Equipped with my graphic board, pens, sunglasses and shorts I set sail for the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. Having attended two awesome gatherings in the past, the bar was set high – however, I was far from disappointed.
From the offset, co-chairs Anu Smalley and Kate Megaw knocked it out of the park by entering the stage to the sound of ‘Starman’ by David Bowie, whilst wearing convincing spacesuits complete with helmets. This was their genius way of setting the Gathering’s theme ‘Infinity and Beyond: Transforming the World of Work’. With three tracks on offer, ranging from beginner (‘Mission Control’), intermediate (‘Orbiting the Earth’), to advanced levels (‘Agile Galaxy’), there were more than enough sessions to choose from for all 1100 attendees. Let’s not forget that this was the largest Scrum Gathering so far.
Although each session had a unique offering, there was an obvious key topic that resonated from all talks. During the CST/CEC retreat ‘Agile Leadership’ was introduced as a pressing subject, with one attendee keen to highlight the distinction between ‘Leaders’ and ‘Managers’. Brian Rabon reminded everyone that ‘Agile starts with Leadership’ during his opening keynote. A panellist on the PWC keynote pinpointed that any organisation would struggle without ‘Agile Leadership’, and Steve Denning went on to inform the audience during his ‘Agile Leadership’ talk that the key driver for ‘Agile Leadership’ is having a different mindset.
Leon Sabarsky identified during his ‘Extreme Scrum Hiring’ talk that an obvious flaw when interviewing individuals for team roles is to interview them on their own. His key takeaway was to move away from ‘One-on-One’ interviews by considering ‘Scrum Team group interviews’. This approach enables individuals to be assessed based on their engagement within the group, and demonstrate the qualities required for being an effective team player. It all comes down to good collaboration and communication, folks.
Leon noted that:
“the number one criterion that Scrum team members ought to be measured against is their Collaboration skill. It’s relatively easy to teach people a domain area, Agile methods and a specific technology. However, I can’t teach someone to collaborate well. They either have it or they don’t. If they don’t, they will reduce team effectiveness and cohesion over time.”
Another talk with an interesting twist was ‘Scrum Team CRM: Aviation Crew Resource Management Techniques for Scrum Teams’ by Thomas Friend. Using the narrative of flying aircraft, Thomas made strong comparisons between ‘Aviation’ and ‘Scrum’. Once again, the underlying message here was good communication.
During the Gathering another inspiring movement was unfolding. A group of passionate Agile Educators met face-to-face to carve out a manifesto for Agile that is authentic to Education. With a variety of case studies demonstrating how Agile values and principles have been adopted within an educational setting showing proven success, this group of innovative leaders were making a difference. They set out to define a vision and values for what resulted in the ‘Agile in Education Compass’, an inspiring model for how education can respond to the modern world with agility.
Once again, I had the opportunity to take to the pen and draw key insights from beginning to end. The canvasses enticed the crowds, and people soon took to Twitter to share the learning and store the visuals as a reminder of the Gathering.
Alongside this, on the final day, I couldn’t resist suggesting an Open Space topic around the use of ‘Graphic Templates’ which can assist coaches and facilitators in communicating with pictures. The session was a great success and those that attended were satisfied with their newly gained visual skills.
“Visuals speak volumes, this workshop encouraged me to draw and take these skills back to my team.” – Lynda Menge (workshop attendee)
Whether you wish to enhance your facilitation skills, make collaborative design thinking a key enabler within your team, or simply gain the confidence you need to draw live in front of an audience, join me for a one-day ‘Innovation through Visualisation’ workshop in London on the 1st of June or Atlanta on the 24th of July.
My final point on what drives so many people to attend the gatherings: passion and the desire to collaborate and share ideas. People attend these fantastic events for the discussions and seeds of information that are shared over breakfast, and last well into the evening over a cold beer, the networks that grow, and the desire to continue to collaborate way beyond the event.
I look forward to sharing some ideas with you at the next Scrum Gathering.
By: Stuart Young from Radtac
http://www2.radtac.co.uk/blog/scrum-gathering-orlando-through-the-eyes-of-a-live-illustrator/
What Rugby Can Teach You about Trust in Agile Teams
Unconditional support, trust, respect, generosity, and courage are the behavioural values required for agile—and also for rugby. On the surface, the software development methodology and the rough team sport may seem to have little in common. But Luis Novella writes that rugby can actually teach you a lot about agile.
When I recently joined an agile team, I suddenly realised I had actually been implementing agile for a few years, just without leveraging the branding. It wasn’t until I listened to Johanna Rothman speak that it dawned on me: Not all things called agile are truly agile, and there are a lot of practices that are agile but are not categorised as such.
Once I understood what agile really means, I realised that I’d seen many of its central tenets contained in another system that’s important to me. Unconditional support, trust, respect, generosity, and courage are the behavioural values required for agile—and also for rugby. On the surface, the software development methodology and the rough team sport may seem to have little in common, but in this article, I’ll show you that agile and the sport of rugby are alike where it really counts—and understanding how to be a team player can improve your career as well as your game.
Trust in Your Teammates
Rugby teaches you to find the most optimal, collectively intelligent strategy within a group of diverse and versatile individuals. When everyone has this mindset, you get sustainability, innovation, and the pleasure of working with a team fully engaged toward a common goal. Overall, rugby is a decision-making game that focuses on shared leadership, and many types of it. It assumes that individuals will be specialists for certain tasks, but they will have the contextual intelligence to make the best decisions for the team based on a deep sense of self-awareness and consciousness of the other team members and the progression toward the goal. Sound familiar?
Despite having played a few rugby games here and there when I was younger, I never imagined the endurance of the behavioral blueprint the sport could generate in a high-performance team. I would argue that the training provided by rugby in terms of behavior is useful regardless of what agile technique or method best fits the particular challenge.
One of the key elements is trust and unconditional support between team members. Despite 160 years of updates, improvements, and new laws, rugby teams at any level still function the same way: When the player with the ball makes a decision, every single teammate actively supports and engages with his position and the context, aiming to provide the best options for the ball carrier (who is always the boss in rugby, if you are into the boss concept). Every player trusts that the decision-maker will make the best choice based on his vantage point, opposition, position on the field, and available support. Once a decision is made, everyone on the team makes the maximum effort for the result of that decision to accomplish the best outcome for the team.
The decision-maker also trusts that everyone behind him will be attentive and available. He believes that if his execution fails, no one will recriminate him; instead, he will be supported. In rugby, you inevitably “fail fast” and make plenty of decisions that turn out to be negative, but you know your innovation was encouraged and respected by the team. Your team trusts that you did the very best you can. They also trust that you have trained and prepared yourself to have been in the best possible condition to play.
Trust releases many opportunities in life. You can innovate and create. You can surprise the opposition. You can discover abilities in your teammates that you did not know were present.
I have had the advantage of working with business leaders who have the courage required to embark in agile transformations the right way—to really and truly happen, change has to start at the top, and the first one to change has to be the inspiration leader. In my opinion, this trust and ability to innovate and err generates pleasure in what we do. It makes our work open and helps us measure and get feedback, because you also trust that the people around you want to make you better.
Just like rugby, agile is a learning system in constant change played by a collectively intelligent team, and the team’s every move is enabled by trust.
By: Luis Novella from the Spark Team
https://www.agileconnection.com/article/what-rugby-can-teach-you-about-trust-agile-teams?page=0%2C1
Gig Economy
You could drive yourself steadily insane compiling a list of all the trends that were supposed to fundamentally reshape business. Once upon a time we were all “flexi” workers, then “mobile learners”. Both terms seem antiquated now, the corporate equivalent of a Segway – perfectly sensible in principle but somehow faintly ridiculous in reality.
What makes the “gig economy” – the legion of individuals taking on piecemeal work, enabled by online talent platforms – feel different is that it’s being driven not by hip early adopters in co-working spaces (though there are plenty of them involved too) but by genuine need, both in the “real” economy and, crucially, in boardrooms.
If you were staffing a major new project from scratch today, it would seem an act of faint lunacy to bring in a raft of full-time employees with cumbersome overheads (and personal taxes) when you could go online and find experienced, verifiable individuals you could pay by the hour and dispose of when required. Similarly, if you were a coder, IT contractor or other technical specialist, why would you harness yourself to one organisation when you could enjoy both variety and a more lucrative income hopping from gig to gig (along with the attendant tax advantages of being self-employed)?
So many businesses are waking up to this recalibration that 450,000 people with full-time jobs now have second jobs, many of them via TaskRabbit, Elance or their multitude of competitors. PwC has tried to cut out the middleman by setting up its own talent “market” of registered suppliers its offices can bid on. There are individuals in greater London making a handsome living assembling flat pack furniture on a piecemeal basis for an hourly rate – an occupation that would have been almost logistically impossible just a couple of years ago.
You can understand the appeal of living by the gig, beyond the financial benefits. The conventional career has been an awkward fit for many people over the years, and few jobs are capable of maximising all our skills and intelligences. Besides, most work is boring, which is why those lucky enough ever to have had a job for life employed the conversational repertoire of the prison system (“putting in hard graft”, “serving your time”) to describe it.
Gigs, by contrast, are exciting and ever-changing, even though they ask some deep questions of the psychological contract (why would I exercise discretionary effort for a business that only employs me for a matter of days? Can I trust someone who could work for my biggest rival tomorrow?). But they aren’t an untrammelled good, either. For every actuarial scientist earning a small fortune for a short-term job, there’s a hotel chambermaid who is now being paid by the room rather than the day. The huge rise in self-employment in the UK has as much to do with businesses shifting such workers – we should include the small army of couriers and delivery drivers in this calculation – off their books as it does people discovering new freedoms. Palpably, none of them are enjoying the benefits of the gig economy, not least because they cannot practically control where and how they work. They are left, instead, to feed on scraps.
Uber, the erroneously attributed poster child of the gig economy, faces a legal challenge over whether its drivers are technically employees. It maintains they are self-employed. This is a vital point for the courts to consider – cycle couriers and plumbers are engaged in similar cases – but in Uber’s case we should also note that it controls the supply of drivers into the market, and their pricing. This is assuredly not the “freedom” gig economy enthusiasts speak of.
Governments will have to decide the legal and ethical boundaries of such behaviours, not least because if gigs take off, their tax revenues will rapidly vanish. Already, there is serious talk of the need for a third kind of classification, between “employee” and “self-employed” which recognises the shared responsibilities (both financial and relating to holidays, sick pay and other benefits) between giggers and those they work for.
Pioneers like Wingham Rowan, who runs the Beyond Jobs consultancy, are trying to imagine a market that will ensure the gig economy brings mutual benefits and conveniences without being open to abuse. Businesses who want to enjoy the flexibility such arrangements provide should not absent themselves from such discussions – but neither should they fear this will turn out to be just another fad.
By: Robert Jeffery, Editor of People Management magazine