The 4-Quadrants of Learning and Mastery

When learning something new we need 4 things to exist to have any hope of being successful:

1. Desire — I must want to learn it. We know from our days being forced to learn piano, play a sport or do whatever our parents wanted us to do, that being forced into this situation will cause ambivalence, resentment, and anger.

2. Motivation — I must be motivated to make the time to learn it. How often have we said we wanted to learn how to cook better, but we don’t make the effort to make the time to start learning? The desire remains just that, an unfulfilled want.

3. Practice — I must make time to practice new skills and techniques. Practice is the foundation for learning something new. Motivation and Practice are uniquely tied together as you must have the motivation to make the time to practice on a regular basis.

4. Patience — I must allow myself time to learn and master something new. Practice and Patience are also uniquely intertwined and without a patient approach to learning, we will most likely stop the learning process before we reach a level of mastery. How many times have you started to learn something new (ie playing piano) but gave up because you became frustrated? Providing yourself with patience will provide you with a way towards mastery.

Having been a professional musician and having a mastery of percussion as my instrument I have experience working in these four quadrants and I’m struck by how organizational change, especially the agile transformations I’ve been on aligns to these quadrants as well.

Unfortunately, they don’t align in a way that allows the organization to become what I consider operational agile, meaning the entire organization is changed and operational agility is the way the organization operates.

Instead, we see that there is a desire to use Agile, typically by the Technology group, but what we often lack on the motivation side is a desire for leadership to engage in a meaningful and knowledgeable way to affect the change needed to support operational agility. Leadership therefore lacks desire or motivation or both.

So, what we are left with is Agile transformations, that leverage frameworks that reside squarely in the Practice quadrant, and without true leadership support, we find that the teams that are doing ‘agile’ feel as if it was forced on them and they do what we did as children, rebel, become frustrated or simply become ambivalent towards working in ‘fill in the framework’.

To master agility requires that the entire organization have:

· Desire to accept and incorporate agility into their business operations.

· A motivation to learn new ways of working, no matter how uncomfortable they may feel.

· Time for people to learn and practice new ways of working, understanding part of learning is failing as you go.

· And finally having patience that operational agility will take time and will evolve. Changing the organization towards something new requires continual assessment of both what you want to get out of this effort and what success looks like.

To talk to me about helping your organization reach higher levels of operational agility and profitability contact me at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com