Scale Your Product Not Your Scrum

I published an article on Scrum.org where I discuss how to scale Scrum without adding additional stuff but rather by applying Scrum itself at larger scale.

You can download the pdf here.

Finished my booklet EMERGENT

I finished my little booklet called EMERGENT.
It is booklet about Agile adoption. You can find it at http://www.leanpub.com/emergent

Coaching for Personal Change

Coaching works great for change. Coaching is asking the right questions. It is not about providing answers. Every time you provide an answer to a person or team you take away an opportunity for them to self-organize, grow and learn. You take away an opportunity for them to take ownership of the change and get engaged. In the role of the coach your task is to create awareness and responsibility. Your goal is to help them discover what needs to change, how to change it and to help them actually implement the change.

Illusion Of Control

“The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for instance to feel that they control outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.”

An interesting research on this topic, by Langer, Ellen J. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 32(2), Aug 1975, involves a lottery. People would either receive lottery tickets at random or were allowed to choose their own. Although the lottery is random, when people were asked to sell or trade their tickets, the people who choose their own numbers were less likely to trade their tickets then the people who received a ticket.

The interesting part of this research is that it shows that by having people choose their own lottery number the ticket became something of their own. The experiment showed that Illusion of Control encourages people to take responsibility for the actions they do. And that is exactly what you want people to do during the change. You want people to be the owners of the changes. And you need coaching to achieve it. People change at a much deeper level when people discover themselves what is best to do and decide themselves to take the appropriate actions to change.

Coaching on competences

In most of the companies I work with the development of hard skills is quite good. Often the necessary soft skills and behaviors required to work effectively and joyfully in teams are missing. In the Lean Agile adoption journey the people need to be supported in developing these soft skills. The coaching efforts should therefore focus on helping people develop specific competences. Some interesting competences in an Agile transformation are relational sensitivity, cooperation & teamwork, and results & performance accountability.

Relational sensitivity
Relational sensitivity competence requires the following behavior:

• Notices non-verbal signs and asks about them;
• Reacts constructively to verbal signs that are emotionally loaded;
• Shows empathy and understanding of others’ perspectives on issues;
• Is aware of irritations and reacts constructively;
• Gives feedback and demonstrates understanding of information and communication;
• Demonstrates understanding and acknowledgment of others’ interests.

Cooperation & Teamwork
Cooperation & teamwork competence requires the following behavior:

• Provides feedback on team results;
• Values team results;
• Makes sure relevant information is shared among team members;
• Starts and actively supports improvement initiatives of teamwork.

Results & performance accountability
Result & performance accountability competence requires the following behavior:

• Helps team members where needed, so the team succeeds;
• Assesses team members and oneself on keeping commitments and the manner in which the commitments are met;
• Takes accountability for one’s own work and the overall work of the team.

In order to stimulate the coaching sessions you need some starting material. In life coaching, the coachee comes to the coach asking for help. Based on the questions of the coachee, the life coach starts to work. Sometimes the people involved in the change come to me with questions but most people do not. Those who are opposed to the change are especially unlikely to do so. You therefore need to create the need for coaching sessions. To have a basis for your coaching sessions, 360 feedback is used.

Competence coaching with 360 feedback

In 360 feedback people receive feedback from the people they work with, such as team members, customers and leaders. The feedback is on the person’s behaviors.  A person receives feedback on the desired competences of relational sensitivity, cooperation & teamwork, and results & performance accountability. Based on the results of the 360 feedback you can start your coaching sessions. As a coach you discuss the results of the 360 feedback with the person and investigate what the person wants to work on. You then coach him during his change. The goal of the coaching sessions is to help the people to change their behavior so that they create and take ownership of the needed changes.

Speaking at InnovationGames Summit in Amsterdam

I’ll be giving my talk ‘Happier Employees and Clients: More Fun at Work with Innovation Games’ at the Innovation Games Summit in Amsterdam.

Join me and register at this great event. Register and Save €100

Professional Scrum Master training 5-6 september in Utrecht

I’ll be giving the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master training in Utrecht on September 5 and 6 2013. The training will be  in Dutch.

Please see AgiliX for additional information on the training.

You can register for this course at here at Scrum.org.

Recording of my talk about Emergent Innovation canvas at the Scrum.org Face to Face in Amsterdam 2013

You can watch the recording of the talk about the Emergent Innovation Canvas at the Scrum.org Face to Face in Amsterdam in March 2013.

You can watch it at the Scrum.org website here.

ScrumPloP 2013 Finished

From 19 ’till 24 of May was ScrumPloP 2013. We got together to work on the Scrum Patterns book that will be published in a year or two.

It started as usual with people bringing in drinks, chocolates and other good things to eat 🙂

A lot of patterns where workshopped including two of my own. Received great feedback on my patterns Norms Of Conduct and Create Knowledge.

We also worked on creating the first outlines of the pattern languages. Leading expert Neil Harrison and James Coplien took us on a crash course about pattern languages.

The first pattern languages that we worked on was Development Team. Jeff Sutherland and Mike Beedle composed the patterns to match their stories of their fist Scrum Team.

The ScrumPloP was a fantastic learning experience and I can’t wait until ScrumPloP 2014. If you want to be part of this great experience you can contact the Product Owner of the pattern book. Please see the website for contact information.

Professional Scrum Master training 3-4 juni Utrecht, Nederland

I’ll be giving the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master training in Utrecht on June 3 and 4 2013. The training will be  in Dutch.

Please see AgiliX for additional information on the training.

You can register for this course at here at Scrum.org.

Emergent Transformation Canvas

Lean Agile adoption can only be successful when the people themselves create the necessary changes and therefore are really committed and feel accountable for it. The path to Lean Agile adoption can therefore not be planned in full detail upfront. But the path towards adoption can only emerge, the path can only emerge by walking it!

In my little booklet I am writing called Emergent Transformation I discuss how you can go on your agile transformation journey. One of the things I use to make an initial adoption plan is a set of questions and possible answers that I call the Emergent Transformation canvas. The canvas is your guide to create your adoption plan by going through all the building blocks and answering the questions. By filling the canvas you create your  transition backlog. After that you can order it by business objective and there you go; your first adoption sprint plan is ready! You can now use Scrum in your adoption journey.

In this blog I will only discuss the set of questions you can use to make up your plan. See below an explanation of the canvas.

Emergent Transformation Canvas

Business objectives

What are our business objectives? Why are we doing this?

The Business Objectives building block defines the objectives the organization aims to achieve. The business objectives are the reason why an organizations is going on the lean agile transformation journey. As the transformation leader you have to ensure the business objectives are crisp and clear so people can identify with and work towards them. Missing or vague business objectives gives poor sense of purpose and direction to those involved.

In the context of lean agile adoption the business objectives are formulated as a vision story including goals and forecasts.

Measures

How do we measure progress towards our objective? Are we moving in the right direction?
The Measures building block defines how the organization is going to determine if the transformation is on the right path. The measures identify how you are going to assess success, measure progress towards the business objectives and learn. In addition the measures are used to discuss whether the transformation process should stop, continue or change direction. Thinking about good measures and quantifying them is very powerful because it forces you to discuss exactly and precisely what you mean with success. This discussion increases understanding among all involved about what you are striving for.

Measures are defined on outputs and on outcomes. For example your transformation could produce shorter release cycles which is an output. The outcome could be that the business can successfully react to opportunities.

Lean Management

How does management support the transformation?
The Lean Management building block describes what management needs to do in order to support the transformation so you can achieve your business objectives?. What is it about our working agreements, policies and organizational structure that has to change? What is it that management needs to do to become a coaching manager and to manage knowledge. What are the changes that need to occur to focus on creating customer value and see high performing teams as a key asset?. You need to assess your current way of managing, decide what changes you are going to make and create your transformation backlog.

From the a lean agile perspective the way to go is to start learning as quickly as possible and use that learning to increase results.

Agile development

Which practices align with our objectives? How do we build the thing right?
The Agile Development building block describes your plan to be able to build the thing right. It is about the practices you need in order to shorten the feedback cycle and support the business objectives.

Below some example practices for software development

• Test Driven Design
• Emergent Architecture
• Pair programming
• Exploratory testing
• Inspection charts
• Collective ownership

Emergent innovation

How do we co-create our innovative solutions?, are we building the right thing?
The emergent innovation building block describes how you are going to engage with your employees and your customers to really understand their needs.  What do you need to do so the people feel comfortable to innovate their ways of working and the company can learn how to do agile?

The teams and organizations have to learn how to apply the practices in their specific context. How are you going to support them to learn and share their capacity to act.

Why serious games enhance creativity.

New product development needs innovation if you want to really make a difference. And innovation needs creativity simply because you need to discover new information. The problem with innovation is that it is unpredictable so a defined process with upfront planning is futile. You need to create lots of ideas and then reduce the number of ideas to those that make sense. You need to think creatively!.

Distributed cognition

Experts in cognitive proceses like Seymour Papert and David Kolb describe a similar model for learning, discovering and creative thinking. In short it comes down to people learning by building a theory internally and then validating their theory in the material world. A group learns along more or less the same process.

Working in a group can significantly increase creativity of individuals [Gerrard Fischer]. Listening to others opinions, discussing different perspectives and looking at problems from different backgrounds stimulates the creation of new ideas. As a group you more easily explore a broader solution space.

In order to get to creative results as a group you need a setup of minimal structure and minimal constraints. Innovative results emerge rather then come from upfront planning. In addition the group needs to work with external artifacts like e.g. post-it notes, or drawing on a whiteboard. These external artifacts also known as externalizations enable groups to more easily go from vague mental ideas to concrete representations, enables a group to create a shared memory that in turn enables to create common understanding and a way to work together. [R. Keith Sawyer]

Emergent creativity

According to R. Sawyer creative results are by definiton results that emerge. To get emergent creativity you need to

• Understand at a abstract level what you want to achieve but not know how to achieve it.
• Have actions of people be dependent upon the actions of others. People must have a large number of possible options to take  in reaction to the actions of others in the group.
• Have the possibility to change the effect of another’s action or even undo it  by future actions.
• It has to be a collaborative process where everybody contributes evenly, so no hierarchy.

The common approach of running a meeting is far from this and therefore creative results are rare. The problem is that common meetings have someone to run the meeting, have an agenda and there are no externalizations for people to work with and create distributed cognition [R. Keith Sawyer].

Why do serious games enhance creativity?

Serious games cover all prerequisites discussed above for enabling group creativity.

A serious game consists of a game space where all the action takes place. Often it is some kind of metaphoric picture with a canvas, quadrant or something else to emotionally connect to. Then there are the artifacts to work with (mostly sticky notes), a common goal to achieve (what features should be put in our next release?) and finally there are some rules of play. The rules, game space, artifacts and goal form the externalizations and help a group create a distributed cognition as described above.

Serious games have a goal but the path towards it is open and emerges though collaboration. In a serious game everyone is equal and can contribute equal. On every action a person takes others provide feedback, others can build upon it or can change its effects. The use of externalizations like post-it notes, written information, drawings, pictures and discussion make you use more parts of your brain. As a group and as an individual you’re creating new ideas that build upon others ideas and then you are reducing your ideas, you are thinking creatively as a group. All this makes serious games also in line with the prerequisites for emergent creativity as discussed above.

The topping on the cake is that games create a safe environment. An environment where people are equal and people are more likely to say what they really think. It is easy to provide and receive feedback and you see real progress towards the goal. This makes serious games not only very productive but also much fun to do.

References

• R. Keith Sawyer – Distributed creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts © 2009 American Psychological Association 2009, Vol. 3, No. 2, 81–92