I’ll admit a failure: I meant to do the same thing as I was researching for my book, create a habit of completely guilt-free learning and I failed, I still felt guilty plenty at times which in turn, in our case, means PeopleNotTech as a company failed to make that permission so clear and fundamental that it bread a healthy employee habit in a worker that felt supported and validated and unless we re-examine this, we’ll be amassing some Human Debt.

In the ultimate delightful paradox, continuous learning is a trialled and tested way to reduce the Human Debt because to do it, we have to have the courage, the state of mind and openness of heart that we need to have happy team dynamics in general, so if we could only be brave enough to keep learning we’d keep being well or even better.

So do yourself, your company and your team a favour and have a learning week ahead! 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch for our Team Psychological Safety Dashboard and our Stay-Connected-When-Remote question pack at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let's help your team become healthy, happy and highly performant.