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PRINCIPLES OF MULTI-LEVEL LEARNING
In their book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, Mary and Tom
Poppendieck (2003) describe the concepts and tools of lean development,
and how they underpin the thought process and practices of agile software
development. These principles have been put to work in the automotive
industry since the 1970s, when Japanese automakers demonstrated the
bene ts that can be achieved through the application of these principles to
manufacturing and production as well as to engineering and product de-
velopment. Lean techniques enabled Japanese automakers to reduce their
engineering e ort by half, and enabled them to shorten product develop-
ment time by a third. According to Jim Highsmith (1999), lean product
development in uenced his work in the development of Adaptive Soft-
ware Development, which is also considered to be one of a number of
approaches that are included in the agile software development family.
The principles of multi- level learning build on those of lean and agile
(Poppendieck & Poppendieck), yet they include some important modi ca-
tions and additions that are aimed at enhancing the learning process for
the project organization overall. These principles include satisfy the cus-
tomer, eliminate waste, welcome new insights, deliver as fast as possible,
empower team learning, see the whole, use a third- party coach, and re ect
at multiple levels. A brief description of each of these principles follows.
Satisfy the Customer
Multi- level learning focuses on ensuring that the outputs from project team
activities are focused on delivering value to customers, whether those cus-
tomers are internal or external to the organization. For organizations that
provide project services directly to external customers, assessing customer
satisfaction may be more straightforward, although not always easy. Many
project organizations, however, provide project services to internal cus-
tomers. For example, IT may develop new software and systems for the
call center, or a Six Sigma group may perform projects that help the HR
group. The HR group, in turn, may perform projects for the operations
group. As stated in the Introduction, to separate internal customers from
external customers in this book, we refer to internal customers as internal
clients. In all cases, wherever this is feasible and possible, providing value
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to the external customer is always the goal. However, assessing internal
client satisfaction with the external customer in mind may be the most
practical approach for some projects. For example, a senior executive team
may launch a project to develop a management reporting system that pro-
vides real- time performance reporting for key business activities. In this
case, the customers are the management team members who need to use
the resulting reports, as they are the primary judge of whether the report-
ing system meets their needs. The customer for this project is an internal
client. When there is confusion over who the customer is for a given proj-
ect, it is helpful for the organization to clarify who must use or implement
the outputs from the project, as these people should be engaged routinely
throughout the project to ensure that their needs are being met.
Eliminate Waste
Waste is any activity or component that does not ultimately add value
for the customer. In manufacturing environments, waste can be unneces-
sary movement of materials, storing excess inventory, or making defec-
tive products that don’t work. In project environments, waste includes
unnecessary processes and bureaucracy that bog down teams and their
innovative potential, project tasks and activities that do not contribute to
achieving a project’s objectives, and features and functions that custom-
ers do not perceive as useful or necessary. It also includes investments in
projects or programs that don’t help the organization achieve its strategic
objectives. Not all waste can be completely eliminated, but the goal of
multi- level learning is to eliminate as much waste as is possible and practi-
cal in order to get the job done to the customer’s satisfaction.
Welcome New Insights
As discussed in Chapter 1, internal and external conditions continually
change as teams de ne and implement strategies, and as projects progress
through their life cycle. Traditional project management and “waterfall”
development approaches tend to shun the introduction of change. Cer-
tainly, changes require updates to strategies, rescoping of projects, and
upgrades to individual skill sets. This creates the potential for frustration
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and extra work. Yet if project organizations do not account for continually
shifting conditions, they run the risk of developing irrelevant products,
improving business processes that are no longer vital to the organization’s
competitiveness, or releasing software that doesn’t meet the needs of cus-
tomers. Change requires learning and adaptation. Yet welcoming it is pref-
erable to continuing to squander scarce resources on projects, products, or
processes that don’t meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.
Deliver as Fast as Possible
Long cycle times for projects create opportunities for waste. Long delivery
cycles mean that by the time a project delivers something, what it deliv-
ers may no longer be relevant or useful to the customer who requested
it. Building in short cycles that produce tangible results for internal or
external customers helps teams build momentum, learn from experience,
and avoid wasteful spending. Moreover, delivering as quickly as possible
enables project bene ts to be captured sooner. For new product introduc-
tions, delivering faster means capturing new revenue sooner, preempting
competitors with new innovations, and learning about what works and
what doesn’t so that the organization can maintain its edge in the market-
place.
Empower Team Learning
Teams are asked to take responsibility for their results, whether they are
senior management teams developing strategy or project teams deliver-
ing software. In multi- level learning, teams are also empowered to take
responsibility for their own learning. They are therefore provided with
the mechanisms they need if they are to learn and improve on their own
terms. With e ective group processes, teams are able to harness the col-
lective brainpower of talented professionals from multiple disciplines to
solve problems ranging from the straightforward to the complex, creating
opportunities to develop a shared vision and organizational alignment. To
become an e ective team, groups of individuals need common goals, an
understanding of one another’s roles, established procedures and norms,
and teaming competencies that can be drawn upon to ensure e ective
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ongoing collaboration. When teams are able to take responsibility for
their own learning, they are able to apply the collective wisdom of diverse
individuals from multiple functional, technical, and cultural backgrounds,
enabling the organization to solve problems and continually adapt and
improve in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Later in this chap-
ter, we will discuss the role of the multi- level learning coach, a trained
facilitator of individual and organizational learning who is responsible for
helping teams at all levels learn and adapt in the service of achieving high-
performance results.
See the Whole
P. Peter Senge (2006) tells us that systems thinking is the glue that binds all
the essential components of the learning organization together: personal
mastery, shared vision, team learning, and mental models. Without sys-
tems thinking, organizations will nd it hard to learn from experience and
transform themselves to achieve higher levels of performance. Systems
thinking helps us deal with the underlying root causes of problems rather
than treating the symptoms. It helps us to look for patterns of behavior in
organizations—ways of solving problems—that often lead to recurrence
of the same problems over and over. Many of us have seen what happens
when managers use Band- Aids to overcome short- term challenges, only
to nd little long- term relief. We’ve seen the e ects of departmental units
that blame one another for persistent problems rather than collaborating
to deal with the root causes, thus limiting the performance of the orga-
nization as a whole. Take, for example, a large nancial services rm that
wanted to improve the way its business units were charged for technology
services. The business units complained bitterly about the way they were
being billed for internal services like telephones and servers, demanding
more transparency so that they could see what the charges were based on.
The CIO implemented a new system for tracking these charges that was
intended to enable the business units to view the drivers of their costs,
like the number of telephones or printers that they used on an ongoing
basis. The new system required the business units themselves to notify the
technology group when employees changed locations or left the rm al-
together. The business units, however, were not willing to spend the time
required to provide this information, and the CIO refused to provide the
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resources to do so because he saw it as the business units’ responsibility.
The new system wound up not dealing with the root causes of the original
problems. The business units continued to complain, and the organization
continued to overspend and overbill for its technology resources. Systems
thinking helps organizations see the overall e ects of behavioral patterns
like these that limit the performance of the organization as a whole.
Use a Third-Party Coach
Retrospectives at frequent intervals during the project’s life cycle are the
primary means for facilitating learning and continuous innovation in
multi- level learning. Retrospectives, as discussed in the previous section,
enable teams to systematically learn from experience so that they can im-
prove upon their strategies, reduce the risk of failures and surprises, and
deliver high- quality outputs for internal and external customers. As we
shall see in the next chapter, engaging a multi- level learning coach from
outside a team’s immediate reporting structure is critical for promoting
e ective learning and re ection. The multi- level learning coach has no
decision- making authority and serves in a substantively neutral role in this
respect, helping teams reduce the damaging e ects of defensive routines
and helping team members at all levels overcome avoidance mechanisms
that prevent the discussion of di cult, challenging, or threatening topics.
The coach helps teams establish e ective mechanisms for collaboration,
and frees executives and managers to focus on re ning their strategies and
improving the way in which work gets done so that they can contribute
their knowledge and expertise. The role of the multi- level learning coach
will be discussed in more detail in the next section.
Re ect at Multiple Levels
Structured re ection is not limited to the project team. In multi- level
learning, retrospectives are conducted after action at each of three critical
levels: project, process, and strategy. In some organizations, these levels of
learning may mirror responsibilities within the organizational hierarchy,
yet their purpose is not to perpetuate unnecessary layers of management
and bureaucracy or to restrict the type of learning at any level. Rather, the
layers parallel Mezirow’s levels of re ection. As discussed earlier in this
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