Sustainable Learning in the Workplace. A model developed from research in the Automotive Supply Sector

Those caveats having been placed, I do notice people having certain kinds of "failure modes." I regularly see methodologies and projects fail for not taking these human characteristics into account. We can build systems of people that are less likely to fail by explicitly taking these characteristics into account. The five failure modes to take into account are people · Making mistakes · Preferring to fail conservatively · Inventing instead of researching · Being creatures of habit · Being inconsistent Making Mistakes That people make mistakes is, in principle, no surprise to us. Indeed, that is exactly why iterative and incremental development were invented. Iterative refers to a scheduling and staging strategy that allows rework of pieces of the system. Iterative development lets the team learn about the requirements and design of the system. Grady Booch calls this sort of learning “gestalt, round-trip design” (Booch 1994), a term that emphasizes the human characteristic of learning by completing. Iterative schedules are difficult to plan, because it is hard to guess in advance how many major learnings will take place ...»