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The Power of Immersive Learning: Elevating Scrum Mastery in Your Organization

Unlock your team’s potential with immersive Scrum training! Discover practical insights and transform learning for effective team development. 🌟🚀

Published on 22 November 2023

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

6 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/jXk1_Iiam_M

If you’re an organization that invests heavily in training—especially if you’re supporting a large number of people trying to step into the Scrum Master role—then immersive learning should be at the top of your list. It’s an investment that can dramatically increase your team’s effectiveness. Unlike traditional training, where learning can quickly fade, immersive learning helps people internalize the knowledge and put it into practice immediately.

Why Immersive Learning Outperforms Traditional Training

In traditional training, participants are bombarded with concepts and theories. You learn something new, then quickly move on to the next topic, and before you know it, you’ve forgotten 80% of what you just learned. At the end of a typical training, only a handful of actionable tips remain in your mind.

But here’s the issue: while you might increase the overall baseline knowledge in your organization, how much of that training sticks? And more importantly, how much of it gets put into practice?

The Key Benefit of Immersive Learning

Immersive learning goes beyond simply absorbing information—it ensures that participants practice what they’ve learned. This is where the real value lies. By giving your team assignments based on real-world scenarios, they’re able to close the loop on their learning. They don’t just learn; they do.

Here’s how immersive learning achieves this:

Hands-on assignments: Participants are given practical assignments that they can implement with their teams right away.
Closing the learning loop: Teams return after completing their assignments to share their experiences and lessons learned.
Knowledge sharing: Through collaboration, Scrum Masters can learn from each other’s successes and challenges.

Closing the Learning Loop

In immersive learning, the loop isn’t complete until knowledge has been applied. The concept is simple: you learn, you apply, and you reflect on the results. This method ensures that the learning sticks and becomes part of your daily practice.

Without closing this loop, the vast majority of training becomes lost in theory, never seeing the light of day in real-world scenarios.

Imagine this scenario: you attend a traditional Scrum Master class, learn about the Definition of Done, but never actually implement it with your team. In immersive learning, you’d take what you learned and go back to your team with a specific assignment: “Talk to your team and develop a Definition of Done.” You then return to the next session and share how it went—what worked, what didn’t, and how you might improve.

Practical Assignments and Real-World Application

One of the most valuable aspects of immersive learning is the practical assignments. Let’s take the example of the Definition of Done. It’s one of my favorite topics because it directly impacts the quality of the product you’re delivering.

Example Assignment: Crafting a Definition of Done

A typical assignment might involve the Scrum Masters going back to their teams and facilitating a discussion around the Definition of Done. If your team doesn’t have one, then the Scrum Master’s role is to help create one. Here’s a step-by-step approach they might follow:

Talk to the team about their current understanding of the Definition of Done.
Facilitate a discussion to define what “done” really means for the team and their product.
Document the Definition of Done and ensure it is clearly understood and agreed upon by the team.
Put it into action by ensuring that every story or task adheres to this definition moving forward.

If the only outcome from an immersive learning session was that all of your Scrum Masters returned with a well-crafted Definition of Done for their teams, that would be a massive win for your organization. Quality would improve across the board, and teams would have a much clearer understanding of what’s expected.

Real-Time Feedback and Continuous Improvement

One of the biggest advantages of immersive learning is the real-time feedback. After completing their assignments, Scrum Masters come back to the next session and share their experiences:

What did you do?
How did it go?
What challenges did you face?

By sharing their experiences, Scrum Masters get feedback not only from the facilitator but also from their peers. This collective learning experience enables teams to refine their practices in real time.

For example, let’s say 12 Scrum Masters from the same organization take part in the immersive learning class. They each go back to their teams and work on creating a Definition of Done. When they return, some will have succeeded, while others may have faced roadblocks.

Why were some Scrum Masters more successful?
What could the others learn from them?

These are the kinds of questions that lead to breakthrough insights and improvements. By pooling their knowledge, Scrum Masters help each other tackle organizational challenges.

This knowledge-sharing element is often overlooked in traditional training. Immersive learning creates an environment where teams can learn from each other’s experiences, both successes and failures. It’s common for one team to say, “There’s no way we can implement that here—it just won’t work with our organizational constraints.” Then, in the same session, another team might say, “We do this all the time and it works great for us.” This sparks conversations and new ideas.

💡 Real-World Tip: When one team discovers a way to implement a Scrum practice successfully within the bounds of organizational constraints, it’s worth having a cross-team discussion to spread that knowledge. This is where the power of immersive learning comes into play.

The Value of Immersive Learning for Your Organization

So, why should your organization invest in immersive learning over traditional training? The answer is simple: effectiveness. Immersive learning ensures that knowledge isn’t just taught, but practiced, shared, and refined.

Key Takeaways

Immediate application: Teams apply what they’ve learned through practical assignments.
Continuous feedback: Real-time feedback ensures that Scrum Masters can improve and iterate on their practices.
Collective learning: Teams learn from each other’s successes and challenges.
Real impact: Concepts like the Definition of Done become part of your organization’s DNA, improving quality and alignment across the board.

If your goal is to elevate the skills of your Scrum Masters and embed Scrum practices deeply within your organization, immersive learning is the way to go.

Ready to Revolutionize Your Training Experience?

At [Your Company Name], we specialize in immersive learning experiences that transform teams and organizations. If you’re ready to take your Scrum training to the next level, book a call with us today, or check out our list of public immersive classes. We’d love to help you achieve your training goals. 🚀

This approach to learning isn’t just about knowledge—it’s about action and impact. Your organization deserves training that sticks. Immersive learning does exactly that.

If you’re an organization that buys lots of training, especially if you have a large cadre of people in your organization that are currently trying to do the Scrum Master role, then the most valuable purchase you could make is immersive learning. The reason that’s much more valuable for your organization is that it gives the people in your organization the ability to close that loop on their learning.

So normally when you’re training, you learn something, and then you learn something else, and then you learn something else, and by the time you get to the end of that process, you’ve probably forgotten 80% of all of the things that came before. Maybe when you come out of that training class, there are a few actionable things—those hints and tips and topics and stories and how-tos. There’s only maybe a few of those you can actually try. You’ve increased the level of baseline knowledge in your organization; everybody now understands perhaps what Scrum is and what a Scrum Master is. But have they actually internalised any of those learnings, and how much of those learnings are they actually able to put into practice?

The key additional value in immersive learning is in allowing the people in your organization to actually put the things into practice. We enable that in the form of assignments. Each person in the class is given an assignment; it’s probably the same assignment for everybody. But if you’ve got a bunch of Scrum Masters you’re bringing to the class, they’re going to go off into their teams, either with their teams or with their leadership, in that area, in that context, and they’re going to try one of these exercises.

An assignment might be, oh, I’m trying to think of what an example assignment might be. My favourite topic is definition of done quality. Are we creating enough quality in a product? One of the assignments might be to go talk to the team and ask them about their definition of done, and if they don’t have a definition of done, help them create one and put it into action. That could be an assignment for a Scrum Master to do. If the only thing that came out of the entire class was that all of your Scrum Masters and all of your teams had a definition of done and it was actually actualised, then that would be a total boon for your entire organization in enabling that level of quality.

But that’s just one of the exercises that we might do, one of the assignments that the teams might get. Not only do they do the assignment, but they come back at the beginning of the next session and explain what they did, how it went, and what problems they ran into, closing that learning loop again. They figure out, well, you didn’t get the outcome that you wanted; here are some other things you can try. That can come from both the facilitator of the debrief and from the other people in your organization who’ve actually done that thing inside your organization.

If you bring 12 Scrum Masters to a training class and those 12 Scrum Masters all go and try to do this definition of done, some of them will be successful and some of them won’t. Some of them will be very successful, and some will only be a little bit successful. So why were certain Scrum Masters successful, and why were others not? How do we bring that knowledge together so that they can assess for themselves what other ways to do things?

Because quite often, I’ve done a lot of private training classes, and you find that even inside an organization, one person will say, “No, there’s no way you can do this thing; it’s not possible within our organization.” Then there’s somebody over in one of the side videos who will say, “We do it; our team does that, and we do it very well within the bounds of the organizational constraints.” Then the other person is like, “Holy crap, how do you do that? Who do you speak to? How can we get some of that as well?”

Even that sharing of knowledge—“We’ve tried something; it works here; it doesn’t work here”—and closing those feedback loops, bringing those conversations together, are the whole reason that the immersive learning classes are going to be much more beneficial to organizations than the traditional approach.

If you want to have a discussion about how immersive classes can revolutionise your training experience, then please book a call on our website. Alternatively, you can find all of our public immersive classes listed there as well, and we would love to hear from you.

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