Today by the campfire I thunk a thought to share with you.

If a simulation teaches something about real life, how much more does real life teach?
(Profound, huh?!? <grin>)

Put another way: if people can learn so much from a simulation why can’t they learn the same lessons from real life?

Of course, they can.  But most don’t.  But imagine if you could?

Each project would be a source of new learning.
Each outage would hold new learnings.
Each success and failure would act as a schoolmaster, opening new lessons for you and your team.

You need to turn experiences into learnings.  And you need to learn how to help your team do that.

If you could do that your team would be unstoppable.  

Honestly, that was probably the biggest lesson I learned from conducting the workshop.  Learning how to guide your team from experiences into learning is probably the biggest meta-takeaway the workshop participants got.

Agile retrospectives?

If some of you think this sounds like the goal of an agile retrospective, I would agree with you.  But I rarely see them accomplishing that goal.  Learning how to guide your team to take an experience to a new learning takes some skill and practice on your part.  And participating first hand is a great way to build that skill.

What would it look like if your team regularly learned from their experiences?