As a seasoned and multidisciplinary engineering consultancy, it is natural to gravitate towards prioritizing standardization and consistency over innovation and flexibility. But we intentionally wanted to maintain a culture of innovation and adaptability. With senior commitment to deliver on a radical new approach to learning and harnessing the talent and investment already in existence across the organization we surveyed the market to find what learning solutions would be suitable.

We looked to the agility and growth-driven mindset of successful startups for inspiration.

Start-ups are agile and apply lean approaches to product development. They incorporate iterative ways of thinking about a problem that involves trial and error while remaining laser focused on getting the job done. Initial attempts often come up with solutions that do not work. But these are then adapted for another attempt and do a little better. Eventually, they end up with a minimum viable product that may not do everything desired, but get the job done now.

What would such an approach adapted to learning look like in practice? At Howard Humphreys it meant crafting a solution that was agile and responsive to the learning needs of the business, could be quickly integrated into the-flow of work, was targeted at meeting specific learning objectives, and could be iteratively improved upon based on feedback.

This took the form of a sprint, a concept rooted in the world of start-ups, that implements time boxed exercises focused on achieving a particular outcome as quickly and effectively as possible. We applied this concept to learning!