This article is part of a series: Learning Lessons from Stanley Cup and Super Bowl Champions. Previous piece in this series: What Does Your Organization Have in Common with Elite Sports Teams?
By now, hopefully you’ve realized that the best athletic teams grapple with many of the same learning challenges that you face:
- Your team’s learning matters for performance
- You need to spot knowledge gaps early (before they hurt performance in the field)
- Your training needs to be flexible and adapt to changing conditions on the ground
So how do the best teams approach these challenges?
They use a training process that we call Agile Learning.
You may have heard of Agile in the context of software development. It’s an approach that has driven massive innovation at tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. What many people don’t realize, though, is that the inspiration for Agile came from the world of sports.
Agile Learning is a continuous training process that consists of many fast, focused learning cycles. In sports, a single cycle might be 1 week long.
Think about a football game as a type of assessment – a public, very high-stakes test. We capture and analyze every facet of performance.
After the game, the coach has 1 week to help the team train for the next game. That’s 168 hours. How should the coach allocate that time? Where should the team focus first?
Rather than moving a millimeter in every direction, teams that implement Agile Learning prioritize relentlessly. They use assessments to identify the most important areas to focus training, and then they zero in on that concept until the team reaches mastery.
Then, they move on to the second most critical topic, and the cycle repeats: fast, focused, and powerful.
We built Learn to Win to bring Agile Learning from elite sports teams to the rest of us. We believe that everyone should be able to train as quickly and effectively as the best pro teams.
4 Agile Learning Lessons (even if you’re not headed to the Super Bowl)
How do you implement Agile Learning at your organization?
At Learn to Win, we’ve observed 4 best practices across our sports clients. Our corporate customers have implemented these training approaches with great results:
