Learning At Work (every) Week - 2022

Learning for "Grow"th

This week is the UK's annual Learning At Work Week (LAWW 2022) - themed this year on "Learning Uncovered". At Nationwide Building Society, we have taken the three proposed themes to heart and hosted a week long celebration of learning focused on; Uncovering Learning Potential, Uncovering Hidden Powers and Uncovering New Dimensions. Over the course of four days, a team from our People & Culture Community and our Ways of Working Centre of Enablement collaborated to put on 50 events, with a total attendance of over 3,000 engaged colleagues.

Our LAWW2022 event showcased the inclusive and diverse interests of our Society, with topics ranging from Learning to Code, Psychological Safety, Future of Finance, Agility beyond IT, Diversity in Tech, Outward Mindset and far beyond. We had talks and hands-on classes from colleagues, panels with leaders, as well as external perspectives shared from military and elite sports.

Attendance this year increased by 200% on last year's WoW2021 - demonstrating a growing interest in learning and continuous improvement, as well as the amplifying power of partnering with colleagues from our People, Growth & Performance team. Also notable this year was both the cross-Society 'breadth' in attendee demographics and the organisational 'depth', with attendees and participants ranging from ExCo members through to product teams.

The event coincided beautifully with the launch of our new colleague learning and career development platform - Grow (combining EdCast for learning and Gloat for opportunities). The interest and engagement here from the outset has been fantastic - capturing colleagues' curiosity, providing connections and feedback, supporting personal and career development opportunities. Grow is an excellent tool and provides strong scaffolding for colleagues' learning and career journeys - I'm very much looking forward to supporting its adoption as a Society enabler.

The next step in our journey is to cross the chasm beyond initial excitement from pioneers and early majority through to the embedding of new habits and mindset of 'lifelong learning' across the Society. In our closing panel on "What Learning Means to Me", I was struck by the diversity of learning styles for individuals and teams - another less visible diversity that we should celebrate and support.

Looking back and looking forward, here are a subset of the ways in which we can continue to embrace colleagues to stretch and develop their learning muscles...

Learning with others

I'm incredibly proud of our continued presence at conferences and other external events that celebrate learning and development. I love Gene Kim's use of the word "scenius" to describe the vibrant, inclusive and diverse DevOps community and the ongoing commitment to continuous improvement and learning.

In the last two months alone, we've had tens of colleagues attend and share at QCon, Gartner D&A Summit, DevOps Enterprise Summit, SEACON to name but a few. Each group who attend are encouraged to share reflections, adapt patterns for our context and seek opportunities to experiment. Engaging with both attendees and speakers, it's great to feel the inspiration to evolve based on the stimulus from these conferences.

Particular shout-outs for me are to Simone Steel (From DevOps to DataOps) and Rich James (Enterprise on the Bleeding Edge) for their excellent recent talks at DOES22. Both talks demonstrate our commitment to further pioneering and act as a prompt for early and late majority engagement and experimentation.

Learning by working out loud

We have an ongoing commitment to 'working out loud' - sharing work in progress externally and seeking feedback from colleagues and the outside world as stimulus for improvement. In this space, our Medium site is a favourite of mine, with a rich variety of content and authors sharing content on topics as diverse as Cloud Security, Lean Portfolio Management and Flow Measurement. A recent favourite is the latest in Tony Caink's treatise on our emergent Lean Portfolio Management journey, highlighting challenges and progress, alongside the secret sauce of the behaviours and mindset that underpin our approach.

Learning from books

Books are not everyone's hot beverage of choice - yet it's clear that colleagues love external content accessed through reading, audiobooks, podcasts, videos or simply by talking through with others. We look to leverage all learners' preferences through our Book Club - providing a regular opportunity to connect those who love reading books with those who love learning by listening or conversation.

Andrew Woolford continues to take this from strength-to-strength - curating conversations and steering the growing community towards each successive read through a democratic dot-voting approach to successive sessions. We've covered books across a broad spectrum - but, probably unsurprisingly, it's those on themes relating to Culture, Mindset and Leadership that are perennial favourites.

Learning from teaching

For some, there's a need for more 'instructional support' - whether that is achieved through a playbook or hands-on training. For this learning cohort, we are evolving an in-house framework to support teams and leaders to form a shared mental model of how work flows in the Society - at teams, value-stream and portfolio levels.

In parallel, we are crafting and accrediting the first of our in-house IC Agile courses - the 'to-be' instructors, those engaged in pilots, as well as the accreditors themselves, have all commented on their own learning and development progress as we curate and practice for training.

This style of learning is not only for our product and project teams - our Nationwide Leadership Team have also been on their own learning journey. Exploring topics such as History of Agile, Scrum and Flow - there have been many "ah ha" moments, alongside an increasing awareness and focus on leadership's role in visualisation & prioritisation, impediment-busting and role-modelling.

Learning by doing

For those keener on experimentation to learn, we nurture a culture of psychological safety - encouraging a #haveago mindset and celebrating learnings (be they 'as hypothesised' or not!). I observe a real growth in this space - teams and leaders demonstrating a balance of curiosity, courage and commitment to seek out improvements or strike through impediments. In our most progressive teams, we are now experimenting openly with sociotechnical design approaches - leveraging Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies types & interaction modes to improve flow. This is all emergent - and it's mostly team-led - inspired by content and supported by a culture of experimentation.

More broadly, across the Society, Enablement Teams are supporting colleagues, teams and leaders to put a practical focus on continuous improvement. With particular thanks to Jon Smart and Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais for the inspiration and partnership - these teams are embedded in Missions and Communities - facilitating learning, development and improving Flow, Value and Culture. Watch this space as we continue to 'work out loud' and share learnings from our ongoing experimentation!

Learning by celebrating

The glue that helps connect all these disparate learning approaches is concocted of conversation and celebration. We find that 'social proof' - combining both colleagues' feelings and the measures of effect from experimentation and continuous improvement - is key to growth. After this week's LAWW2022 event, our heads are turning to this recognition of the best in our colleague/teams' continuous learning and continuous improvement.

With six categories covering 'Innovation in Learning', 'Inspiring a Learning Culture' and 'Impact through Learning' - our celebration culminates in an awards presentation event held in London and online, with winners receiving prizes from our Chief Operating Officer and a Mission Leader. Nominations opened on Monday and we have already received more than 40 - judges look forward to learning more by hearing more about what our awesome colleagues and teams have achieved this past 12 months.

Learning needs nurture

I observe in the Society a clear thirst for continuous learning and continuous improvement. We should be proud of the achievements colleagues, teams and leaders are making - in all the ways highlighted above - and continue to nurture this powerful but invisible mindset. Creating time and the psychological safety for teams and leaders to learn together is fundamental - enabling what Amy Edmondson references as the balance between 'learn what' (technical skills) and 'learn how' (social skills).

We can observe that leaders have a disproportionate impact on establishing a culture founded on learning and continuous improvement. We are also now experienced in how to balance and leverage the 'diffusion of innovation curve' - embracing innovators and encourage engagement from healthy sceptics (thanks to Jon Smart for this version!). The audacious learning goal for our Society is towards what Peter Senge references as a Learning Organization - no small undertaking but definitely a worthy, healthy, challenging journey!

To all those involved with Nationwide Building Society - colleagues, partners and other collaborators (you all know who you are!) - a massive thank you to mark the end of Learning At Work Week 2022 and as a waymarker for our onward journey, together.