Why Your Learners’ Agility Is More Important Than Your Own

I’ve covered agile software development methodologies in a favorable light from a journalisticperspective for a number of years, and last month at The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2016 Conference & Expo, I was thrilled to see Megan Torrance promoting the use of agile’s best practices in the trainingindustry. The agile manifesto, compiled more than 15 years ago, is hardly outof date today in its principles or core tenets—and her explanation for whyagile has just as much of a place in the development of modern, innovativetraining offerings made perfect sense.

When Torrance asked her DevLearn 2016session attendees, “How many of you are using or are looking to start usingagile?” maybe a third of the room of 60 or so raised their hands, and in alater interview she told me that was one of the highest numbers of agile usersshe’d ever seen when asking that question. Agile is not being used by everyone in training today, and even as an agiledevotee, I can admit that’s … okay. After chatting with some in the room tolearn how their agile journeys were going, answers ranged from “Awesome” to “We’rehaving some difficulty scaling” to “We’re really in the early days and are justtrying to keep our heads above water.”

I believe that one of the reasonsthat software and training development teams have both such success and difficulty with agile is that it’simpossible to find a single definition or approach to agile that the world canagree on. While this ambiguity enables anyone “doing” agile to find thecollection of methodologies, processes, and tools that work best for theirneeds, this can also result in aspiring agile practitioners becoming confused aboutwhere to begin, or having difficulty knowing exactly what they’re evenbeginning.

When asked who would be willing justto define agile, even fewer handswent up in Torrance’s class. There might have been three willing participants,and I was one of them. Torrance’s own definition was solid enough: “A collectionof tools and techniques that result in better products for our customers.” But,again, with that level of freedom when it comes to choosing that collection of tools and techniques—especiallyat a conference where seemingly every expo vendor is promising “better productsfor your customers”—you can see why agile confusion runs so rampant.

Personally, even though the Merriam-Websterdefinition of agile is just asambiguous in its meaning, I think it’s better than any others I’ve heard—especiallywhen those looking to become more agile realize that the secret is firststriving to improve the agility of their customers.

According to Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary, agilemeans:

1 : ableto move quickly and easily

2 : quick,smart, and clever

• an agile mind
• an agile writer
• an agile thinker

While training or softwaredevelopment organizations technically never “become” agile (it’s a goal younever stop working toward), their customers can absolutely reach this state ofnirvana, and prioritizing theiragility over their competition’s—or even your own agility—is how you get there.

Think about it. What abilities andqualities do learners need? All of the above. With “change” being a synonym of“move,” and the business world around your learners changing every day,learners themselves must be agileenough to easily keep up with—or ideally, to stay ahead of—those changes.Whether it’s moving from an outdated process to a new one, launching a new softwarefeature to your business partners or customers, or changing the way supporttickets are handled, the agility of your customers to quickly adopt thosechanges should be priority numberone.

And it very well may turn out that giving yourselves “the ability to move quicklyand easily” is the key to giving your customers that same power. Your agilitywill likely impact that of your learners, but let’s not get so hung up ontrying to answer, “How do we becomemore agile?” and then assuming your customers’ agility will follow. I believethat the training industry, and the software development industry as a whole, wouldbenefit by being able to report the increased agility of their customers, andnot just of themselves.