Status Updates From The Hitchhiker's Guide to A...

It turns out that for a proposal to be a safe-to-fail experiment it is essential to have a way of dampening the side effects, a kind of rollback plan.

Many companies have a static perspective on organisation.They believe that the current setup is stable and that any change requires energy.The more agile approach is to assume that change is inevitable: the question is in which direction to guide it.In the context of organizational change, avoid asking “Shall we try this particular proposal?” and instead try asking “Which of these proposals are we going to try next?”

As an aside, it can help to take a so-called “yes, and” approach and build on top of suggestions posed by the organization. (When changing.)

The team receives the rewards, and the managers are there to facilitate and support.

Traditional command and control organizations are often “business monarchies” or “technical monarchies” which means that managers or technical leads are accustomed to receive the rewards: they enjoy higher status, they provide directions and action plans, they decide who does what, they control the budget, they decide who is in the team and who is not and they can choose to share or withhold information.

Because the mere perception of predictability is what counts, people are happy to believe in project plans even if they rationally know that the software project failure rate is immense.

Certainty — Your perceived ability to predict the future.

SCARF describes low-level threat or reward scenarios in the amygdala: people unconsciously try to minimize threats and maximize rewards. We do this by tagging stimuli as either “good” (associated with rewards) or “bad” (associated with threats) and try to respectively approach or avoid such stimuli.
Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

And so we have evolved a mechanism for getting ourselves out of dangerous situations quickly and with a minimum of thinking. In fact, thinking is high on the list of things not to do.

Case studies for TCF

pg 106 Some nice examples of Coaching Cards

New agile teams tend to need help with their dysfunctions first. Only after they have started working well enough together as a Scrum team does it make sense to draw up goals and start working together towards them.

the retrospective is about learning and looking ahead, not about blaming and looking back.

An ineffective team that continuously improves will, in the end, beat an effective team that doesn’t.

During backlog refinement and sprint planning meetings, you should focus on facilitating — helping the team and stakeholders make great product decisions. After the daily standups, however, you have a great opportunity to grab five or ten minutes with the team following up on how they are doing short term. In the retrospectives, you can drive long term team questions.

Summary In this chapter, we discussed how teams differ from workgroups and we covered several different models for forming and developing teams and for identifying and avoiding common pitfalls. Team synergy and building up trust are so important that an agile coaching engagement can be considered an exercise in team building.

The normal timespan from starting out as a working group to becoming a high-performing team is between six to twelve months.

Examples: “Deliver as quickly and cheaply as possible” rather than “Deliver by Oct 15 and at a cost of maximum 1.2 million.” We have seen that relative targets work better than absolute metrics: “Improve the lead time by 15 %” rather than “Reach a lead time of 8 days.”

We have found that replacing individual incentives with team incentives helps a lot. It is also a good idea to base incentives on actual outcomes and make them win-wins rather than guessworkbased metrics:

Lacking broader information, people are unable to make good decisions and will instead push their own opinions and agendas.

In order to become a high-performing team, the team needs to set up personal professional development plans together. They will also need to know how to give and take feedback.

Real team — This is a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Members do not take responsibility for results other than their own, nor do they try to develop incremental performance contributions requiring the combined, real work of two or more group members. In other words, there is no synergy in the working group.

Working group — A working group is merely a group of people, for which group performance is primarily dependent on individual contributions. The working group is the sum of its parts but nothing more and there is little potential for improvement.

this kind of social intelligence requires a certain level of heed in the group members. Heedful people are attentive, observant, careful, respectful and helpful towards others. The more heedfulness in the system, the more developed the collective mind will be.

Teamwork does not happen by itself.

By anchoring the discussion in what has actually worked instead of what does not work, we can increase motivation and enthusiasm and pave the way for future learnings.

Design - Based on the wishes for the future and the best experiences of the past, we now examine which of the possible future situations will be of particular relevance to the team.

Discover - In this phase, you explore the past experiences of the team members with a focus on successful events and incidents.