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How to Thrive (or Fail) in Building a Learning Culture

By Jeffrey Shupack, Harry Koehnemann, Jeffrey Fredrick, Steve Mayner, Thomas Limoncelli

A Leader’s Guide

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Leaders in today’s age of digital and AI are challenged by accelerating disruption to their existing customers, markets, and technology. To survive and thrive, leaders must foster a learning culture by finding ways to leverage and integrate knowledge, experience, and creativity across their workforce, supply chain, and the broader ecosystem.

Creating a learning culture is hard. We cringe when we hear horror stories, and we celebrate success stories. There is much to learn from both! This paper assembles patterns of behavior often found in learning organizations. For each pattern, we identify a key principle, illustrate it with stories of it being transgressed and stories of it being adhered to, and give specific actions you can apply tomorrow. Each learning pattern is independent from other patterns, allowing leaders to understand and apply them separately or in small groups, depending on their needs.

  • Publication Date September 26, 2023
  • Format PDF Download
  • Pages 23

Features

  • Clear Guidance

    The Fall issue of The DevOps Enterprise Journal collects guidance papers from the annual DevOps Enterprise Forum, which addresses the most pressing challenges facing the industry today.

  • Expert Authors

    The papers in this collection are written by teams of expert leaders, technologists, consultants, and more to provide proven solutions.

  • Business/Technology Alignment

    The DevOps Enterprise Journal shares evolving technology and architectural practices for better, safer, happier technologists and enterprises.

  • All Levels

    Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. These papers directly address how to lead and implement change no matter your role or title.

About the Resource

Leaders in today’s age of digital and AI are challenged by accelerating disruption to their existing customers, markets, and technology. To survive and thrive, leaders must foster a learning culture by finding ways to leverage and integrate knowledge, experience, and creativity across their workforce, supply chain, and the broader ecosystem.

Creating a learning culture is hard. We cringe when we hear horror stories, and we celebrate success stories. There is much to learn from both! This paper assembles patterns of behavior often found in learning organizations. For each pattern, we identify a key principle, illustrate it with stories of it being transgressed and stories of it being adhered to, and give specific actions you can apply tomorrow. Each learning pattern is independent from other patterns, allowing leaders to understand and apply them separately or in small groups, depending on their needs.

Jeffrey Shupack
Harry Koehnemann
Jeffrey Fredrick
Steve Mayner
Thomas Limoncelli
Jeffrey Shupack

Jeffrey Shupack

Jeffrey Shupack, president, Project & Team, is an advisor, speaker, and author who helps organizations improve efficiency in delivering complex products. Specializing in change management, AI, digital innovation, and fostering learning cultures, Shupack guides leaders to enhance operational flow, speed to market, and customer satisfaction. As a distinguished SAFe Fellow, he leverages proven methodologies from Lean/Agile, DevOps, design thinking, and organizational development to drive digital transformation. With decades of experience in bridging theory and practice, Shupack has delivered measurable, impactful outcomes across industries such as aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, finance, government, technology, manufacturing, medical, and oil and gas. He collaborates with Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. Shupack is also a published author in leading industry journals and a sought-after speaker at international conferences. Find his work at jeffreyshupack.com.

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Harry Koehnemann

Harry Koehnemann

Harry Koehnemann, Scaled Agile Inc., is a methodologist and SAFe Fellow. He helps organizations build and deliver large, complex systems faster, more predictably, and with high quality using SAFe. He has spent the past two decades working with large system builders in aerospace, defense, automotive, and other industries to apply Lean/Agile principles to their engineering practices, including systems engineering practices, quality management, and compliance.

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Jeffrey Fredrick

Jeffrey Fredrick

Coauthor of Agile Conversations

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Steve Mayner

Steve Mayner

SAFe Fellow and Principal Consultant at Scaled Agile, Inc.

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Thomas Limoncelli

Thomas Limoncelli

Thomas Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. He manages the SRE teams at Stack Overflow, Inc., and previously worked at Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, and others. His books include Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly), The Practice of System and Network Administration (3rd edition), and The Practice of Cloud System Administration. In 2005, he received the USENIX SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award.

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"As Enterprise Technology Leaders, we all know that when faced with the demands and time pressures of modern day business, one of the first things that falls by the wayside is our ability (both individually and collectively) to learn about new technologies, methodologies or processes but as the authors of this paper correctly state, paradoxically, it is exactly that learning that will give us the insight into the next step in the competitive evolution of the business. This paper contains clear guidelines for creating and maintaining a learning culture along with real life case studies that can be used immediately to direct the learning culture in your business."

Matthew Pickles

Data Consultant

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