3 Phases for Building a Culture of Learning
Tags: leadership, culture, learning, notes
Published: 2017-08-11 05:20:18

---
title: 3 Phases for Building a Culture of Learning
published: true
description: Joseph Matsey identifies 3 phases of building a culture of learning - I describe my takeaways from his talk at Abstractions
tags: leadership, culture, learning, notes
canonical_url: https://www.gunnargissel.com/three-phases-for-building-a-culture-of-learning.html
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/d1k36tg1y30obgr1bnj9.jpg
---

_[Originally posted at my blog](http://www.gunnargissel.com/three-phases-for-building-a-culture-of-learning.html)_

I attended [Joseph Matsey's](http://josephmastey.com/) talk on building a culture of learning at [Abstraction's](http://abstractions.io/) last year.  I really enjoyed the talk, and have been thinking about and implementing ideas from it over the past year.  Here's a summary of my takeaway for the 3 different phases of culture building (with a bonus 4th phase, of "you have a culture")

Guerilla Learning
--------------------------

This is where a lot of places start - there isn't really any particular culture of learning, but some learning exercises and activities are supported

* High resistance to taking time from shipping
* Ad hoc learning
* Onboarding by oral tradition
* Few folks driving learning

###Approach
* Think opportunistically
* Improve team members primary roles
* Seek fast returns with low investment

###Examples
* Workshops
* Meetups
* Build a team library
* New hire buddies
    * Try cross-team buddies

###Dangers
* Buy in never starts
* Stay stuck in guerilla learning forever
    
Buy in Starts
----------------------

This is a dangerous intermediate phase, where some culture building has happened, but it's not baked in or fully supported by management

* New hires have some kind of organized learning
* Team members want more, but aren't empowered

###Approach
* Leverage internal experts (workshops, talks)
* Seed good role models (and shame everyone else)
* Mentor mentors (mentorship is an orthogonal skillset to what you do at work)

###Examples
* Weekly talks, 4 15 minute talks
* Project updates
* Tech approaches
    * Senior leadership talks
    * Ops talks

###Dangers
* Key folks leaving
* "Takes too much time" payout not obvious, track and figure out how to measure returns
* Mentor burnout
        
Making it Stick
-----------------------

This is the final phase, that takes management buy in, re-programming existing employees and enculturating new hires

* Boringly normal
    * From "workshops are amazing" to "oh god a workshop"

###Approach
* Momentum to sustain effort
* Sustained learning    
* Make people forget the old way

###Examples
* Learning/teaching as a KIP
* Apprenticeships
* 3 part onboarding
    * Teach skills
    * Teach processes, history and context
    * Personal development
* 20% time

###Dangers
* Payoffs hard to measure
* No one is responsible
* Losing the habit
        
Self Sustaining
-----------------

At some critical mass point, it continues lurching forward.  This point is when you have a durable culture of learning

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Credits
---------

_Thank you [Mat the W](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mat_the_w/) for the photo of [Hammerschlag](https://flic.kr/p/83vFp2)_