9

Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning

So far, we have looked at value stream management by using the Three Ways identified in The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. By following the First Way, establishing Flow, we looked at determining and mapping our development value streams. In the Second Way, we amplified the feedback loops in our value streams by adopting meaningful KPIs.

We’ll now look at the Third Way: continuous learning and experimentation. A critical part of DevOps is the realization that the journey of transformation has no end destination. That is, your organization will continue improving and setting further goals to create a stronger value stream. You will create more and improved future-state value streams as you discover and optimize continuously with no end in sight.

In this chapter, we will look at finding future states for your value stream by discussing the following topics:

• Adopting a continuous learning culture
• Utilizing the Improvement Kata to identify future state value streams
• Implementing all parts of the Lean Improvement Cycle as part of the Improvement Kata

Let’s start our exploration by delving deeper into continuous learning.

Understanding continuous learning

In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. In it, he described the qualities or disciplines that companies need to become learning organizations.

A learning organization allows for learning to develop from the efforts of the people that work for it. This learning facilitates a continuous transformation of the organization so that it can strive for improvement. In today’s business environment, the organization that learns quicker than its competitors has a distinct advantage.

Senge identified the following five characteristics or disciplines that learning organizations must have:

• Personal mastery
• Mental models
• Shared vision
• Team learning
• Systems thinking

As organizations work on the first four disciplines, the fifth discipline, systems thinking emerges to take the organization to the next level in becoming a learning organization.

Let’s look at each discipline closely to see what’s involved in becoming adept at that discipline and moving toward being a learning organization.

Personal mastery

Organizations cannot learn unless the people inside the organizations learn. The individuals inside an organization seek to grow and continually learn. This drive is referred to by Senge as personal mastery and is the seed that spreads to the entire organization.

Individuals building personal mastery will discover two artifacts, which play a role in their development:

• Vision: The individual learns what is important to them
• Changes in perspective: The perception of the current reality as either something that will help or hinder the vision

As the individual develops the vision and sees the current reality through personal mastery, they encounter tensions between the vision and the current reality. These tensions are natural and include creative tension or the difference between the vision and the current reality, and emotional tension, the emotions the individual feels when viewing the creative tension.

In addition to creative tension and emotional tension, individuals may also be aware of structural conflicts. These structural conflicts are the overwhelming feelings of powerlessness or unworthiness when unable to deal with creative and emotional tension.

When encountering the preceding tensions and structural conflicts, the following reactions may appear as coping mechanisms:

• Letting our vision erode to achieve an easier goal
• Conflict manipulation where we focus on avoiding what we don’t want
• Adopting a strategy of willpower where the individual overpowers the tensions, conflicts, and other resistance to achieve the vision

To ensure we develop personal mastery through the strategy of willpower, the individual must be honest and embrace the truth. This allows viewing the creative tension through multiple perspectives and allows several angles of attack to attain the vision. Another beneficial tactic is that learning is done on more than the conscious level. People adept at personal mastery allow the subconscious to have a role. An example of this is the repetition of a new skill to the point that it becomes muscle memory.

As individuals develop personal mastery and move toward their vision, a number of the following changes develop:

• Reason and intuition become integrated. This allows the viewing of multiple perspectives.
• Individuals start seeing more connectedness between themselves and the world.
• Compassion starts building.
• Individuals see the whole and begin committing to that whole.

These traits are what organizations need from individuals. To that end, organizations must work toward allowing and encouraging employees to make journeys to personal mastery. They need to create a climate that encourages the creation of visions. They must grant freedom to individuals to inquire and seek the truth. At times, this could involve questioning the status quo. Such freedoms result in better individuals, which leads to growing the organization.

As individuals grow in personal mastery, they may change their visions and their perception of the current reality. This change affects the mental models they’ve created and used. We’ll now look at what those mental models mean.

Mental models

We previously saw that as individuals develop their personal mastery, they encounter creative tension, or they see the gap between their vision and the current reality. That creative tension may arise from their perceptions of how the world works. These perceptions, simply, are the mental models used as a discipline for a learning organization.

The mental model shapes the perceptions of the learning individual and serves the following two main purposes:

• It helps the individual in making sense of the world around them
• It informs the individual on how to take action

Mental models inform individuals and organizations of what has worked in the current situation for a specific issue. As such, a learning organization benefits by changing its mental models in the face of new information.

The following things are needed by individuals and learning organizations to add to or change mental models:

• Tools that promote personal awareness and reflective skills
• Infrastructures that try to institutionalize practices, tying them to mental models
• A culture that promotes inquiry and allows challenges to current thinking

Senge identified a few tools to help allow for easy change of mental models. Let’s take a close look at these.

Reflective practice

Reflective practice is the act of reflecting while learning in order to discern whether the new information conforms to the existing mental model or whether new mental models must be created.

Reflection is a key tool for adjusting mental models. People that allow reflection do well with this discipline.

Espoused theory versus theory in use

Building up reflective practice skills allows for easy comparisons. One such comparison is whether gaps exist between an espoused theory and the application of that theory.

The following are typical comparisons to determine whether the existing mental models are valid:

• Questioning leaps of abstraction: See if what you’re looking at is based on fact or is a generalization.
• Left-Hand Column Analysis: A comparison of what someone is thinking (written on the left-hand side) with what they say (written on the right-hand side). This exercise created by Chris Argyris allows us to see the differences between what our thoughts are and what was actually said, exposing our preconceptions and biases.

A left-hand column analysis can allow people to understand what they really think and feel and communicate those thoughts in a more transparent fashion. When used properly, this allows conversations to be more productive because of the transparency.

To perform a Left-Hand Column Analysis, find a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. Take a recent conversation and write what was said in the conversation in the right-hand column. Recall your thoughts and feelings about what was said and record them in the left-hand column, lining up the thoughts with what was said.

An example of a left-hand column analysis is shown in the following table.

What I’m Thinking	What Is Said
Doesn’t he know I’m busy enough? I’m not sure I can handle any more.	Boss: Can you do me a favor? Me: I suppose. What’s the favor?
Really? I bombed 3 months ago! Does he really want to send me to fail again in front of a larger crowd in New York?	Boss: Since you did a great job speaking at the conference 3 months ago, I and the marketing team want to know if you could speak at the conference in New York next month. Me: That does sound fascinating.
How do I get out of doing this?	Boss: Fantastic! Let me send you details about the conference. Me: Sure. Thanks!

Table 9.1 – Left-Hand Column Analysis demonstrating what is thought versus what is said

The ability to regularly examine and readjust mental models is an important enabler of the fifth discipline, systems thinking. Not adjusting mental models in the presence of new information prevents organizations from seeing the whole, and as a consequence, thinking in terms of the entire system.

An example of developing a mental model comes from Scrum. A common practice that Scrum teams follow is estimating the effort of stories using story points. The Scrum team commonly estimates story points using planning poker. In planning poker, the team convenes and collaboratively develops the concept of the 1-point story, a reference to the smallest amount of effort for completing a story and the basis for relatively comparing other stories against this reference.

During planning poker, the team members convene and are given a set of cards with numbers detailing the story points. The product owner reads the story, and the team members individually select a card with the number of story points. The Scrum master, acting as facilitator, then counts down for all members to reveal their choice at the same time. Those that reveal a different value are invited to explain the reason for their choice. This conversation with the entire team helps build a model of how the team sees work meant for the entire team.

As agreement builds on the mental models in the organization, it becomes the basis for a shared vision. Let’s see how important that shared vision is.

Shared vision

In Chapter 2, Culture of Shared Responsibility, we looked at a generative culture. Remember that a generative culture has its members focused on a shared mission. The shared mission energizes the members, connects the team members together, and gives them the focus to do whatever is necessary.

This shared mission can be thought of as a shared vision that Senge calls one of the disciplines for a learning organization. The shared vision is quite simply the answer to the question just what are we building?

Many organizations start with an extrinsic or outwardly focused vision such as beating the other competitors. The problem with these types of visions is that they tend to be transitory; what happens once you’ve accomplished your vision? The best visions, ones that will keep learning organizations moving forward in different situations, will be intrinsic, or inwardly focused in nature.

Another type of vision that may not endure as a shared vision is a negative vision. A negative vision describes what the organization wants to avoid as opposed to what it wants to be. The differing mindset diverts the energy that the organization needs, robbing the organization of achieving a long-term vision. An avoidance strategy also implies the organization is powerless to change its destiny. These types of visions are only effective in the short term, failing to give the organization any long-term vision.

Shared visions come from individual visions. The source of an individual vision generated by personal mastery is not necessarily from the leader or a predetermined process. Anyone in the organization, by remaining clear on the vision and actively questioning the current reality, can share what they have discovered and invite others to follow.

As the vision spreads, there are a number of reactions that can come when sharing visions and inviting others to follow. These are the following reactions one can expect:

• Enrollment
• Buy-in
• Commitment
• Compliance
• Non-compliance
• Apathy

Of the preceding list, the first three items (enrollment, buy-in, and commitment) are desired reactions that help turn an individual’s vision into a shared vision. The other reactions on the list (compliance, non-compliance, apathy) present challenges for attaining the broad-based agreement that is needed for a vision to become shared by the organization.

The process of growing a vision from an individual to an organization does include several challenges. An abundance of divergent views may weaken focus and create conflicts in the organization. The gap between the shared vision and the current reality may discourage people in the organization. People may forget that they are part of a collective whole and lose their connection to each other.

Sharing visions may require innovative ways to collaborate. In this article from the Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2011/07/are-you-a-collaborative-leader), Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, Inc invited all 5,000 employees to a virtual off-site management meeting. The results were immediate: conversations erupted that involved the entire company. The dialogue continued for weeks and contributed to a more empowered, mission-driven company.

Other advice for sharing a vision comes from a blog article written by Veena Amin of Empuls (https://blog.empuls.io/organizational-vision/). In the article, she includes the following advice:

• Unify the organization: The leader’s job is to find and bring together all parts of the organization to communicate the vision.
• Engage everyone: Once everyone is brought together, the leader should communicate with everyone, even if their role is not seen as important or central to the organization.
• Set context: Good leaders find a way of connecting the vision to the current state of the organization.
• Shift control: Refinement of the vision involves a collaborative approach, and that often means sacrificing control. Some control at the organizational level may have to be removed to allow this to happen.

In working through these challenges while creating a shared vision, the organization improves other disciplines. The shared vision will approach the ideal reality through personal mastery. The process of personal mastery changes the mental model of the organization. We will see that the process to set personal mastery in motion to accomplish the mental model change to a shared vision is team learning. Let’s examine what team learning entails.

Team learning

When looking at the journey of personal mastery from the current reality to a shared vision, individuals need to undertake that journey through learning. In the beginning, that learning is done on an individual basis. Effective groups eventually pool together and learn as a collective. This convergence is team learning.

Achieving team learning is not done through group training. The primary mechanism of team learning comes from opportunities for organizations to have frequent discourse. This discourse can take the following formats:

• Dialogue: This type of discourse allows the organization to reach a common understanding
• Discussion: This type of discourse is usually the exchange of different points of view, followed by examination, usually to see which point of view prevails

In both formats, the organization tries to look beyond an individual’s understanding to reach a common understanding. Multiple points of view are often exchanged. The key difference between dialogue and discussion is that dialogue allows for alternatives to emerge, while discussion has a single point of view: winning.

Senge talks of three necessities for having dialogue as part of achieving team learning:

• The ability to take assumptions, examine them, and move beyond them
• All participants are able to look at each other as colleagues and equals
• Having a dedicated facilitator that can hold the context of the dialogue for the group

With the preceding components, a leader can keep the group learning through dialogue. They help the group maintain ownership of its objectives.

Another mechanism for team learning is the awareness of defensive routines. Defensive routines may emerge as groups become aware of the gaps between the current reality and the shared vision. A good facilitator can recognize defensive routines and deal with them in the following manner:

• Inquire directly with the organization about the causes of the problem
• View defensive routines as a sign that team learning is not occurring

An example of team learning is mob programming. This practice was developed by Woody Zuill as an extension of the practice of pair programming. In mob programming, one member of the team takes the role of the driver, while the other team members assume the role of navigators. The driver performs the main task, often writing code, while receiving feedback from the navigators. After a set period of time, the driver role rotates to another team member.

Mob programming is effective as a team learning method because, as the team collaborates, they learn and share new insights at the same time.

As teams learn together and gain a common understanding of the shared vision and change mental models, the fifth discipline, systems thinking emerges. Let’s look at this final discipline, which allows a learning organization to really flourish.

Systems thinking

Systems thinking is the change in perspective that learning organizations attain through proper practice and skill development of the other four disciplines. Learning organizations can look at themselves and see the components and interconnections.

Systems thinking comes from the culmination of effort in starting and improving on the other four disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning). At certain points, the organization achieves a certain level of maturity in the discipline to expand into systems thinking.

When individuals are tuned to their individual personal mastery, they start seeing the whole and their role as part of that collective whole. This awareness is a necessary part of systems thinking.

The awareness of the collective whole affects the mental models that individuals have established. The individual mental models transition to a shared collective mental model of the learning organization with roles defined.

The change to the collective mental model paves the way for a shared vision for the organization. The members of the organizations become committed to this shared vision. They work together in dialogue with a team leader to learn how to move the shared vision throughout the organization and expand that vision to include everyone in the learning organization.

A way of visualizing systems thinking is the iceberg model. As detailed in this article from ecochallenge.org (https://ecochallenge.org/iceberg-model/), systems thinking resembles an iceberg, where only 10% is visible above the water and the 90% that is below the surface affects the part that is visible.

The iceberg model details the following four levels:

• The event level: This is the only visible layer in systems thinking. This represents our perceptions of the outside world.
• The pattern level: This level attempts to explain our perceptions at the event level.
• The structure level: This level explains the causes of the patterns we are observing.
• The mental model: This represents attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions that create the structures.

As a learning organization that employs the five disciplines, members work and learn more about themselves and how to improve in a never-ending quest of discovery. The organization incorporates new learning regularly to continuously improve. Let’s see what that journey looks like through the use of the Improvement Kata.

Applying the Improvement Kata

The Improvement Kata is one of the patterns that came from the Toyota Production System and is described in detail in Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results. In the Improvement Kata, we follow a path toward improvement by examining the following four steps:

1. We envision our ideal future state.
2. We examine our present state or condition.
3. We determine the next target that brings us closer to the ideal future state.
4. We run an experiment, evaluating and learning in a Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) or Lean Improvement Cycle to see if the results bring us closer to the ideal future state.

An illustration of the four steps of the Improvement Kata is as follows:

Figure 9.1 – Improvement Kata

An example of teams using the Improvement Kata is an Agile retrospective. A retrospective is a meeting held at regular intervals where the team considers the following questions:

• What has gone well?
• What has not gone well?
• What actions should we take (including keeping things that work) to improve?

The first two questions allow exploration of the current state and the future state. The third question sets in motion actions to move the team to its ideal future state. In Scrum, these actions are added to a team’s backlog of work so that the team can work on them. In this way, the team is moving toward the ideal state using the PDCA cycle of learning.

Moving to the ideal future state target by target requires continuous experimentation. This experimentation is done in learning cycles that follow the PDCA format. Let’s look at what happens in each Lean Improvement Cycle.

Closing the Lean Improvement Cycle

Continuous improvement is at the heart of Lean thinking. Improvements should be built into future efforts and measured for their effectiveness.

For our value stream to have this approach, it must view its efforts in terms of a cycle of learning. The most popular model of this cycle is the Lean Improvement Cycle or PDCA cycle.

This cycle was associated with W. Edwards Deming, who called it the Shewhart cycle after Walter Shewhart. This cycle is illustrated in the following diagram:

Figure 9.2 – PDCA cycle

As shown in the preceding diagram, the cycle has four phases of activities:

1. Plan: Determine what iterative step to take. This may be a step in a backlog that is ranked high in priority. Formulate the hypothesis of what outcomes may happen if this step is implemented.
2. Do: Add the step to your value stream’s workflow.
3. Check: Examine (or keep examining) the metrics you measure for your value stream.
4. Act (or Adjust): Did performing the step achieve the hypothesis? If so, keep the step. If not, you may need to pivot by formulating another hypothesis.

This cycle can be performed over both short and long durations of time. In SAFe®, a team practicing Scrum on an ART will perform this cycle every sprint to improve the team and work with the other teams on the ART to perform this cycle every program increment or PI.

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how value streams can follow the Third Way by adopting continuous learning and experimentation. We saw how this starts by looking at the journey organizations take to become learning organizations. They hone their learning through the five disciplines of personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and ultimately, systems thinking.

An approach for learning organizations to move toward their shared vision is to follow the Improvement Kata. In the Improvement Kata, after the desired future state is determined, the current state is identified. The value stream then identifies a target and an experiment to run. The experiment is run in a PDCA cycle, and the learning is applied to see if the value stream is closer or farther from the desired future state.

A Lean Improvement Cycle or a PDCA cycle is used in the Improvement Kata as the framework for experimentation. The value stream plans the experiment, runs through the experiment, and checks to see if the results validate the experiment’s hypothesis. Based on the results, the value stream will make adjustments.

This completes Part 2 of this book, where we saw how to align our work in value streams, how we measure the effectiveness of the value stream at delivering value, and how, based on the value stream’s metrics, we proceed down a path of continuous learning to improve the value stream. In Part 3, we will look at how a value stream in SAFe, embodied as an ART, performs the tasks of delivering value through the marriage of process and technology known as the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

Questions

Test your knowledge of the concepts in this chapter by answering these questions.

1. In personal mastery, what creates tension with the vision?
   1. Virtual reality
   2. Current reality
   3. Desired reality
   4. Past reality
2. What types of discourse facilitate team learning? (Choose two)
   1. Conflict
   2. Dialogue
   3. Lecture
   4. Discussion
   5. Soliloquy
3. Which is the first step in the Improvement Kata?
   1. Determine the ideal future state
   2. Identify the present state
   3. Identify a target
   4. Execute PDCA cycles to iterate to target
4. What does the C represent in the PDCA cycle?
   1. Conclusion
   2. Cease
   3. Check
   4. Capital

Further reading

• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping your Business Win by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr – We’ve used this book and its Three Ways to discuss how value streams are created and maintained.
• The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge – The reference when learning about how to be a learning organization.
• https://valshebnik.com/blog/left-hand-column/: This article provides an excellent description of Left-Hand Column Analysis, including definition, examples, and dangers.
• https://hbr.org/2011/07/are-you-a-collaborative-leader: This article looks at how leaders can collaborate and share with their companies.
• https://blog.empuls.io/organizational-vision/: This article looks at sharing an organizational vision, the benefits, and tips and tricks to do so.
• https://ecochallenge.org/iceberg-model/: An article describing the Iceberg Model, which illustrates Systems Thinking.
• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results by Mike Rother – Detailed method for the Improvement Kata.