Learning through Agile Values: Driving Growth and Development in the Modern Organization

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

In the long run, the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.

Peter Senge

In 1990 Peter Senge released a book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. At the time this book was released, many of the core ideas were out of balance with existing leadership practices. The book predated the Agile manifesto by over 10 years, however much of Senge’s ideas are aligned with agile; collaboration, adaptive capabilities, retrospectives, awareness of change, self-organisation, and crucially how companies need to excel at effective learning throughout the organisation. Over 30 years on and it is evident that what Senge advocated has become mainstream in successful organisations.

Spotify which is a very successful agile 21st-century organisation, has put Senge’s ideas into action to help the digital music company grow. Spotify decentralises the development of their ‘Spotifiers’ (employees), it is upon the ‘Spotifiers’ for their own learning and to collaborate with colleagues for peer-to-peer training. Another successful company, AstraZeneca has ambitions of implementing a culture of lifelong learning to enable the business to be adaptive to future challenges. Why…