The importance of a culture of Continuous Learning, why it matters, what you can do about it as a manager, concrete ideas and suggestions.

1. Continuous Learning
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2. Developing a Culture of Learning
 The pace of change in our market and on the web in general forces
companies to adapt fast. To be adaptive as an organization, that organization
must intentionally engage in Continuous Learning.
 When you learn as a team, you become more adaptable and achieve much
better results, especially when the pace of change is fast.
Teams that learn quickly are more adaptive than teams that don't.
Adaptive teams are teams that can get better results, by rapid response to
change.
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3. A BIT OT THEORY
TO START WITH
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4. Levels of learning
 3 levels of interdependent learning:
1. Individual
2. Team
3. Organization
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5. Continuous Learning at Individual Level
 Learning requires time and effort, as well as the decision to want
to learn.
 Make individuals understand the value of continuous learning, and
how it will not only help the organization, but most importantly, it
will be a great benefit to the learner as well.
 Examples: trainings, coaching and mentoring, seminars and
workshops, also through actual application and practice of skills
and knowledge
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Continuous Learning at Individual Level

6. Continuous Learning at Team Level
 Means collective individual learning: if the members of
the team acquire and share new knowledge and
information, then team learning takes place.
 Involves a set of learning processes that support and aid
team performance
 Examples: team sharing or training, agile retrospective,
feedback, experimentation, group discussions, and Q&A
sessions.
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7. Continuous Learning at Organization Level
 Comprises change of interaction patterns, change of
policies and procedures, new culture and new
innovations.
 Example: feedback from the employees themselves, from
clients, and from customers. Getting comments and
ideas. Culture and Change Management. Processes.
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8. Agile : a learning laboratory
 Agile means that teams must first become skilled at
learning as a group:
 Retrospective
 Auto-organization: estimate, design, self-management
 Safe space: safe to take risk. Experiment / trial-and-error: fail
or succeed.
 Agile teams are in fact small Learning Organizations.
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9. Scaling Agile at enterprise level
 Very complicated task. Hard to achieve.
 Agile teams operate in a safe space for learning.
 Creation of enterprise-wide safe space is a non-trivial problem to
solve.
 Tribal Learning: start below the enterprise, above the team, by
Managers, for groups of 20 to 150 people.
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10. Models of expertise
 Dreyfus Model
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11. Shu-Ha-Ri
 Introduced by Alistair Cockburn
 Aikido reference
 Shu : follow the rules (learn)
 Ha : master the rules (become a master)
 Ri : break the rules (create new rules, innovate, surpass the
master)
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12. 10 000 h Model
 10 000 hours of practice are required to master a discipline.
Controversial model.
 But practice is key to learning. Practice, practice, practice.
 A professional poker player plays on average 100 000 hands a
month / 17 hands per minute.
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13. HOW TO CONTRIBUTE TO A CULTURE OF
CONTINUOUS LEARNING AS A MANAGER
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14. Be Purposeful / Announce your intent
 State your purpose early and often. Make it easy for those
who follow you to understand your vision, your mission
and your intent.
 This clarity helps everyone around you, and increases
levels of group learning.
 Explain. Again and again.
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15. Facilitate and Game Your Meetings
 Optimize the meeting and presentation
process, by guiding the members to share
and achieve a common goal and action
plan
 Make meetings fun, enjoyable, and
engaging by gaming them.
 Try other types of meetings, such as Open
Space Meetings
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16. Examine Your Norms
 Normal is what you willingly tolerate. Examine your norms,
because what you tolerate is a minimal level of what you insist
on.
 What you insist on is more likely to happen. Insist on norms
that encourage greatness.
 Encourage good group behavior on top of Agile patterns to
facilitate meetings and group work:
 paying explicit attention,
 being punctual,
 honoring Scrum values: Focus, Commitment, Openness, Courage, and
Respect.
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Examine Your Norms

17. Be Punctual
 Punctuality associates with focus,
commitment, and respect; these in
turn associate with individual and
group greatness. The whole group
cannot learn together if the whole
group is not present.
 Punctuality as a norm explicitly
devalues lateness and tardiness. It takes
openness and courage to establish
punctually as a norm.
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18. Conduct Frequent Experiments
 Frequent experimentation means frequent learning. Make
learning into a game, by scheduling frequent, cheap
experiments. Failing cheap means learning economically.
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19. Manage Visually / Be Playful
 Use visual artifacts to convey messages and influence thoughts
and perception.
 Play games to get work done. Use games for simulation, work,
and learning.
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20. Inspect Frequently / Pay Explicit Attention
 Use iteration and frequent inspection to make a game of
change. Inspect and retrospect frequently at all levels.
 Pay attention to what is working and what is not. Zoom in on
details and focus on results. Discuss with the specific intent to
be excellent.
 Retrospective at all levels.
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21. Coach and Get Coached
 Coaching helps the learning process and is a best practice. A
coach will see what you do not and cannot.
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22. Understanding Delays
 Delays in achieving good
results are common.
 Good steps taken today
usually do not have an
immediate positive
effect. The truth is that
you often get worse
before you get better,
because of the
investment period.
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23. Bad Moves Make You Better, Then MUCH Worse
 Example: adding more
people to a late project.
 So use practices that
produce small results
with low delay.
 Experiment cheaply.
 Avoid the tendency to
backslide to old habits,
even if changing is
painful.
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24. Values
1. Serve Others
2. Be Purposeful
3. Communicate Honestly with Respect
4. Create Relationships
5. Increase Learning
6. Be Open-Minded
7. Adapt to Change
8. Create Fun
9. Be Focused, Committed, and Courageous
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25. CONCRETE IDEAS FOR A CONTINUOUS
LEARNING ORGANIZATION
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26. Mini-training cycle
 30 min weekly: 20 min presentation + 10 min question.
 Any speaker, any topic.
 Raise team awareness about continuous learning
 Explore new topics with curiosity
 Improve communication skills by being a speaker in a safe
environment
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27. Blogs / Intranets…
 Internal
o Share, Communicate, Serve Others.
o Increase Learning
 External
o Promote your Engineering team,
Motivate, hire, retain top engineers
o Contribute to team learning and
performance, by reflecting, formalizing
and sharing our practices (with the peer
pressure of making it public)
o Attract external contributions
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28. Conferences & Meetups
Be a speaker or participate to
conferences and meetups.
• Learn and discover
• Meet other people. Create
relationships.
• Open your horizon
• Share your knowledge and
experience
• Become thought leaders
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29. Hack Days / Innovation Days
Take some time off to make a break and innovate:
 Take 1 day to build prototypes, demo them, vote for the
best and reward the best team, follow up to put in
production the best ones.
 Be creative
 Work with other developers and with business
teams
 Learn and have fun
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30. Monthly Lab Days
Regularly organize days where developers are allowed to do
other stuff (IT intelligence, training, clean up code,
prototype, code for external projects, write blog articles…)
 Agenda for each person to be explicit.
 Auto-learning
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31. Bug Fixing Day
Organize a one-day contest where all
developers try and fix as many bugs as possible.
Reward the best bug fixers.
 Have fun and be productive together.
 Reduce bug count.
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32. Developer Exchange Program
Switch developers between teams or companies to share
and learn.
 Discover and learn other practices
 Be open-minded
 Create relationships
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33. Pair and Mob Programming
 Pair Programming is 2 developers working together: either
for mentoring, or between peers on a complex topic.
 Mob Programming: is an extension to a whole team to
collectively train the team to a new technology or
architecture.
 http://mobprogramming.org/
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/09/03/weve-done-a-3-days-mob-
programming-at-betclic/
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/09/23/mob-programming-angularjs-dojo/
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34. Code Dojos & Coding Katas
 Train your programming skills with small
exercises, challenge your abilities and encourage to find
multiple approaches.
 Play with code without fearing any consequences! Also discover
& learn new methods, areas, algorithms, languages, libraries ...
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2015/04/29/coding-dojo-the-fruit-shop/
 https://github.com/Betclic/CodingDojo-Katas
 http://codingkata.net/
 http://www.cyber-dojo.com/
 http://www.codechef.com/
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35. Brown-Bag Lunches
 Invite an external expert to come and speak to the team
(and offer him lunch).
 Another opportunity to learn, from the experts.
 http://www.brownbaglunch.fr/
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/10/10/bbl-an-introduction-to-f-by-pierre-irrmann/
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/05/12/bbl-code-refactoring-by-david-gageot/
 https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/04/08/bbl-on-xamarin/
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36. Lunch & Learn
 Invite outside people for lunch. Informally. No Agenda.
 Trigger the discussion with your guest to learn and
explore new things.
 An informal version of the brown-bag lunch.
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37. Ciné-Goûter / Watching tech videos at tea time
 Watching together and commenting a video from a
conference.
 Drinks and cookies.
 You can do it during Lab Days.
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Ciné-Goûter / Watching tech videos at tea time

38. IT intelligence
Take some time to review state-of-the-art blogs and
articles, based on your interests and learning domains.
 Build your own RSS library of feeds
 Use twitter as input
 Share with others on the blog.
 Auto-learning
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39. External projects
Encourage senior dev to participate in external projects:
 http://www.codeplex.com/
 https://github.com/explore
 http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm/
Open-Source your internal tools.
 Learning with others
 Practice other areas of coding
 « Peer pressure » on code cleanup
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40. Programming and Logic Puzzles
 To tickle the brain and challenge your
logical/mathematical/programming skills
 http://programmingpraxis.com/
 http://projecteuler.net/
 http://www.topcoder.com/tc
 http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
 http://rubyquiz.com/
 http://uva.onlinejudge.org/
 http://www.spoj.pl/
 http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html
 http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/intro.shtml
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41. Play & Learn
Make IT fun: set up avatars, trophies,
points…
 Game what you do: coding, meetings,
learning…
 http://www.playmaking.org/
 http://fr.slideshare.net/portiatung/the
-powerofplay36
 People learn better while having
fun
 Create relationships
 Create fun
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42. References
 The Culture Game, Dan Mezick
 http://www.exforsys.com/career-
center/performance-development/importance-
of-continuous-learning.html
 http://adulted.about.com/od/onthejobtraining/p
/whatsinitforyou.htm
 http://managementhelp.org/blogs/training-and-
development/2011/06/06/how-many-steps-to-
continuous-learning-none/
 Tribes & Chapters (Agile at Spotify):
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018963/Articles/Spot
ifyScaling.pdf
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In addition, each member of the Dashlane team can take some time to
share his insights in Tech Conferences and become a thought leader
in the tech community.
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Alexis Fogel
@ Droid Con
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Emmanuel Schalit
@ The Dublin
Web Summit
Goo.gl/M4H7vg
Emmanuel Schalit
@ Le Wagon
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