Rising To The Challenge Of Continuous Learning

The Continuous Learning Dilemma - It's Real!

Last week I described “The Continuous Learning Dilemma” that I believe all of us as IT people and organisations are facing. I don’t believe it’s a small challenge, neither do I believe it’s going away any time soon. It’s a challenge we all must face and overcome if we are to be successful as individuals, teams and organisations.

Some people would say it’s not so much a challenge as an opportunity! If IT was “easy” anybody could do it. In reality it's an infinite game i.e. we never really win, we just aim to stay playing!

At Capgemini we welcome this challenge as an opportunity to demonstrate our breadth of knowledge and technical dexterity.

Out Of My Comfort Zone

In my role as Capabilities Lead within the Digital Delivery Group (DDG) a couple of things take me out of my comfort zone. One is building my people network, the other is the battle for hearts and minds. These aren’t strengths for me but I’m happy to learn as well as ride on the coat-tails of others, especially when they offer to extend my network into the wider Capgemini (200K+ people) and beyond.

Collaboration Required

None of the challenges we take on at Capgemini can ever be considered small enough for just one person to deal with and so team effort and collaboration with others is a must. The challenge of the continuous learning dilemma is no different – in fact it’s going to take the brains of the whole IT industry (and then some) to solve this one! Fortunately, collaborative working is a means of putting your own limitations behind you and playing to your strengths and those of others.

Choosing An Approach

The approach to this challenge must be agile (in order to get feedback fast, learn and adapt) and multi-threaded because success will be through multiple people and ideas running in parallel. The approach also has to generate metrics that will help us. It will be like “spinning plates”. Effort will be needed to keep plates spinning and to spin up new ones. Some plates will inevitably get broken along the way – maybe we won’t count those, just learn from them.

I know that I can’t expect to do this role well without working with and through a network of people and that I also need to “take people with me” along the way. (This means finding people willing to keep plates spinning for me.)

My background thread is “Continuous Research” where I periodically research (usually daily for a few minutes making notes of keywords and useful links) in order to learn from the best around the world. Thankyou Internet.

The Battle For Hearts and Minds

Winning hearts and minds is just plain hard to me. The necessity and benefits of making learning part of the day job seem obvious to me and I can’t always understand why others don’t see that.

Selling is clearly a skill in it’s own right. I swear that if there were no people involved, doing IT would be a doddle!

It took me a while to learn and accept that people are motivated by different priorities and so the same “sales pitch” isn’t appropriate for all customers. For managers it is often about hitting budgets and deadlines ahead of anything else to please our customers (and our accountants) which doesn’t always align with the company mantra “People matter, results count”. Fortunately not everyone is short-sighted. (I’m literally long-sighted. 😊)

The Continuous Learning Spectrum

In my experience, people generally fall into one of the following continuous learning categories:

The Continuous Learning Spectrum - Theory or Reality?

If the above spectrum is true, the questions that immediately arise include what percentage of people currently fit into each category and how can we move the sliders to shift people between categories to achieve the optimal numbers we desire? Categorisation is only a theory until you have a means of applying it to generate metrics. (We’ll look deeper into this in a future post.)

1) The Trail Blazers

Some people (Google call them “learning animals”) are already there with continuous learning and they’re so busy loving learning new stuff in new ways and applying it in their work that they don’t even look backwards to see the others they’ve left behind! I need to throw a rope around these guys and work out how to get them dragging others with them.

These people are often less in number and in high demand. They are candidates for coaching, knowledge sharing and involvement in community activities if they are not already doing so. These are some of the people we’d really like to clone. (Ultimately we’d like everyone in this category – job done.)

2) The Well-Intentioned Majority

Most people relate reasonably well to the necessity to learn new skills and are well-intentioned about learning. However, many suffer from sub-optimal time management skills coupled with a strong desire (and project pressure) to delight the customer which both inevitably impact commitment to learning. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that learning is more important than delighting customers but what I am saying is that learning is essential to delighting customers and so getting the balance right in terms of how we manage our time is extremely important.

These guys need direction as well as help managing their time and support and encouragement from managers for learning.

3) The Partially Convinced

Here the battle for hearts and minds is still being fought or yet to be fought. The “What’s in it for me?” question has not been suitably answered. Here the learning approach is a little “ad hoc” and more a response to pressure. New ways of learning attract minimal levels of interest unless provoked. Another form of motivation is required here.

4) The Not Convinced

Here the battle for hearts and minds has been lost. The value-proposition answer to the “What’s in it for me?” question did not align at all with the motivations / priorities of these people. Continuous learning is perceived to be an anti-pattern that may hinder delivering on time and to budget and is simply not necessary for personal success right now. Only leadership direction can change this position.

5) The Minimalist Minority

Some will say that people who don’t want to learn new things or who resist change shouldn’t be working in the IT industry where change is constant. That’s not a helpful viewpoint when such people are talented and performing significant roles that they enjoy but which dominate their time – including their learning time. They may also be generating significant revenue for the business in doing so. (Don’t you just love this dilemma?!)

There is also a minority who resist change or are apathetic. Management intervention is required here. (Such people leave me wondering if even dynamite would make a difference! 😊 However, we are not planning on leaving anyone behind.)

Building People

In any large organisation you can sometimes feel like a small wheel with a number in a big machine where managing your career is your problem. However, my role as DDG Capabilities Lead is to “build people” which is a Lean Thinking concept that I greatly admire and strive to achieve each day. Another Lean Thinking concept is “challenging the status quo” and I seek to do that each day too.

"T-Shaped" People

At Capgemini we like people to be “T-shaped” in terms of their knowledge and skills i.e. to have both breadth and depth: breadth in many things and depth in a few. We encourage people to have their own areas of interest and to know what they want to be “famous” for.

"Pi-Shaped" People

I recently saw a description of "Pi-shaped (π)" people who had "two deep skills" as opposed to the "one very deep skill" of "T-shaped" people. This seems unrealistic to me as it's so rare for people to have or need just one or two deep skills when most skills have many closely related (adjacent) skills so there is rarely a single learning curve. I'm also not really able to grasp the difference between "deep" and "very deep" skills.

Initiatives

To instigate my multi-threaded ambitions, I set about launching the following initiatives which I’ll describe in more detail in coming posts:

• Learning Vehicles
• Wall Of Champions
• Technical Communities
• Team Health Check
• Gamification

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Tim Simpson
12th April, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini

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