Building competence

As shown in Why this works, competence is crucial! If we don’t keep building competence, our model will probably stop working in the long run.

Fortunately, Syncopate is built around individuals who love learning anyway, so it’s really just a matter of making sure nothing gets in the way! So we don’t have training budgets and approval processes and things like that, we just trust people to manage their own money and take responsibility for their own competence development.

Here are some things we do to keep learning:

• ShareIt - a meetup where someone presents something interesting that they’ve learned recently (see above).
• GDWS - Get Drunk With Syncopate - a pub night that happens from time to time
• Invite our favorite gurus and rock stars to come to Sydney and teach courses or co-train with us
• Peer-coaching workshops, where the agile coaches meet to help each other solve problems
• Active mailing list and chat
• Write articles
• Create and teach courses (gives the teacher a very strong motivation to learn the topic!)
• Pair-coach and pair-teach - lets us steal tricks from each other
• Share all course material with each other (mostly via Dropbox and Google Drive)

Some of these forums are very active and some less so, it varies over time. But it sure adds up to a lot of opportunity to learn!

At the end of the day, though, it’s up to each consultant to reserve the time needed to learn new stuff, and not always be 100% booked up with grunt work.