Book Notes from 'Coaching Agile Teams' by Lyssa Adkins
Surplus Ideas Required
- Needing a surplus of ideas
necessitates a creative environment
- Team members will not come up
with the breakthrough ideas when under constant pressure to produce.
- "The challenges in
organizations start with the frenetic pace many people feel compelled to
maintain"
- Breakthroughs come when
people take the time to stop and examine their assumptions.
- The sprint review and
retrospective build in the pause to crucial for breakthroughs to break
through.
- Assumptions are thought to be
fact until one hears an alternative viewpoint and then realizes their fact
is only one of many ways to view the previous sprint.
- It becomes possible to see
new ways of working - maybe even breakthrough ideas for creating products
that make a difference.
- Help each person see how they
can best collaborate with the whole team.
Build the Team's
Collaboration Muscle
- Allows them to engage in the
messy and joyful work of collaborating.
- The team needs you to help
them get collaboration going.
- Collaboration behaviors
- Build up instead of breaking
down
- Hear all voices
- Play together
- Nurture collaboration
intimacy -- ect
- Adopt collaboration behaviors
Start with Team-Level
Cooperation
- Help the team discover what
they need to know about each other to achieve cooperation.
- What each person brings to
the team:
- Skills
- Talents
- Desires
- Work preferences.
- Having a shared goal - puts
them in each others business.
- We want them to be
interdependent - they must converse about the best ways to meet their
shared goals and produce something that makes them proud.
- Cross functional abilities of
each team vary according to the current skills
- Nudges the team in the
direction of becoming more cross-functional.
- We are pushing the edges of
people's perceptions of themselves.
- To produce more and better
results together
Allow them to Speak the
Unspeakable
- Makes it acceptable for team
members to speak out about things that make them feel vulnerable or
uncomfortable.
- Unexpected capacity but
hasn’t mentioned it, teach the whole team to say "I have bandwidth to
give today"
- You notice some team members
seem to be struggling alone for hours on end.
- No one spends more than 30
minutes struggling with something before asking someone else to join
them.
- "Hey im spinning my
wheels. I need help"
- Result - more work done
better and with a sense of 'being in it together'
Push Them to Build Up
Instead of Breaking Down
- Through re-conceiving - the
team makes new unpredictable ideas.
- Encourage re-conceiving
wherein we build up ideas - not break them down.
- Create safety for them to do
so, specifically by:
- Demonstrating tolerance for
failure.
- Refraining from punitive
exercises of power.
- Participating in team
processes rather than imposing rules.
- Two types of behavior kill
synergy:
- People saying more than they
know
- People saying less than they
know.
Make Hearing All Voices the
Norm
- In team conversations an
agile coach draws out the quite ones and shushes the dominating ones.
- As long as what you offer the
team supports openness and transparency.
Nurture Collaboration
Intimacy
- Cognitively intimate team
members can sense and anticipate individual and group level
misunderstandings in the perception of new material.
Model Faith in Emergence
- To be of greatest service to
teams, an agile coach must become free from personal agendas.
- Collaboration works when one
gives away one's own ideas to the group and allows that idea to be just a
piece of a bigger idea yet to emerge.
Help Them get Unstuck
- Help them get unstuck by
offering ways for them to get back in touch with one another so the ideas
can flow again.
A Refresher
- Let the team grow -
- Make a conscious decision
with the team about whether they need collaboration to get their work
done.
- Focus on individuals first
when you start to build cooperation.
- Call it when teams slide back
into non-collaborative behaviors
- Step out of the center and
let the team collaborate on their own.