Fact: Two things are necessary for an effective learning organization:
Executives are aware of their organization’s’ top performers but often struggle to leverage their capabilities to improve those of the rest of the team. Vertical Learning works with these exceptional employees to identify key knowledge, skills, disposition and emotional intelligence, which are then operationalized as part of Vertical’s Dynamic Emergent Curriculum (VDEC). Our development process rests on the assumption that the community is the curriculum and that the fast pace of technical change requires any viable learning system to be intentionally designed to adapt over time.
The Vertical Learning Process
1. We quickly identify the currently active knowledge sources and sinks in your organization in small, highly diverse, hand-picked groups. These are the "dynamic curriculum generators."
2. We endorse these local experts with the time and space (~ 2-4 hours per week) to interact on high priority business objectives.
3. Next, we extract lessons from their interactions via video, images and transcribed recordings. This becomes the "dynamic curriculum."
4. We also lightly editorialize the curriculum via early adopters (ie. ratings, comments, sequencing and curation) and in consideration with the organization's cultural capacity.
5. Then, we distribute this learning more widely, radiating out from center of the organization's high performance "learning profile."
6. We teach your teams to revise regularly (ie. monthly, quarterly) as sources and sinks on the vanguard deviate from the published curriculum.
7. We have established communities of practice across functional areas and with other organizations. We provide ongoing training and updates to these groups.
- The development of dynamic curriculum.
- The identification of high performance learners.
Executives are aware of their organization’s’ top performers but often struggle to leverage their capabilities to improve those of the rest of the team. Vertical Learning works with these exceptional employees to identify key knowledge, skills, disposition and emotional intelligence, which are then operationalized as part of Vertical’s Dynamic Emergent Curriculum (VDEC). Our development process rests on the assumption that the community is the curriculum and that the fast pace of technical change requires any viable learning system to be intentionally designed to adapt over time.
The Vertical Learning Process
1. We quickly identify the currently active knowledge sources and sinks in your organization in small, highly diverse, hand-picked groups. These are the "dynamic curriculum generators."
2. We endorse these local experts with the time and space (~ 2-4 hours per week) to interact on high priority business objectives.
3. Next, we extract lessons from their interactions via video, images and transcribed recordings. This becomes the "dynamic curriculum."
4. We also lightly editorialize the curriculum via early adopters (ie. ratings, comments, sequencing and curation) and in consideration with the organization's cultural capacity.
5. Then, we distribute this learning more widely, radiating out from center of the organization's high performance "learning profile."
6. We teach your teams to revise regularly (ie. monthly, quarterly) as sources and sinks on the vanguard deviate from the published curriculum.
7. We have established communities of practice across functional areas and with other organizations. We provide ongoing training and updates to these groups.
That's it, and it works.
Here's An Example:
Technical Support is facing several challenges (as identified by team leads and relevant business unit KPIs)
Some members of the team seem to have no problem keeping up with their workload, appear to always have the latest version of the FAQ memorized, somehow find time to support their team members questions with thorough and insightful answers, and are well connected with the engineering team -- occasionally eating lunch with them and visiting their work spaces. These employees are invited to attend a meeting where they discuss their strategies for keeping up with the pace of change. Out of this meeting a set of key people and relationships are identified.
Some are currently behaving in the way you "wish everyone else would". They'll be easy to find since most of their peers will think of them as a "wizard" and their direct managers will readily admit to seeking out their opinion and regard them as the high water mark for new hires. Some are already engaged with other teams, especially tech. They will be easy to identify because almost all of your developers will know them by name and recognize their face instantly. Your development managers will also probably see them as a direct and reliable link back to their team with "an ear to the ground".
In a meeting (or via survey) you ask them:
On the other side of the organizational equation, a few employees on the engineering team are identified as willing and capable mentors to employees on the technical support team.
In a meeting (or via survey) you ask them:
Meanwhile, the entire technical support team is invited to take a learning profile survey lasting no more than 30 minutes to establish a near optimal order for deploying the learning experience across the business unit -- answering the question: "who should learn first?" Within a week, a set of concrete activities emerge and are organized into a lunch-and-learn, evening or weekend workshop. The most capable employees (based on learning profile) are invited to participate in these activities.
API Trivia
Technical support employees pair up to overcome challenges proposed by an engineering mentor around the implementation of certain features of the platform API. Discussions follow with worked examples provided for review. Technical support employees learn to read and recognize code in the context of the platform API, build a rich heuristic around the "hard parts" and rehearse the activities associated with supporting customers in troubleshooting related issues.
Storylines
Technical support employees join engineering mentors to lead a 10-person roundtable discussion of the most pressing questions, concerns and misconceptions facing technical support.
Language Games
Using the company knowledgebase as your primary source, play games with the most requested / recent / often changing content like
Learning to Read Code
Each of these challenges represents a small body of technical work. Answer the questions with your group.
Tool Adoption and Development
All of these activities are recorded in several modalities including pictures of whiteboards, transcribed recordings of key exchanges, videos of the meetings, etc. These artifacts are edited by a review team over the next week to create a structured, indexed course (including external references to online resources where appropriate) for consumption by the team of technical support employees.
Ratings and comments are captured, the most useful evergreen content is channeled into the knowledge base and confusing or short-lived lessons are applied and discarded without hesitation.
The process repeats on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on the people and teams involved and the urgency and novelty of their learning needs.
Technical Support is facing several challenges (as identified by team leads and relevant business unit KPIs)
- increasingly complex and growing knowledge base as new products are added with more nuanced interconnections
- deteriorating and siloed on-boarding process as team members specialize in response to increases in complexity
- increasing call volume as customers face increasing complexity in solution development, deployment and maintenance
Some members of the team seem to have no problem keeping up with their workload, appear to always have the latest version of the FAQ memorized, somehow find time to support their team members questions with thorough and insightful answers, and are well connected with the engineering team -- occasionally eating lunch with them and visiting their work spaces. These employees are invited to attend a meeting where they discuss their strategies for keeping up with the pace of change. Out of this meeting a set of key people and relationships are identified.
Some are currently behaving in the way you "wish everyone else would". They'll be easy to find since most of their peers will think of them as a "wizard" and their direct managers will readily admit to seeking out their opinion and regard them as the high water mark for new hires. Some are already engaged with other teams, especially tech. They will be easy to identify because almost all of your developers will know them by name and recognize their face instantly. Your development managers will also probably see them as a direct and reliable link back to their team with "an ear to the ground".
In a meeting (or via survey) you ask them:
- What do they think their job really is, at its core?
- What motivates them and what their plans are for the near future with the company?
- What activities are they regularly doing that keep these relationships fresh and meaningful?
- What do they talk about with engineers that makes them feel competent and connected?
- Can they share their daily and weekly habits (ie. newsletters they subscribe to, events they attend, books they've read)?
On the other side of the organizational equation, a few employees on the engineering team are identified as willing and capable mentors to employees on the technical support team.
In a meeting (or via survey) you ask them:
- What activities are they regularly engaged in to support people around them and why are they doing it?
- What do they hear non-tech Stripes asking most often and how have they optimized their answers to be most useful?
Meanwhile, the entire technical support team is invited to take a learning profile survey lasting no more than 30 minutes to establish a near optimal order for deploying the learning experience across the business unit -- answering the question: "who should learn first?" Within a week, a set of concrete activities emerge and are organized into a lunch-and-learn, evening or weekend workshop. The most capable employees (based on learning profile) are invited to participate in these activities.
API Trivia
Technical support employees pair up to overcome challenges proposed by an engineering mentor around the implementation of certain features of the platform API. Discussions follow with worked examples provided for review. Technical support employees learn to read and recognize code in the context of the platform API, build a rich heuristic around the "hard parts" and rehearse the activities associated with supporting customers in troubleshooting related issues.
Storylines
Technical support employees join engineering mentors to lead a 10-person roundtable discussion of the most pressing questions, concerns and misconceptions facing technical support.
Language Games
Using the company knowledgebase as your primary source, play games with the most requested / recent / often changing content like
- Charades (teams of employees compete to out-guess one another by representing ideas as physical forms)
- Taboo (teams of employees compete to express answers to commonly asked questions without using taboo words)
- Memory (teams of employees compete to match questions with most effective answers)
Learning to Read Code
Each of these challenges represents a small body of technical work. Answer the questions with your group.
- https://github.com/CitizenDeveloper/scavenger_hunt/blob/master/sample_01.md
- https://github.com/CitizenDeveloper/scavenger_hunt/blob/master/sample_02.md
- https://github.com/CitizenDeveloper/scavenger_hunt/blob/master/sample_03.md
Tool Adoption and Development
- Ebbinghaus "learning curve" tooling like Anki to help drill certain evergreen lessons
- Prototyping new tools for learning happens in focused workshops
All of these activities are recorded in several modalities including pictures of whiteboards, transcribed recordings of key exchanges, videos of the meetings, etc. These artifacts are edited by a review team over the next week to create a structured, indexed course (including external references to online resources where appropriate) for consumption by the team of technical support employees.
Ratings and comments are captured, the most useful evergreen content is channeled into the knowledge base and confusing or short-lived lessons are applied and discarded without hesitation.
The process repeats on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on the people and teams involved and the urgency and novelty of their learning needs.
“Accelerated learning tied to job skills, soaked in empathy, and branded with a major company’s name in the space, is a solution for a very big problem.” - David Phillips, Founder, Hackbright Academy