Continuous Learning

1

Developing a Culture of Learning

The pace of change in our market and on the web in general forces companies to adapt fast. To be adaptive as an organization, that organization must intentionally engage in Continuous Learning.

When you learn as a team, you become more adaptable and achieve much better results, especially when the pace of change is fast.

Teams that learn quickly are more adaptive than teams that don't.

Adaptive teams are teams that can get better results, by rapid response to change.

2

A BIT OT THEORY

TO START WITH

3

Levels of learning

3 levels of interdependent learning:

1. Individual

2. Team

3. Organization

4

Continuous Learning at Individual Level Learning requires time and effort, as well as the decision to want

to learn.

Make individuals understand the value of continuous learning, and how it will not only help the organization, but most importantly, it will be a great benefit to the learner as well.

Examples: trainings, coaching and mentoring, seminars and workshops, also through actual application and practice of skills and knowledge

5

Continuous Learning at Individual Level

Continuous Learning at Team Level

Means collective individual learning: if the members of the team acquire and share new knowledge and information, then team learning takes place.

Involves a set of learning processes that support and aid team performance

Examples: team sharing or training, agile retrospective, feedback, experimentation, group discussions, and Q&A sessions.

6

Continuous Learning at Organization Level

Comprises change of interaction patterns, change of policies and procedures, new culture and new innovations.

Example: feedback from the employees themselves, from clients, and from customers. Getting comments and ideas. Culture and Change Management. Processes.

7

Agile : a learning laboratory

Agile means that teams must first become skilled atlearning as a group: Retrospective

Auto-organization: estimate, design, self-management

Safe space: safe to take risk. Experiment / trial-and-error: failor succeed.

Agile teams are in fact small Learning Organizations.

8

Scaling Agile at enterprise level

Very complicated task. Hard to achieve.

Agile teams operate in a safe space for learning.

Creation of enterprise-wide safe space is a non-trivial problem to solve.

Tribal Learning: start below the enterprise, above the team, by Managers, for groups of 20 to 150 people.

9

Models of expertise

Dreyfus Model

10

Shu-Ha-Ri

Introduced by Alistair Cockburn

Aikido reference

Shu : follow the rules (learn)

Ha : master the rules (become a master)

Ri : break the rules (create new rules, innovate, surpass the master)

11

10 000 h Model

10 000 hours of practice are required to master a discipline. Controversial model.

But practice is key to learning. Practice, practice, practice.

A professional poker player plays on average 100 000 hands a month / 17 hands per minute.

12

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE TO A CULTURE OF CONTINUOUS LEARNING AS A MANAGER

13

Be Purposeful / Announce your intent

State your purpose early and often. Make it easy for those who follow you to understand your vision, your mission and your intent.

This clarity helps everyone around you, and increases levels of group learning.

Explain. Again and again.

14

Facilitate and Game Your Meetings

Optimize the meeting and presentation process, by guiding the members to share and achieve a common goal and action plan

Make meetings fun, enjoyable, and engaging by gaming them.

Try other types of meetings, such as Open Space Meetings

15

Examine Your Norms Normal is what you willingly tolerate. Examine your norms,

because what you tolerate is a minimal level of what you insist on.

What you insist on is more likely to happen. Insist on norms that encourage greatness.

Encourage good group behavior on top of Agile patterns to facilitate meetings and group work: paying explicit attention,

being punctual,

honoring Scrum values: Focus, Commitment, Openness, Courage, and Respect.

16

Examine Your Norms

Be Punctual

Punctuality associates with focus, commitment, and respect; these in turn associate with individual and group greatness. The whole group cannot learn together if the whole group is not present.

Punctuality as a norm explicitly devalues lateness and tardiness. It takes openness and courage to establish punctually as a norm.

17

Conduct Frequent Experiments

Frequent experimentation means frequent learning. Make learning into a game, by scheduling frequent, cheap experiments. Failing cheap means learning economically.

18

Manage Visually / Be Playful

Use visual artifacts to convey messages and influence thoughts and perception.

Play games to get work done. Use games for simulation, work, and learning.

19

Inspect Frequently / Pay Explicit Attention

Use iteration and frequent inspection to make a game of change. Inspect and retrospect frequently at all levels.

Pay attention to what is working and what is not. Zoom in on details and focus on results. Discuss with the specific intent to be excellent.

Retrospective at all levels.

20

Coach and Get Coached

Coaching helps the learning process and is a best practice. A coach will see what you do not and cannot.

21

Understanding Delays

Delays in achieving good results are common.

Good steps taken today usually do not have an immediate positive effect. The truth is that you often get worse before you get better, because of the investment period.

22

Bad Moves Make You Better, Then MUCH Worse

Example: adding more people to a late project.

So use practices thatproduce small resultswith low delay.

Experiment cheaply.

Avoid the tendency to backslide to old habits, even if changing ispainful.

23

Values

1. Serve Others

2. Be Purposeful

3. Communicate Honestly with Respect

4. Create Relationships

5. Increase Learning

6. Be Open-Minded

7. Adapt to Change

8. Create Fun

9. Be Focused, Committed, and Courageous

24

CONCRETE IDEAS FOR A CONTINUOUS LEARNING ORGANIZATION

25

Mini-training cycle

30 min weekly: 20 min presentation + 10 min question.

Any speaker, any topic.

Raise team awareness about continuous learning

Explore new topics with curiosity

Improve communication skills by being a speaker in a safeenvironment

26

Blogs / Intranets…

Internalo Share, Communicate, Serve Others.

o Increase Learning

Externalo Promote your Engineering team,

Motivate, hire, retain top engineers

o Contribute to team learning and performance, by reflecting, formalizing and sharing our practices (with the peer pressure of making it public)

o Attract external contributions

27

Conferences & Meetups

Be a speaker or participate to conferences and meetups.

• Learn and discover

• Meet other people. Createrelationships.

• Open your horizon

• Share your knowledge and experience

• Become thought leaders

28

Hack Days / Innovation Days

Take some time off to make a break and innovate:

Take 1 day to build prototypes, demo them, vote for the best and reward the best team, follow up to put in production the best ones.

Be creative

Work with other developers and with business teams

Learn and have fun

29

Monthly Lab Days

Regularly organize days where developers are allowed to do other stuff (IT intelligence, training, clean up code, prototype, code for external projects, write blog articles…)

Agenda for each person to be explicit.

Auto-learning

30

Bug Fixing Day

Organize a one-day contest where all developers try and fix as many bugs as possible. Reward the best bug fixers.

Have fun and be productive together.

Reduce bug count.

31

Developer Exchange Program

Switch developers between teams or companies to share and learn.

Discover and learn other practices

Be open-minded

Create relationships

32

Pair and Mob Programming

Pair Programming is 2 developers working together: eitherfor mentoring, or between peers on a complex topic.

Mob Programming: is an extension to a whole team to collectively train the team to a new technology or architecture.

http://mobprogramming.org/

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/09/03/weve-done-a-3-days-mob-programming-at-betclic/

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/09/23/mob-programming-angularjs-dojo/

33

Code Dojos & Coding Katas

Train your programming skills with small exercises, challenge your abilities and encourage to find multiple approaches.

Play with code without fearing any consequences! Also discover & learn new methods, areas, algorithms, languages, libraries ...

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2015/04/29/coding-dojo-the-fruit-shop/

https://github.com/Betclic/CodingDojo-Katas

http://codingkata.net/

http://www.cyber-dojo.com/

http://www.codechef.com/

34

Brown-Bag Lunches

Invite an external expert to come and speak to the team (and offer him lunch).

Another opportunity to learn, from the experts.

http://www.brownbaglunch.fr/

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/10/10/bbl-an-introduction-to-f-by-pierre-irrmann/

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/05/12/bbl-code-refactoring-by-david-gageot/

https://techblog.betclicgroup.com/2014/04/08/bbl-on-xamarin/

35

Lunch & Learn

Invite outside people for lunch. Informally. No Agenda.

Trigger the discussion with your guest to learn and explore new things.

An informal version of the brown-bag lunch.

36

Ciné-Goûter / Watching tech videos at tea time Watching together and commenting a video from a

conference.

Drinks and cookies.

You can do it during Lab Days.

37

Ciné-Goûter / Watching tech videos at tea time

IT intelligence

Take some time to review state-of-the-art blogs and articles, based on your interests and learning domains.

Build your own RSS library of feeds

Use twitter as input

Share with others on the blog.

Auto-learning

38

External projects

Encourage senior dev to participate in external projects:

http://www.codeplex.com/

https://github.com/explore

http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm/

Open-Source your internal tools.

Learning with others

Practice other areas of coding

« Peer pressure » on code cleanup

39

Programming and Logic Puzzles

To tickle the brain and challenge yourlogical/mathematical/programming skills http://programmingpraxis.com/

http://projecteuler.net/

http://www.topcoder.com/tc

http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

http://rubyquiz.com/

http://uva.onlinejudge.org/

http://www.spoj.pl/

http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/riddles/intro.shtml

40

Play & Learn

Make IT fun: set up avatars, trophies, points…

Game what you do: coding, meetings, learning…

http://www.playmaking.org/

http://fr.slideshare.net/portiatung/the-powerofplay36

People learn better while havingfun

Create relationships

Create fun41

References

The Culture Game, Dan Mezick

http://www.exforsys.com/career-center/performance-development/importance-of-continuous-learning.html

http://adulted.about.com/od/onthejobtraining/p/whatsinitforyou.htm

http://managementhelp.org/blogs/training-and-development/2011/06/06/how-many-steps-to-continuous-learning-none/

Tribes & Chapters (Agile at Spotify): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018963/Articles/SpotifyScaling.pdf

42

We’re changing the world… one password at a time

Dashlane wants to make identity and

payment simple and secure everywhere!

43

Want to be a part of life in the Dashlane?

Visit dashlane.com/jobs for all the info!

Dashlane is a premier, award-winning password manager and

digital wallet, intrinsically designed to make identity and payments

simple and secure on every website and every device.

We’re a rapidly growing, tech startup using the world’s best security

and privacy architecture to simplify the lives of more than 3 billion

Internet users worldwide.

Since our first product launch in 2013, our brilliant team of engineers and developers tirelessly work on new coding challenges, build code using

the latest up-to-date frameworks for native development across desktop and mobile, use cutting-edge web service architecture, and are at the

forefront of building applications that help millions of people every day!

So far, all of our hard work has been paying off! Dashlane was recently recognized by Google as one of the “Best of 2015” apps! Google also

recognized our Android password manager as an Editors’ Choice winner on the Google Play Store, and selected Dashlane to demo its adoption

of Android M fingerprint technology at Google I/O!

We work with the latest technology!

See our code in action! Check out some of our

projects on Github!

Github.com/Dashlane

In addition, each member of the Dashlane team can take some time to

share his insights in Tech Conferences and become a thought leader

in the tech community.

44

Alexis Fogel

@ Droid Con

Goo.gl/7h4guk

Emmanuel Schalit

@ The Dublin

Web Summit

Goo.gl/M4H7vg

Emmanuel Schalit

@ Le Wagon

Goo.gl/kvPLG0

Desktop Mobile Web App/Server Security

Dashlane is dedicated to building high-quality user experiences on Mobile, Desktop, and on the web using the latest up-to-date

technologies and languages.

Ready to join #LifeInTheDashlane?

We’re filling our ranks from top to bottom with

some of the smartest and friendliest developers

and engineers in the industry! Come join us!

Visit Dashlane.com/jobs to learn more about

joining the Dashlane team!

45

Dashlane.com/stackoverflow

Dashlane.com/linkedin

Dashlane.com/vimeo

Dashlane.com/blog

Also visit us here: