In Episode 58 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Collective Learning for Project Teams, co-hosts Jen Ferello and Jonathan Scott welcome a familiar guest, Dr. Patrick Hillberg, speaker, author and professor. To begin the conversation, Jonathan suggests collective learning is the idea “of people coming together and the sharing of ideas that benefits the group and how they learn together.” Pat agrees, explaining that his interest stemmed from struggles with leading teams well before that kind of learning could happen. As he led projects, he says, he realized he was missing some X factor that would get the team working well together and moving in one direction. To get projects done, especially PLM projects that focus so much on collaboration, he realized he needed a more collaborative approach.
Starting with Agile
The traditional project management approach, even in the software or PLM spaces, is waterfall, in which each stage—requirements, design, implementation, etc.—must be completed before the next stage begins. The problem with waterfall, Pat says, is “if you don’t get the details correct at the beginning, it’s really difficult to change. And organizationally, it becomes really difficult to change. Agile says I’m going to change. Things are going to change.”
Jonathan adds, “The key difference is the timeframe and how often you’re allowed to change.” In waterfall, you know all the details of your big target at the start, whereas in Agile, you have smaller targets and shorter work cycles that are completed quickly, and you are expected to adapt to changes after every cycle. Those short cycles give teams the opportunity to recognize the fact that they’ve learned new things in the process, Pat says.
The trio also discuss the lean principle of “inventory” or the backlog of requirements for a project. The value of an incremental approach to inventory is that it ultimately saves you effort. When you don’t define every need at the beginning of a project, when you only define what you need to immediately work on, you will learn and improve through that work, and your definitions may change as the team collectively learns. What’s critical to the idea of collective learning, Jonathan points out, is creating opportunities that make people want to come together for discussions, sharing, and collective learning. Ultimately, doing so will foster internal acceptance of new technology and processes in the same way that organizational change management (OCM) can. As Pat says, “you need to move the culture to the technology. That’s the transition that needs to be made.”
People Love to Learn
Pat goes on to explain that the way to create opportunities for collective learning is to capitalize on the fact that people love to learn and to create spaces for people to feel FOMO (fear of missing out) so that they’ll show up.
The idea is to begin with the understanding that people are intrinsically motivated to learn, then you look for ways to get people involved and excited about whatever the new thing is—and excited about learning about it. “In the course of learning new things,” Pat says, “they’ll come to their own agreement and their own decision that what they would really like to do is change.” Jen points out that this approach really requires a mindset shift, noting, “We are taught to perform, to get a result. You’re not taught to think creatively anymore. You’re not taught to explore. You’re taught to deliver. And to change that mindset to let’s find the best way of doing this, and let’s work together. That’s a big change.”
Pat agrees and reiterates the biggest lesson of all: “We didn’t make the change. We created the environment in which change could happen.” That’s an idea that resonates with Agile, the idea that teams have self-determination, they’re self-organizing, within some boundaries. What this does require, however, is someone to sponsor the project, to be the buffer against bigger organizational goals of specific timelines or deliverables. Someone to create the space, Jen says, “To hold the space for learning and mistakes and tangents,” which creates the new culture and mindset. The bottom line, she goes on, is “Teaching them to think rather than just learn and regurgitate is going to be critical to our success moving forward as a community, as an environment.”
Learn More About How Collective Learning Can Benefit Your Projects
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how the scheduling methodology of drum, buffer, and rope helps identify and manage bottlenecks; Pat’s experience with motivating a team to complete a project in one-fifth the time of comparable teams; how top-down setting of goals for teams is a waterfall approach that doesn’t allow workers to naturally get excited about learning, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 58: Collective Learning for Project Teams, and join us each week for a new podcast.
