Shift-Left for Learning - With the Help of Enabling Teams

If you can take a bird's-eye view of your organisation, how often would you see the same problem being solved over and over again? You look around and see that one team did an amazing job at data loading, but that other team over there somehow did a worse job, in double the time. Ouch, how did that happen?

In the age where we are bringing down the ivory towers and teaching teams to have autonomy, we start observing that, on the flip side, teams are becoming their own silos, black boxes where knowledge is being created, but is rarely shared with others. In a way, bringing down the architecture review board “ivory tower” lead to the emergence of knowledge “ivory towers”, hidden within teams. In its extreme, this could lead teams to become very misaligned, adopt incompatible approaches and tech, creating problems and conflicts that are hard to undo.  

We were up to the challenge! Over the course of four years, we’ve kick-started, grown and scaled we.innovate - an approach designed to bring people together to exchange with passion and curiosity about their work, struggles and solutions. We’ve taken an atypical approach to learning - instead of relying on a central entity to decide what’s worthy of learning about, we’ve let the people decide this and learn from each other! We see this as a Shift-Left for Learning that increases alignment, collaboration and reduces "reinventing of the wheel" in a natural, emergent way.

The hidden ingredient to truly shifting left is having an Enabling Team with a mission and vision to support and evolve the approach and answer questions like - “What’s the right format to do this?”, “What are the right incentives?”, “How can we reduce the cognitive load of trainers?”, “How do we grow the pool of trainers?”, “How can we get management’s backing in difficult times?”, etc. We’re excited to share the learnings of our journey with you and help you do something like that in your organisation!