I'm excited to kickoff our case study series, where I'll post a short case study each week highlighting fast and smart hyperlearning organisations.
This week's hyperlearning organisation is Shopify, an all-in-one commerce platform powering over 1,000,000 businesses worldwide.
What sets them apart:
- They frequently talk about building a learning organisation, to help them cultivate the right skills and mindset to scale from 2 to 4,000+ staff.
- They focus on a growth mindset, that emphasises effort over innate ability. And they help people move from a fixed to a growth mindset through coaching and sharing wins and fails via an internal podcast.
- Thriving on change is one of their core values and they speak to it during the hiring process.
- They believe the quality of an organisation can be measured by how it responds to "bad" things that happen. The CEO, Tobias Lutke, takes it upon himself to purposefully break things such as randomly turning off web servers to see what happens and how teams respond!
Finally, Lutke gives this great example of responding to change. Each year Shopify holds a developer conference in San Fransisco. One year, on the second day, the power went out. He said we could have cancelled but we decided to push on. So they moved to the parking lot. No PAs or anything so people just got into small groups and talked about specific topics. He believes five new companies were started that day just from networking and he thinks developers got way more out of that day than they would have in a single track at a conference.
What organisations have you seen that have a learning mindset and thrive on change?
