S6 | 522: The Dojo model and its transformative effect with TEKsystems, Part 1

Digital StrategyTechnologyConversational AI

May 13

About the Episode

In the evolving landscape of today’s professional world, the pressing need for continuous skill development has never been more apparent. In this series we’ll dive into how the Dojo model transforms an organization’s learning culture.

I’m excited to introduce part 1 of a special series on continuous skill development, brought to you by TEKsystems, a global provider of business and technology solutions.

To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Danny Lopez from TEKsystems.

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Resources

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Transcript
Greg Kihlström: Welcome to Season 6 of The Agile Brand, where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience trends, insights, and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data, and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer-focused, and sustainable. This is what makes an Agile brand. I'm your host, Greg Kihlstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on Martech, Marketing Operations, and CX, bestselling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that my latest book, Priority is Action, Seven Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions and Outcomes, is now available. In it, I give ideas and insights for leaders and teams that need to make meaningful progress on their priorities. After all, our priorities are what we do, not what we say we'd like to do. You can find Priority is Action on Amazon or learn more on my website, gregkillstrom.com. Now let's get on to the show. In the evolving landscapes of today's professional world, the pressing need for continuous skill development has never been more apparent. In this series, we're gonna dive into how the dojo model transforms an organization's learning culture. I'm excited to introduce part one of a special series on continuous skill development, brought to you by TechSystems, a global provider of business and technology solutions. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Danny Lopez from TechSystems. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about your background and what you do at TechSystems?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, thanks for that, Greg. So my background is everything for the past decade plus. It's been agile, product development, DevOps, CICD, cloud. And all of those have been just very much interconnected for me over the past 10 years. And what I'm doing now at TEKsystems is taking all of that background, and we've built out a full offering, which is called our Technology Plus Business Agility Dojos, which really kind of wrap all of those things together and help some of our clients solve some of their most important really business problems with the underlying technology that's supported in the modern enterprise today.
Greg Kihlström: Great. Great. So, yeah, let's dive in here and talk some more about this. So, where did the concept of a learning dojo stem from? Yeah. So,
Danny Lopez: People think dojo, they automatically think of martial arts. And that's where it comes from. You go to a martial arts dojo to practice and learn from a sensei. It's hands on. And what we've done is we've taken that concept of a dojo and martial arts, and we've built a technology and business agility flavor of that dojo where You know, you bring teams in and we get hands-on practice. It could be in cloud, it could be in software development, it could be in DevOps, it could be with leadership. But the main point is that it really comes from the traditional martial arts practice, and we really challenge folks to learn by doing. We like to kind of align with adult learning theory, which says that people learn best when you apply actual coaching and training to their actual work. And so that's what we do in our dojos. And that's kind of where it comes from.
Greg Kihlström: Great, great. So what strategic objectives does the dojo model aim to achieve? And how does that align with the overarching business goals in technology and beyond in those organizations?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, so good question. So I kind of want to start off with a high level. So our tagline in the dojo, it's learning while delivering. And so teams are really getting the opportunity to practice and change on their daily work. Now, in terms of the strategic objectives, there's a couple of different things that leaders are looking to solve for right now. The first one is around upskilling their current workforce. So staying ahead with emerging technologies in software development or AI, cloud, a variety of technologies. So they're trying to figure out how to do that in-house and how to get all their folks really upskilled. The second part is a lot of companies are going through a ton of change right now. So what do larger organizational change efforts like DevOps, Agile, Cloud First, even bringing in, again, the emerging AI technologies, How do we get all of those implemented at a larger level at scale? And so we think the best way to describe this is we're going to bring those in-house for you with your teams while practicing on their actual work. So I have a lot of leaders say like, hey, Danny, I can't take three months in a dojo just to train my teams. And we say perfect because we're actually not going to train. We're going to take a look at your existing backlog and start to implement some of those either new technologies, new ways of working, whatever it is. We're going to teach your teams how to deliver in a different way while learning. So it's kind of like learning while doing in a C1, do one, teach one framework. When I'm speaking with a lot of CIOs, CTOs, senior leaders, they're trying to solve for a few major problems right now. So the first one that we're seeing that's really common is that they're trying to figure out how to do more with less. So how do we upskill our current organization? How do we become future ready? And how do we really start to think about the next iteration of both technology and business challenges? That's kind of like one of the overarching themes is doing more with less. The upscaling and becoming future-ready organization, that's the next piece. And then I would say the final one is really around organizational change. You have a lot of companies right now that are trying to do things like, how do we build a product-centric culture? Or we've been doing agile for the past 20 years, and we need to think about becoming a product organization. What does that mean? How do those play together? How do they work together? So we kind of combined this idea together that we want to help build the teams and their skill sets. We can help with a larger kind of organizational level change. And then finally, it's really about building the future ready organizations from not just the team level, but think leadership level, you know, first line, second line, all the way up to the C suite. So kind of those larger transformations, and that's, you know, the dojo is that vehicle for larger organizational change.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so, you know, obviously, this method was created and adopted because of some challenges and perhaps limitations of some of the traditional learning methods. What are some of those challenges and limitations? And, you know, maybe a follow up to that would be, you know, is this also something that kind of sits on top of or works together with some traditional learning methods? You know, how might those two things work together?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, so, you know, I want to say that a lot of organizations, they'll start at the right place, which is training. And training does a great job of setting the foundation, you know, creating a common vernacular amongst an organization, really making sure everyone has that baseline level knowledge. Now, just, you know, how many times has this happened to you, you go through an awesome training, you take some great notes, you're like, Oh, man, I can't wait to get this done back in the working environment. You get back to your laptop, whether you're working at home or back in the office, You're like, how do I really apply this now? You're kind of stuck sometimes. You may know how to do a few things, but you may be stuck with a few others. That's where the dojo actually builds that complementary we'll call it a complementary approach to training. So after training is done, or after you have that baseline knowledge, we bring in our expert level coaches to actually practice what you just learned in your actual environment. So an example of that is maybe you just learned AWS Cloud or GCP. you learn a bunch of stuff, you're an engineer, you get back, you're like, okay, what do I need to do now? How does this implement with my CICD pipelines? What do we need to think about doing in terms of software development differently? How do we actually make the migration happen? So our coaches will come in, we do what's called a see one, do one, teach one method. So our coaches are highly versed in a number of areas, they'll show you how to do it for a little while, then they'll take a step back, and give you some practice with guidance, again, in your actual work environment, then after that, the actual people going through the dojo, they're going to be challenged to go out and teach others to make sure that it really, not only that it sticks, but that they're helping other parts of the organization to learn and grow.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, and building on that, then another issue, particularly with larger organizations, is that of scaling, right? So to kind of build on what you just said, how does this model address that very real challenge of scaling in either just a large organization in general or across multiple teams within an organization?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, scaling is always the big question because when we work with some of the senior leadership, they're like, okay, let's start off with a proof of concept where we pilot out agile product management and some DevOps work with, let's call it, three to five teams. Now, in all of our cases, most of our cases, it goes really, really well. And then clients say, OK, I have 80 teams where they need to become high-performing, modern product, DevOps, agile, cloud, whatever it might be. How do we scale this out to the rest of the 80 teams? So there's a couple different things that we do. The first is, after that proof of concept is complete, we'll want, in most cases, not all, we'll likely build out, we'll work with our training partners to make sure that everyone gets engaged with all of the learnings that the teams in that proof of concept just learned. So building out custom training, getting all of the teams engaged. And then from there, there's going to be some teams that go on a couple different routes. So after that training, or after we kind of get all the teams engaged, the first route they can go on is what we call the DIY. So the do it yourself route, where, okay, you know, we have some baseline product management practices in place, we're going to try to go do it ourselves. Now, a subset of that group, they may go into our dojo route, which means they'll need some more hands-on guidance, some more dedicated coaching, and we're going to guide them through the process every step of the way with our see one, do one, teach one method. That's really going to accelerate them. And then we also have an additional route where we build kind of our, it's a dojo apprentice program or a dojo sensei program. within our clients organization where we say, okay, let's identify some really high performers. And we're going to turn them into coaches and champions, and have them go out and help the other teams that may not be on that DIY path right now. So we have a couple different mechanisms that kind of get, you know, the organizations and all of the different teams, not just engaged, but moving together collectively. And if they're on that DIY route, and it's not working out very well, no problem at all. We can either get them engaged with some of the in-house apprentices, or those teams are more than welcome to circle back and come through the dojo as well.
Greg Kihlström: And so, you know, you've touched on leaders involvement in this process. But, you know, wondering if you could talk a little bit more about, you know, what is the role of leadership in not only implementation, which I think you touched on, but also sustainability of this dojo model within an organization? Yes.
Danny Lopez: So it really, really starts with leadership. So we actually have full leadership dojos, meaning we've worked with organizations to get their leadership aligned at the top level before they go into any type of team level execution dojos. So that could look like, you know, how do we really lead in a modern product centric environment? How do we think about our new product taxonomy? How does our communication and leadership style really need to evolve with this change? So if it's more at the team level, we're making sure that the leaders are involved from an organizational change management perspective. So we really want them to do a few things. We want them to, one, set the stage and the foundation for, hey, teams, we're going through a dojo. More importantly, here's why we're doing it. Here's how we're going to engage. And here's all of the expected, all the expectations for you as a learner coming through their dojos. The second piece is we want them actively engaged. So we run, in most cases, we'll have sprint reviews. Depending on the product that the organization is building, it could be cloud, it could be something on the DevOps side, whatever it is, we want the leaders to attend those so they can see the actual value that their teams are building in the dojo. Because we're challenging the teams to deliver and build in a different way, and we want the leaders to actually see that and provide feedback. So we always say that we don't just want the teams going through the dojo. Because we actually had that very early on where we built help to build some very high performing teams and the leader wasn't connected. So when the leader, you know, got back in touch with the team after going through the dojo, six to 12 weeks later, they're like, wow, this is a whole different team. I'm not really sure how to lead these folks. And so for that reason, we started having the leaders be a part of it, you know, being respectful of their time, but making sure that they understand how to lead kind of in this new way of working.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. And so you've talked about some of the some of the benefits of the the dojo culture approach. But, you know, in terms of benefits, with immersive learning, is there anything else that helps to foster skill, mastery, collaboration, you know, some of these other things.
Danny Lopez: Yeah. So we're all about practice by doing practice, practice, practice. That's what we like to say in the dojo. It's all about muscle memory. But in terms of the skill, mastery, collaboration. So one of the things that we do in the dojo is we're not building dummy products. We're not building dummy databases or cloud instances, anything like that. Again, we're taking an actual business problem that our clients need to solve, and we're putting the teams through the dojo to solve that business problem. It could be in their existing backlog that they have today, or it could be a completely separate problem to solve for the business. But either way, they're getting practice in their actual environment. So a couple of things that we do as we're practicing towards skill mastery. The first thing that we do is we create a very safe space for these teams to experiment. to learn fast and fail fast. So we want them to experiment with different ways of working. We want them to experiment with different ways of software development or DevOps or CICD, whatever it might be. So psychological safety is a really big piece. So we're working on a couple different things. they're going to gain skill mastery in whatever technology stack they're in. But the second part of that is we're working on the mindset and the culture. And all of those three are very much interconnected in skill mastery. So we want to build a team that works together, that solves problems together, and they're growing their skills together. So we're not teaching them so much what to think, but we're coaching them on how to think and how to solve problems for the future. And all of that repetition over the dojo really contributes to, you know, skill mastery in those different areas.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so then that leads to measuring effectiveness, right? As you know, all of these things working together and having alignment and leadership alignment, you know, what are some recommended ways of measuring the effectiveness of the dojo method?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, definitely. So first and foremost, we are super data driven in our dojos, to the point where some customers that we've worked with before, they had never seen these types of metrics and dashboarding come out of like some of the teams they've been working with for years. So one of the first things that we do when we kick off our engagement is we try to understand And it will be different for every single team. That's really important to understand that every team has their own unique set of metrics and the things that they measure for effectiveness. So what we do is we'll go in, and if it's a software development team, we might look at things like defect ratio or any of the door metrics. So mean time to restore, deployment frequency. they may or may not have those in place. If they don't, we'll start to help them build out the baseline for those metrics. And what we do is we take a before and after snapshot. So if they had a deployment frequency of monthly before the dojo. Maybe we got that down to every two weeks. We'll show the actual snapshot, along with the time savings, along with any technical debt that was reduced along the way. So it can be very, very custom. We've actually had customers where we're helping them with mean time to restore. That's a pretty big one. Also, velocity for the teams that are working in Agile, we want to make sure that those are set up properly. But the metrics are really going to vary client by client, it's going to be custom to what they need.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so from your perspective, having not only run several of these dojos, but also been involved in other training methods, what makes a dojo better than some other methods that are geared at some of the same outcomes?
Danny Lopez: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of different ways to get to an end result. And I think it really comes down to what your organization is looking for. So the way I like to describe it in many instances is that Training, obviously, it will give you that baseline foundation if you're a learner who likes to be in a classroom type of setting where there's a lecturer, where there's someone providing some homework assignments. For some people, that works. There's other people, I'm one of these where I need to get some really hands on practice and guidance, whether it's something that's technology related, or maybe it's leadership related. I need to get some hands on practice on my actual work. And it really helps when you have that coach that's sitting there with you and saying, all right, Danny, here's a few things that I would like you to work on. Or if we have some of our engineering coaches working with some developers, they may be coaching them through unit testing and test-driven development and saying, OK, let's skip down to line 33 and let's refactor this code. And here's why we need to refactor this code. So it really helps to be in your actual environment, hands-on keyboard, hands-on roadmap, hands-on communication with that coach providing you real-time feedback. So we have that piece of it. In terms of an organization, the way that we consult and advise in our dojo is it's a little bit different. So in consulting, you may you have a couple different types of consultants. One, they're going to come in, they're going to kind of diagnose your organization. And maybe at the very end of it, they're going to leave you a nice, pretty report that says, here's these five things that you really need to go work on. And here's how you get there. Now, we take that a step further because we want to understand the organization's technology stack, their business challenges, we want to do that assessment, and we're going to help you get there step by step in our dojo, whatever journey that might be in.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, that's great. Well, one last thing, just wanted to see, you know, any parting thoughts or anything else we haven't had a chance to cover.
Danny Lopez: Yeah, I would just say that, you know, the dojo, it's, Again, it's one of many ways, but if you're looking to solve some of those higher level business challenges, we're really looking to combine business plus technology. So we always start off with client, what are your business problems that you're looking to solve? And then we backtrack from there and we start to look at the underlying technology. We had one client that was saying that we need to convert our leads by 50% in the next two quarters. After a little bit of a deep dive, we found out that it really has to do with some of their continuous delivery. some of their continuous deployments in DevOps. Now, it may not be the case for every single client, but I think the main takeaway is that we're coming with some thought leadership, strategic advisory that combines both business and tech that's going to kind of help organizations move and solve some of these bigger level business problems that they have.
Greg Kihlström: Great, great. Well, this has been a great conversation, Danny. I really appreciate you sharing your perspective.
Danny Lopez: Yeah, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Thanks for the time today.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, of course. Thanks again to Danny Lopez from TEKsystems. You can learn more about TechSystems and their perspective at TechSystems.com. Thanks again for listening to The Agile Brand, brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.GregKihlstrom.com. That's G-R-E-G-K-I-H-L-S-T-R-O-M.com. While you're there, check out my series of best-selling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics, or you can search for Greg Kihlstrom on Amazon. The Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina-owned, strategy-driven, creatively-fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile. The Agile Brand.