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Plan

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 Learning Flow

Planning in a dojo takes minutes. Its real job is to decide who learns what, not who builds what.

Overview

Every hyper-sprint in the Dojo Loop opens with planning. Early in a challenge it runs close to half an hour, because the team is new to the pace and to its coach. By week three it often takes a few minutes. Finding the smallest useful amount of planning is itself a learning outcome.

Put all the work on the table

The team picks what to pursue next. That can be a user story, an investment in the team’s rig (say, building out the pipeline), or a one-off session like a platform team walking everyone through how to provision a cloud environment. If discovery is running, its work goes in the same backlog as delivery. No invisible work.

Check the plan against the team’s frame, its product and learning goals, and whatever discovery artifacts it has: story maps, journeys, example maps, event storming canvases. Then pull in what came out of the last Share and Reflect. Stakeholder feedback lands here first.

Start at a WIP limit of one

AI-era teams run small. For a team of three to five, start with a WIP limit of one, especially if the team mobs or pairs. Everyone sees how one item gets done end to end, and the coach has one group to work with instead of several. Raising the limit later in the challenge is normal.

Size, don’t estimate

Ask one question: does this fit in one two-and-a-half-day iteration, or two? Teams that answer it twelve times in six weeks learn to cut work into small slices without anyone lecturing them about it.

Volunteer across roles

The team decides who works on what. Volunteering beats assignment. Nudge people across their usual lines: if a story leans on development, invite the test automation engineer into that group. They build new skills, and the developers practice teaching, patience, and taking turns. Those are the habits that grow T-shaped people.

Resources

  • Dojo Loop — the full plan, do, share, reflect cycle
  • WIP Limits — why one item at a time speeds learning
  • Do — what happens once planning ends