Why Mile 20?
What is Mile 20? Why does it exist?
I founded Mile 20 in late 2022 as a vehicle for my work helping people along their journey towards high performance and deeper meaning in their lives. Over the last 12 years, I’ve helped hundreds of people, teams, and organizations and almost all of them wished that things were better: that it was easier to get things done, that they could be more successful, that they were happier - the list goes on and on.
I know we can get better. I’ve been there and I’ve done it! As an example, let me share my journey from workplace noob to the owner of my own company.
My professional career began as a technical writer for a small CRM software company in Boston. Essentially I was able to take my love of writing and make money doing it: a win/win! The only problem was that most of our busy customers didn’t have time to read what I was writing. The documentation was necessary but not immediately valuable: what did help people was the support I gave over the phone. Over time, I began translating this guidance into webinars to solve common problems. I became a teacher without knowing it!
Only ~8 of us worked for this small start-up company, so we worked as an Agile Team, meaning that (among other things) we all met every morning to align on what we needed to do in order to meet our short and long term goals. Everyone’s expertise was welcomed, and it was exciting to see how quickly we could move. I was hooked; it was obvious to me that Agile was the future of work and I started learning as much as I could about it.
My next stop was completely different: a large corporation of 14 thousand people, working for a small team delivering just-in-time training. Gratifying work, but I started to notice that even if my team delivered quality training (which frankly we did often), we usually didn’t see an improvement in student performance. Why not? Well, a dirty secret in education is the forgetting curve: Students forget an average of 70% of what they are taught within 24 hours of the class! And this number gets worse as time goes on. The only way to defeat the forgetting curve is to reinforce or support learning. (This is why you often get reminders and follow-ups after classes.)
This led me to investigate performance support: how can we help people apply what they are learning both during and after the training? There are two techniques:
Active Learning. Use hands-on activities, gamification, and group discussion helps make knowledge stick. Even better, encourage participants to make mistakes along the way - your brain more easily remembers what you learned when things go wrong. My favorite book on this is Sharon Bowman’s Training from the Back of the Room.
Reinforcement. Creating continual touch-points where students are asked to recall the training and how they are incorporating it into their lives. This practice lead me directly into coaching.
All of these threads merged together when I attended a a truly transformational workshop based on Lyssa Adkins Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa defines an Agile Coach as “...someone who takes teams beyond getting agile practices up and running, and into their deliberate and joyful pursuit of high performance.” Such an inspiring and meaningful purpose! Such brilliant and helpful techniques! I had found my calling: I became an Agile Coach.
From there, I’ve refined my approach - I’ve become certified in multiple agile methodologies, have learned how to coach teams and entire enterprises, and am close to achieving my professional coaching certification with the ICF. Currently, I mix coaching, mentoring, facilitative leadership, and teaching together - usually but not always in an Agile context - in service of helping people get better at what they do and accomplish their goals. I’ve done this for years inside large corporations. Now I’m expanding to serving individuals and smaller organizations.
Thank you for reading! Take a look around. I’d love to work with you, so please send me a message and let me know what challenges or opportunities you’re working on. We can build good things together!