Dojo Loop

A team can't learn a new way of working on a two-week feedback cycle. The Dojo Loop compresses the sprint to two and a half days, so the team runs plan, do, share, and reflect twice a week.

Overview

The Dojo Loop is the iteration rhythm inside an experiential learning engagement, the six-week dojo challenge. The dojo community calls each iteration a hyper-sprint: two and a half days, two per week. Twelve iterations in six weeks give a team twelve chances to try a practice, show what happened, and decide what to change. Each one is a turn of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, run at team scale.

If you know Scrum or XP, the shape is familiar. The differences are in the beats. Each one carries a learning job alongside its delivery job:

• Plan. Pick the work and the learning attached to it. Minutes, not hours.
• Do. Most of the iteration. Real work, done collaboratively and slowly enough to notice how you’re doing it.
• Share. Show stakeholders what you delivered, what you discovered, and how the team is growing. Collect feedback without negotiating it.
• Reflect. Process that feedback and the team’s own experience, then feed it into the next plan.

Every beat feeds the next. Feedback from Share is raw material for Reflect, and Reflect’s output is the first input to Plan. Skip a beat and the loop turns back into an ordinary sprint with a shorter deadline.

When to Reach for It

Use the loop when a team is adopting practices it hasn’t done before: mob programming, test-driven development, continuous delivery, story mapping. The short cycle keeps experiments cheap. A practice that fails costs two and a half days, not a quarter.

It needs protection to work. Stakeholders agree up front to lower delivery commitments for the challenge, and the team gives the dojo its full attention. Run hyper-sprints for a team that is also fielding production interrupts and you get the stress of the tempo without the learning.

Resources

• Experiential Learning — the engagement model this loop runs inside
• Framing — the charter that sets each challenge’s product and learning goals
• Scaling a DevOps Dojo at Target — the loop at a dozen concurrent teams
• Shifting Left to a T-shaped Team — one team’s experiment inside the loop