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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
Why the Time for Investing in Shared Learning is NOW! with Victoria Morgan-Smith
Unlock the secrets to thriving in the AI era with the help of Victoria Morgan-Smith, a respected organizational coach and consultant. She joins me to unravel the transformative power of shared learning in today's dynamic work environments. Discover how innovative platforms like internal conferences and hackathons can create fertile ground for ideas to flourish, moving beyond the limitations of traditional training methods. As organizations strive to keep pace with rapid technological advancements, fostering a culture of experimentation and collaboration becomes imperative.
We also explore how to make conferences more inclusive for introverts, ensuring that everyone has a chance to shine. Introverts can often feel sidelined in typical conference settings, but by offering diverse participation options such as quiet spaces and structured formats, their unique perspectives can enrich discussions and outcomes. Whether through prepared talks, panel discussions, or insightful note-taking, the inclusion of all personality types enhances both the conference experience and organizational innovation.
Finally, navigate the world of AI-driven organizations by understanding different engineering archetypes. Identifying these mindsets helps in tailoring engagement strategies. Learn the importance of fostering shared learning across diverse teams through regular internal events and open conversations. Victoria shares practical insights from her co-authored guidebook on organizing successful internal tech conferences, offering listeners a roadmap to nurture collaboration and drive growth in the AI space.
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriamorgansmith/
Read Victoria's book, "Internal Tech Conferences : Accelerate Multi-team Learning":
https://www.amazon.com/Internal-Tech-Conferences-Accelerate-Multi-team-ebook/dp/B08PDS9KMQ
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into today's episode, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, impact Agility. Impact Agility specializes in training and coaching through scrumorg and proconbonorg, empowering teams with cutting-edge tools and techniques. Their classes are designed to deliver actionable insights, whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader. Whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader, at the helm is president and founder Matt Domenici, who has guided over 50 organizations toward professional agility. With his hands-on experience, matt helps teams and organizations take ownership of their processes and outcomes, unlocking their full potential. To explore free learning resources, check out their training schedule or book a free consultation, visit impactagilityco Once again. That's impactagilityco. Well, welcome back to the Agile Within. This is your host, as always, mark Metz. I hope you're having an absolutely fantastic day out there. I have a guest for today's episode, and her name is Victoria Morgan-Smith. Victoria, welcome to the Agile Within.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Oh, so great to have you. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. So Victoria resides in Winchester, england. If I were coming to Winchester for a day and I've never been there before what's one thing that Victoria would say that I couldn't miss doing?
Speaker 2:I'm not very good at sticking to rules, so I'm going to give you two things. So one is the cathedral. Everyone, if you go to Winchester, it's the one most obvious thing. But get a tour of the roof. It's spectacular. If you go to look at the cathedral, look at the roof. But the other thing is just to go for a walk along the rivers. We've got the Ixchin River and the Test River and they are chalk streams Because the chalk underneath it is the most clear and very clear and clean-looking water and very, very beautiful to walk along. So that would be the other thing I would do. They're very rare, these chalk streams, and they're unique to the area.
Speaker 1:Are they big enough to take a ride on a boat or a small canoe or something like that?
Speaker 2:I'd go walking along the side, maybe a bicycle and structures off it, but they're not typically big enough to go riding on.
Speaker 1:I see, All right, very good. Well, thank you for that. Let me introduce Victoria. Victoria is an organizational coach, consultant and co-author of a book on running internal tech conferences. She coaches teams and senior leaders to effectively deliver outcomes within a culture of inclusion, collaboration, curiosity and generosity. The title for our episode today is why the Time for Investing in Shared Learning is Now. So, Victoria, tell us about shared learning.
Speaker 2:So what I mean by shared learning is learning that happens in a shared space where it's your bouncing ideas between people so you get that cross pollination. So it might be an Intel conference, it might be a hackathon, it might be experiment, design sprints, but whatever it is, it's a shared space where it's not just an individual taking in knowledge and holding it and then possibly forgetting about it. It's where the ideas get to bounce a bit and it's the organizational learns, not just the individual. So that's what I mean by shared learning.
Speaker 1:So I'm gathering there's lots of different exercises that you could employ in shared learning. There's not some framework that is intrinsic to the idea of shared learning.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. It's anything that enables ideas to flow around the place, so that they can flow and then they can grow as a result of people connecting dots with other information that they have previously, or the organizational context. It's the ripple effect that happens when information flows around, so that can be in a multiple of different types of ways.
Speaker 1:I like the way you describe that the ripple effect. That does give a great visual. Well, the title for today is why the Time for Investing in Shared Learning is Now. Why now, victoria?
Speaker 2:So that came up for me when I was thinking about AI.
Speaker 2:So if we thought that Agile was a big industry shift and then DevOps was a big industry shift, AI kind of knocks those to the side.
Speaker 2:It's a landscape which is changing all the time.
Speaker 2:It's so fast and it's not something where you can be sending people off to a training course to go and learn this expertise and come back and apply it in their daily job.
Speaker 2:It's a constant, constant learning, and so the only way to enable everyone that you need to to cut to learn this stuff together, for the organization to figure out what it means in their space and how to actually survive and thrive with that as a company, means bringing your humans along with you and doing that in a shared learning space so that everyone can actually benefit from that learning and they can throw their own ideas and challenges into the mix. That means lots of experiments, and so in order to enable experimentation, which is critical at the moment, I think if you want to have any kind of chance, then having a way of coming together, a habit of coming together kind of an attitude of being able to share ideas and experiment in an environment where it's okay if your experiment doesn't work, etc. All these things. It's right now for AI. It's the only way, I think, to make sure that the learnings happen quickly enough.
Speaker 1:And so I'm unpacking that a little bit and thinking because typically you think about corporations, and at least the ones that I have been to they're much more apprehensive to invest in group training. And when you're saying shared learning, that's what I'm hearing, because you're bouncing ideas off of each other and you're learning together. When it's investing, it's more like well, let's invest in one person and if that person gets some value out of it, then maybe they can teach some of the others. Talk to us a little bit about the investing side of that and why that's so important and maybe how we can position ourselves and our departments and our companies to actually do that investing.
Speaker 2:This investment is. There's many different types of investment, I think. So there's this sort of financial investment. Maybe you've got a training budget and you think how am I going to spend this training budget? Maybe you've allocated that training budget per individual and everyone wants their bit of training budget to go on a training course. That is quite individual and siloed thinking which in some situations maybe works. So people who've got individual skills gaps and they need to learn those things to bring themselves up to speed with the learning of the people, that still you know it has its place and it's still needed.
Speaker 2:But thinking in terms of that departmental training and learning budget, learning is not just about training, because you learn more than just that skill. You're learning about the industry, you're learning about the business need, you're learning about the opportunity, about the threat, and you're learning about each other and where the different ideas and so on. So the shared learning is not just about that technology skill and so if they put it in the bucket of just people's training, then they're going to miss out on a whole ton of the extra benefit that you get and the objective really of these shared learning spaces, which is about pooling knowledge and ideas and getting the kind of cross-pollination across areas so that new wisdom can emerge and individual training is just upskilling a person. We're talking about organisational learning, which is different.
Speaker 1:So I want to pivot just a little bit because this is something I've been waiting to ask you what about introverts versus extroverts? There are some people that feel like, yes, I learn better when I'm by myself, I'm in a safe place, I'm not distracted by other people. But then you have other people who are extroverts, that naturally you see people that they work through problems by talking, and those types of people are very comfortable in a, in a shared learning space. But there are others that have the, the thought process, and really it applies better to them or they feel like it's more advantageous for them if they can think about things themselves personally and individually much better than they can with having the distraction of having to work with others. So how do you balance that between the two types of personalities?
Speaker 2:I think it just comes down to having a variety of formats in your event. So if we're talking about a conference, we're not necessarily talking about a day full of workshops and brainstorms which are just going to terrify and exhaust introverts. We're talking about talks that people get to. If they want to contribute a talk, then actually the preparation for it is something that would suit an introvert really well, because they get to really get into their subject and go, go on, really think about this, think about it in depth, learn some more, boost your own knowledge because you've been given explicit and direct information, permission, a request to do it, go and learn more about this thing and share it with us. So the preparation for and the learning and preparing this talk that bit would suit an introvert really well. And in order to make it easier for them to deliver it, then one of the things we need to do within the organization is support them. So can we line up some coaches who can be sympathetic, practice ears, who can give them some guidelines and some feedback and help them rehearse it over and over again, and then just setting the expectation at the conference that you know what. No one's going to be perfect. This is all great. We're going to really welcome and applaud. So just lots and lots of encouragement would hopefully help somebody who's more introvert in a talking scenario.
Speaker 2:But they may also benefit more.
Speaker 2:Maybe they might prefer the safety in numbers if there was a panel.
Speaker 2:If they know the questions in advance so they could prepare for them.
Speaker 2:They maybe don't need to worry about being centre stage where everyone's looking at them. They're sharing the stage with other people or maybe it's a discussion that they'd rather be part of, or maybe it's something that actually they've really enjoyed listening to lots of talks and taking part in some discussions and observing things and going you know what, I'm going to go and follow up with that person and that idea. I'd really like to be part of an experiment around that and that is something where they can go and work off, you know, with a couple of people to work through an idea as a follow-up. So it's not necessarily something that is going to be prohibitive to somebody who's introvert, because they just find their own way to contribute and the organization hosting it. There's sort of the onus is on them to create an environment that does feel safe and does feel supported and supportive and and and give people that kind of courage to to express themselves and perhaps, you know, leave the hugely performance type things to somebody who enjoys that more so what I'm hearing is giving people options.
Speaker 2:Yeah yes, options. I think that gives people, gives people a little bit of control and maybe there's a different time of day where their energy is a different level. Just you know how would they like to contribute and work with them to find a way that works I was part of.
Speaker 1:This was a conference, so it wasn't necessarily you could call that shared learning, but they did an interesting experiment. What they did was they had a brainstorming session where they put people together in small groups around tables but then they had this safe space that was a separate part of the large room organized that if you didn't feel like it was comfortable for you to hey go up and find three people that you want to form a triad with, you could go over there and brainstorm individually and then when they came back corporately to share ideas, then they could come back and if they wanted to share, they could share. If not, like you say, if they were just a listener and wanted to reflect on what ideas that they had, like you say, if they were just a listener and wanted to reflect on what ideas that they had. And I thought that was pretty novel and you know, again, it's about giving people options.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's the kind of thing where you know, starting out, I don't feel safe, I want to be an individual thinker, and all of a sudden you start hearing these conversations across the room and it's like you know, maybe I do want to go be part of that conversation, so I wasn't. I wasn't signing up for this immediately, but now maybe I might be brave enough to go to go listen in. So just having an open format so that people can contribute how they feel instead of forcing everybody into the same format seems like a good thing yeah, I really like that idea of a quiet space as well, where to give people.
Speaker 2:You know, those conferences I've been to where they've had explicitly had a quiet room. You know if people go and recharge their batteries, if they're finding, if they're finding the event a bit too much, and also there's, you know, these events don't need to be one-off. Maybe they they experience one and they get to see what it's like, and they and then well, maybe the next one I'll take part in. Sometimes what you need at these events that's really useful is to have somebody who's a bit of a note taker, a scribe, who can write a really thought-provoking blog post that comes out of it that can inspire other people Go. This was really interesting here with some takeaways. Maybe that's how they'd like to contribute. So there's different ways, all these different types of events hackathons, where you're experimenting, so you're just coding. Maybe you're doing some mob coding or pair programming or something, just trying an idea. It's not all about the talking. Some of it's about the doing.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, you just really. You really hit me square in the chest with that one, because it's always a struggle for me to. I've always excelled at being a scribe and it helps me to retain information, because I'm constantly trying to organize information and put bullet points together. No, okay, I want to put this section under here and that just helps me to process, but I'm not really present as part of a discussion when I'm doing that because I'm so focused on doing this, the act of scribing myself. And that's always been an interesting balance for me of feeling that tug of okay, I need to put the notepad down and I need to actually contribute, versus oh gosh, I know I'm going to forget this. So trying to find that right balance has been tricky for me.
Speaker 1:So, victoria, I want to ask you, when it comes to selling our leadership on providing either time or a budget for shared learning. So, even though you may be doing a shared learning exercise internally within a company and you're not hiring anybody to come in, you're just doing it yourself, but you're allocating the time to do that, I have actually been at places where senior leadership looks in in a conference room and sees 10, 15, 20 people and have made the comment boy, this is an expensive meeting. What are we really getting for this? Shouldn't people be working? How do we convince leadership that it is worth the time, it is something valuable, and how do we demonstrate that?
Speaker 2:I think, to begin with, you need to be able to answer for yourself as well as anyone else. Why are you doing it in the first place? Know your goal, because if you know your goal, not only will you have a better, more effective event, but you'll be able to justify it to yourself as well as to anyone else. If you're trying to organize something, anything you do, you should know why. So you know. Perhaps what you're trying to achieve with this is to accelerate learning. So if there's, if there's information that you want to have things or spread around and people to learn more quickly to some, get some new pathways opened up for ideas to be flowing. You know, speeding up learning in an environment where everything is changing constantly and it really is right now, that seems like a good reason for doing this. If this is going to speed up the ability of the organization's learning, that's a good outcome. So being able to express how this is going to do that it might be about trying to just break down some silos. Maybe there's some silos that exist in your organization that means that people are going off in totally different directions and there is no alignment In terms of how people are looking at things. This is a great way to deal with that to cross some silos, to get people aligned so that they're not pulling in different directions. That could be our goal, and it might just be about trying to create an atmosphere in itself of where experimentation is a way of doing things or where people develop a habit of we're going to try our idea, we're not going to worry if it's going to fail because no one's going to blame us. If it's going to fail because no one's going to blame us if it's going to wrong, it doesn't matter. If someone knows more than I do about this, maybe what you're trying to do is create some psychological safety so that experimentation can thrive.
Speaker 2:That cultural shift might be something you're trying to do. It can be an explicit goal, a completely valid one, or it might be something else where you're just trying to build some social cohesion and connection across the organization. But but know what the goal is and then you can sell it because you can design it. You can. You can directly draw the connections between what you're structuring in the day and what you're hoping to get to get out of it, and then, when it comes to the next one hopefully you've got some stories to tell that help, to illustrate how it helped, and but it's not, it's not a, it's not a bang for buck kind of easily measurable thing. Sometimes, when it comes to dollar and cents, it's, it's um stories but, but I do like shifting towards.
Speaker 1:you know, this is an outcome that we're trying to get towards. What I'm getting out of this is we're not trying to to have a solution. That's looking for a problem, because that problem may or may not, may not exist, right, it's like well, let's, let's do shared learning because inherently, the shared learning is, is good, correct. What I'm hearing is let's have a goal for that. I would think coming out of any sort of retrospective would be a great time to identify some areas that maybe would be candidates for a shared learning exercise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely it's. You know, asking the question at the end of your iteration, your increment, what came out of this? That would be what's a lesson here that others could learn, which might be something we discovered, something that we've done really badly. We've learned from it. That's just as valid. It's often more interesting actually than the here's a really cool thing we did. But asking those questions regularly to kind of prompt the ideas for sharing and again, that sharing doesn't have to be in this big event, it might be there's an internal blog system going where people are sharing and writing blogs for each other and sharing across the teams what they're doing. It might be something that gets fed into another activity. But asking those questions regularly what did we learn? What would be useful for other people? Maybe they might want to do what we've done, or maybe we can give you a cautionary tale on what not to do.
Speaker 1:So, victoria, what do you do when maybe you come to an organization and you start sensing and you really feel some strong indicators that there are silos within the organization and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and you really do want to do these types of experiments and you start getting pushback. You start hearing well, we don't do that here. Or oh yeah, we tried that once. It was a complete disaster, so we said we're never going to do that again. What are some of the steps that you do to start moving in that direction, to get people open to the idea of learning as a shared group?
Speaker 2:I think. Well, there's two people you've got to convince. One is the broader team members, who often actually would love to share if they were given the opportunity to and they were encouraged to. But if they don't realise they're invited to, then they don't necessarily always look for it, but they might are the management and actually we just need to convince them to get out of the way, really to allow others to get to do the shared learning, because I think by really with most people, if they're encouraged to and given the space to, would do, enjoy it and they get a lot out of it.
Speaker 2:It's the fear at the management level of you know what? I'm not not recognizing the, the potential behind this, not recognizing the value. So it's's trying to find ways to demonstrate to them, I suppose. So what I would maybe be doing is talking to them about you know, trying to explain. You know this is what you're missing out on. This is what you need to be afraid of. If you don't do this, if you don't enable people to share their ideas, to be curious, to learn to be inquisitive, to be brave to, to be courageous, if you don't have an environment where people feel they can be, they can be. They can try ideas and challenge things.
Speaker 2:If you're in the very you know, I would say probably quite a bureaucratic environment, these are things that you're going to miss out on and you will miss out on that organizational growth. And when these ai waves, all these changes come, you're not going to ride that wave, you know. So I would be, I would be trying to talk to them about why it is really so important that they actually do create the opportunities. And then I probably would start with some smaller events. How could we do something small to demonstrate the value, to demonstrate that it's actually not as expensive but it is higher value? And then look for some stories where we can kind of go well, okay, this, we noticed this here. Did you notice these two people who they didn't understand each other at all before? We're now seeing this empathy grow? If we can find some little glimmers, some nuggets and things that you can nudge in a positive direction as a result of these events, you can then talk about those to encourage more to happen.
Speaker 1:So Victoria, I think about two groups of people and these are extremes. But you think about the type of person that's going to play it safe. They're going to ask for permission before they do anything. It's like every time you make a suggestion it's like, well, let me talk to my manager about that. Things can move really slow when that happens. So that's one extreme. But then you've got the other extreme of somebody that's just goes total rogue right. They do whatever they want whenever they want it. They just kind of feel like I'll pay for the consequences later. But I'm just going to blaze a trail forward and whatever happens happens. Maybe they're a little bit entitled, but oftentimes we don't find us at either of those extremes, it's somewhere in the middle. So how do we maybe push the boundaries a little bit if maybe there isn't quite as much an appetite for, or there's some resistance to, doing a group learning or a shared learning, without maybe overstepping our bounds?
Speaker 2:So I've had a bit of fun thinking about this recently be overstepping our bounds. So I've had a bit of fun thinking about this recently. There was a talk that I gave a couple of years ago where I identified five cats who could represent different engineering archetypes, and these archetypes were shaped by the environment that they were in. So we had, on the one hand, we had the cat I called Peanut, who is a house cat, doesn't think that anything outside of his world is real, so he has no concept of any other reality. This, as an engineer, is going to breed a distinct lack of curiosity about anything. So if we think about the world of AI an engineer in this space who's maybe in a very traditional environment where nothing ever changes they've been doing the same thing for 20 years. This environment is not changing. They're not going to see that AI is something that's going to come into their space at all. They're going to be the last ones to even think about it. And if it was to come into their space, they'd probably be pretty terrified. Because where is this thing? They're not used to adapting to change at all. If we were looking at what they need and actually just having some conferences or talks or something in the organization to let this engineer know this is a thing that we're talking about, this thing that's out there that you thought was just on the internet. We're interested in it and just starting some conversations so that they realize this might become part of their world. It might be a thing that might be all they need just to help them feel a little bit safer, that suddenly this, that an awareness that this thing is happening, would be a starting point.
Speaker 2:And then I have several other cats in between, and my final one is is the is rocky the one I call who is a bit like the 10X engineer and just does whatever they want, because they think that they're awesome and they're very bold and as a cat, they're just crossing all the boundaries and terrorizing any other cat in the neighborhood, but as an engineer, they are someone who has no regard for the policies, necessarily, and they create risk wherever they go, when they will be pumping your company's data into track GPT, unless you get them to actually think about responsible AI. So actually, from that end of the scale, you know having events and conversations where they can be part of a conversation where you talk about. You know what is responsible AI. What are we? What is our policy? What is our approach? What are we going to try and create safe ways to play. So you might be creating, you know, local LLMs or whatever for people could try and, but enabling them to be safe.
Speaker 2:And then I heard other cats along the way which are, you know, and a different where most engineers probably would reside. But there are the two extreme extremes there. With the the two to cover you that, I would say that you referred to peanut and rocky. Peanut and rocky are the two ends of the two ends of that extreme you're talking my language now because I'm an animal person.
Speaker 1:I love cats too, so, yeah, I perked up when you, when you said that. So I immediately thought about Rocky and I thought about a thought process, about this 10x engineer and it's like, well, if AI is good, then more AI has to be better, right?
Speaker 2:So why not yes, exactly right.
Speaker 1:What could go wrong?
Speaker 2:Yeah, completely fearless. The did have the other three. I had a. I had princess is the cat who's allowed out but on a lead. So this cat is is very disempowered. They can see that this thing called you know ai is out there but they don't know how to start a conversation about it.
Speaker 2:How do I get involved in that? They might be getting really frustrated because they can see and they're probably going to be a flight risk because they're very, very curious about this thing, but there's no way to be part of the conversation. They might leave and you might lose out on an awful lot of their energy and enthusiasm if you don't invite them. So, inviting them into a space, a kind of a conference or something which, which is an open invitation to get involved and this is where the psychological safety comes in. Creating a space where she's safe, she feels she can offer her ideas, that explicit invitation will keep her in your organization and mean that she can add an awful lot of value to these ideas and to this shift. That was my second one. Do you want me to touch on the other two? I had a lot of fun with them.
Speaker 1:Go ahead quickly. I love cats. Let's hear about your other cats.
Speaker 2:The other two because one of them is my cat, so I have to talk about him. But the next one that I talk about is Willow, and Willow is a cat that can go outside but has no desire to go beyond the garden. You know, you get, these cats are quite lazy and they're very comfortable in the garden. They don't need to go any further. And the reason they don't go further potentially is because they're scared of what's on the outside, what's beyond those walls. So it's possible too, but they just have to find the impetus so they might see that they might be quite scared of AI. They might see, oh, everyone's talking about this thing, it's going to change my job, it might even steal my job, and they'd just be afraid. Creating some cross-silent conversations encouraging her to broaden her horizons, and it would help her come along on the journey towards this and help her be part of it and not just sort of sitting quivering with fear in the corner. So, yes, it's that bit about building courage and being connected to it is what I would say for Willow.
Speaker 2:And then my final one is the one pre-Rocky, and this one I call Squiggle, because my cat is called Squiggle and he's amazing, so therefore, he's the best cat and he's the. I see him as a developer in an autonomous team and actually he's maybe on the cool team who are getting to experiment with AI and he's getting to do all this cool stuff. Stuff is changing all the time. It's very chaotic, it's very fast and potentially a bit bewildering, because there's an awful lot to learn. And how can he have all of that in his head? How can he have all of that responsibility for taking all of that risk? And wouldn't it be really nice if everyone around him was also on that journey and he could share and people could ask questions and offer ideas? So creating a supportive, supported environment where everyone is part of it would be really great for him, so that he could be part of a bigger adventure than just his own. So that's where I see it. So that was my five cats.
Speaker 1:All right, so maybe I'll get to meet Squiggle someday, maybe. Yeah, when we talk about shared learning, it sounds like it's I don't know if you call it a win-win-win or you're like tripling your value, because you're not only learning a topic, but you're probably learning it faster than individually because you have multiple people. So you're not just getting your ideas, but you're getting other people's ideas. And not only that, but you have some intrinsic qualities that you're building as far as fostering, working together as a team, being open to experimentation, generating ideas and those types of things. So would you say that, victoria?
Speaker 2:I would say that, yes, it's when there's nothing there's. No, not when. I mean if people are sharing, then AI works. By information being added to another pot of information, it works and makes you can. Some new thing pops out the other end. Well, our brains and our organizations work the same way. So we have a context, we have information. If we can add new information to it and dots are connected in all the different directions, then we get a new wisdom that comes from everyone's wisdom being brought together, and so this organizational learning happens. It happens more quickly, and so the organization can grow and you make the most of the people you've got in your department rather than siloing off at different areas.
Speaker 2:I've seen some people talk about how, in the AI space, they're seeing fractures happening in some organizations in terms of who's leading and owning AI. Is it the data team? Is it the tech application development team? Is it the business? You've got the business ideas, and so if you've got those off going in different directions, then you know what a disaster. Finding ways to bring those together so that they can, you know, kind of build and rip and kind of amplify each other's ideas rather than kind of being resentful of each other, then that's got to be healthier, and so yes, win, win, win, win.
Speaker 1:So it's a really good point that there is an aspect of sharing the learning within a team, but then there's also across teams, across departments, across the organization as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, victoria, in your experience where you're working with corporations maybe it's working with AI on trying to ride the wave of AI and get ahead of the curve but what are some of your go-to or what are some of your favorite exercises, your techniques, your tricks?
Speaker 2:What are some of your favorite go-to items that you have found to use? So conferences is the big one, but recently maybe shorter ones that are more frequent because the pace of change is so much quicker at the moment. So I used to think of them as being something that would be run once a year. I would think maybe it's every three months now, but this would be a full day of various things. So either long talks and lightning talks and a panel discussion and a game at the end, different formats, different energy levels and then making sure that whatever questions people are asking get picked up and followed up on, which might be a trigger for a hack day, it might be a trigger for a working group to go and try something and come back, but it's always the triggers for something else that comes after it.
Speaker 2:It's more important than the event itself. That has worked quite well and in a company that I spent time with recently who did struggle with having learning as a thing Spent time with recently who did struggle with having learning as a thing I helped them organize a conference and worked with Leith to find success stories where we could shine a light on where people were doing things really well that give a sense of celebration and enthusiasm and get some motivation going and it created an appetite for some more. So that worked. Just doing something, something keeping it simple and and making people feel good is about it I like keeping it simple.
Speaker 1:Sometimes and I've I'm known for this is I can make something way more complicated than it needs to be yeah, we all can, and, on a smaller scale, some teams I worked with a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:We were trying to get more of a regular cadence of sharing, so we just had a, a weekly thing that we just called it's good to talk, that's all it is. It was fairly informal. They weren't highly polished and highly rehearsed talks. They were three or four minutes each, interspersed with I don't know, photographs of people's holidays or their dinner. But just to kind of keep it lightweight and non-threatening and give people some confidence and practice in sharing the small learnings, the small wins, and build those muscles and help them test out something that they might then want to share in a bigger way. And because they got to practice it, that worked quite well, because it was a bit more immediate and they felt safer in that space did you call it igtt?
Speaker 1:it's good to learn, or igtl?
Speaker 2:it's good to talk with. That. That's really my, my, my age and uk-ness, because there was a there. Was there used to be an advert on television in the uk where bob hoskins would say it's good to talk? That was okay, interesting you have to be my age and based in the UK to get the name at all, but we quite like the name anyway.
Speaker 1:So, as we're coming to an end of our show here, why don't you give us a summary of your techniques and your approach to shared learning?
Speaker 2:So I would say, start with being clear on what your goal is for it, what it is that you want to achieve, and then, once you've got that goal, find some excited people who would really want to help make it happen and empower them.
Speaker 2:This is potentially a team of people who were your change agents, who would get excited, who can build some momentum and connect with people across all of the different teams to rope them in and encourage them to contribute. And then, when it comes down to actually making it happen from a leadership perspective, just encourage, just nudge. Show everyone that you are, that you're sponsoring this, that you're behind it, that you really want people, that it matters to you, and then be ready to celebrate whatever comes out and get excited about it and follow on with the nudges. So if there's things that good stuff, stuff, good seeds that seem to be planted in whatever this you know xm empowered team, create, be present, be there, notice it, celebrate it and nudge those positive things into happening afterwards and and help make sure that it kind of can ripple and expand afterwards at a very high level.
Speaker 1:that's what I would suggest so, victoria, you've co-written a book about running internal tech conferences. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:This is a really practical short book on basically the why and the how to do an internal conference and how to do it. Well, and I co-wrote this with Matthew Skelton, who has since then written a much bigger book, team Topologies, which has flown off the shelves this one is a very, very short and snappy. It's got guidelines, it's got case studies. It's just to help you get started, and so it's a short read that should be highly practical if you want to get started. To help you do so.
Speaker 1:Awesome. We'll put a link in the show notes so our listeners will have easy access to that. And if our listeners want to get in touch with you, Victoria, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:LinkedIn is probably the way. So if you put a link, a message, a link to LinkedIn in the notes as well, and that's where I can be found, All right, that sounds great.
Speaker 1:Well, unfortunately we're out of time here, but, victoria, it's been great talking with you, great to meet another fellow cat lover. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This was very interesting.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, that brings it into another episode of the Agile Within. We'll see everybody next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.
