Study session difficulties, or the Learning Organisation challenge

In the Yahoo group supporting Cem Kaner’s Black Box Software Testing course, Anil Soni has been describing experiences organising and leading internal training, using the BBST course materials. One point in particular caught my attention:

> The major challenge is to have all the testers together in the same time
> needed for the group interaction.

In a recent role, I had trouble getting all of my testers together for study sessions. Often, the testers felt uncomfortable stopping work to come to a study session. At times, work was a genuine priority. At other times, the things testers were working on could wait an hour or two, but it was difficult for the tester to make that decision.

Sometimes I would have to make the decision for them. That is, tell them “This is more important than the work you are doing right now”. I could do this because I had management support for creating a learning environment.

Organisationally though, we were sending mixed messages. The project manager expressed the opinion “We’re not running a school here”. The development manager countered with “We absolutely are”. These two statements captured the tension between getting today’s job done now, and ensuring that tomorrow’s work can be done better or more efficiently. In one statement, is the view that employees should always be working on something that directly contributes business value. In the other statement, the view that it is vital that time be set aside during work hours expressly for improving the skills of staff and for reflection on past experience.

At this point, I don’t really want to enter into the philosophical debate around whether organisations should be learning organisations are not. However, if you’ve decided that it is important that your staff learn and improve here are a few things that I would consider.

• Make it clear how much time you expect employees to be spending on improving their skills.
• Check that they are spending the necessary time. If not, find out why.
• Keep groups small if possible. This allows scheduling to be more flexible.
• Get a clear statement (or statements) from whoever is in authority that study time is important for the organisation.
• Establish and communicate principles for when work should take priority.
• If participants are having difficulty deciding what is more important, help them.
• If you are going with a less structured informal learning approach, how will you know whether team members are using their study time for study? That is, what feedback mechanisms will you have to help understand and support your team’s learning needs?

On this last point, in one team, a thousand dollar self-education budget was available to each employee per year. They were free to spend this on anything that they wished. However, in a year and a half, almost none of the team had made use of that budget. That’s one example of a feedback mechanism, triggered by the question “Why haven’t you used your training budget?” Regular team meetings, where each team member presented some recent learning were another.

The dominant work culture is about appearing to be busy, and doing ‘real work’. Despite support at the highest level, if other management levels don’t support the company’s learning objectives, employees will be quite nervous about spending time on tasks that their close managers may consider trivialities. This is a significant cultural change, and the forces of history will be working powerfully against you.

I’ve recently come across the Informal Learning blog, and hope to write more on this subject in the future.