Team Building

Tom Wujec presents some surprisingly deep research into the "marshmallow problem" -- a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?

Scrum Inc.'s Team Working Agreement Canvas combines key Scrum elements with a Lean Canvas in order to guide your team towards hyper-productivity.

Team working agreements are a great tool to get new teams productive as soon as possible, and starting on the right foot towards effective team practices. In this article Avi Schneier explains that this tool can also be used to launch many teams at once. It covers the steps for chartering a new team, helping them reflect on their individual and collective values, and identifying the key events and stakeholders of each delivery.

The RC social rules help create a friendly, intellectual environment where you can spend your energy on programming.

As an center for educational retreats for anyone who wants to get dramatically better at programming, The Recurse Center has instituted some social rules that they have found to help create a friendly, intellectual environment where you can spend as much of your energy as possible on programming. In this quick guide they describe the 4 social rules that must be followed at all times.

A look at the elements that compose truly great teams.

What makes teams better and more productive, and more importantly, how do you build a great team? Ozren Colic defines the categories of teams, and points to the connections between individuals as the recipe. This superb article breaks down the prerequisites, and the three most important enablers for teams to really gel. A must read.

Analyzing the process-product paradox as a way to scale output.

The process-product paradox, outlined by Misrab Faizullah-Khan, states that it is the underlying communication structures in an organization that chiefly determine the product. By taking an organic approach to engineering principles, companies can create an atmosphere where people can simply be themselves. This article takes a mathematical approach to the analysis of scaling.

There are many ways of conducting agile team health checks to visualize areas where there are opportunities for improvement.

Continuous improvement is central to the agile methodology, but it must be guided in order to maximize benefit. Instead of observing "traditional" measurement, which are lagging, Andy proposes focusing on the health and well-being - since they are leading indicators. To identify what can really be measured, and what things would produce the largest impact, the author has done a complete survey of the solutions available to help teams get the most of their improvement efforts.

You need both diversity and safety.

An analysis of 150 senior teams showed that the ones who solve problems the fastest tend to be cognitively diverse. Further analysis of the study also showed this is not always true, and that an element of psychological safety is also necessary. This article explores the need for both traits to enable curious and encouraging behavior that keeps a learning momentum on the team and wards off combativeness and/or group-think.

How to use OKRs to to set and execute on audacious goals by focusing on the right work to be done.

Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it's not always because they're bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it's simply because they're leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with "Objectives and Key Results," or OKRs -- a goal-setting system that's been employed by the likes of Google, Intel and Bono to set and execute on audacious goals. Learn more about how setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure -- and how we can use OKRs to hold our leaders and ourselves accountable.

When applied properly, Agile Maturity Metrics can measure improvements of agility at individual, team, and organizational level.

AMMs, or Agile Maturity Metrics, measure individual, team and organizational levels into different buckets - separated by maturity. Though a trusted way to measure improvement, organizations must keep in mind there are ways to game the system, some attributes are conditional, and the correlations between attributes is not linear.

Combining Modern Agile with the proper use of OKR can be a lightweight, joyful way for organizations to help their people achieve awesome results.

When it comes to setting goals, most companies use a top-down approach to create a set of static goals - which are linked with individual or team bonuses and directly conflict with being agile. Its a waterfall command-and-control mindset that turns teams into "feature factories" with no focus on delivering value. Alexandre Freire and Felipe Castro propose the usage of OKRs, which are evaluated frequently and are bidirectional - a bubble-up approach is used to create contracts with the teams. Furthermore, they explain how this can be used in the context of Modern Agile.

Overcoming the greatest barrier to collaboration and our ability to solve problems by managing individual defensiveness brought on fears of vulnerability.

Based on years of experience and research studying collaborative behavior and productivity in chickens, Jim Tamm explains that defensiveness is the single greatest inhibitor to true collaboration. Defensiveness, he explains, does not protect us from other people, but instead defends us from fears we don't want to feel - usually brought on by fears of lack of significance, competence or likability. Collaboration stops and we initiate aggressive behavior.

People don't change because of external demands, they change to save something of value. You can only find out what it is if you empathize.

Esther Derby shares how ignoring the emotional impact of change, or attempting to depress or devalue people's response to change tends to amplify their emotions. Empathy enables you to understand someone else’s point of view, the challenges posed by the change, what they value, and what they stand to lose by changing." This ability is in her mind a change agent's superpower.

The original presentation that defined psychological safety.

This Ted Talk is the seminal work on Psychological Safety that introduced the world to the concept. Amy Edmondson is the original researcher that coined the term, and that while working with the Google research team identified its importance. In this insightful talk, the presenter explains its foundations, the necessity to support it, and outlines the three things you can do to build a psychologically safe workplace.

Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact and structure their work.

Psychological Safety is the feeling that it is safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other, and it is essential for effective teams. Google found through extensive research of over 180 teams that who is on a team matters less than how they interact. Marc Vollebregt expands on this subject by integrating it with openness and trust, and the concept of personal, professional, and private emotional spaces.

Psychological safety comes in three interrelated varieties.

Psychological Safety has been identified as the key element common in all productive teams. Leaders therefore seek to instill it in their workforce, but Chris Weller suggests that it’s critical to start by understanding what they want employees to feel safe to do. Chris outlines three different kinds of safety - around belonging, speaking up, or taking risks - each which can be leveraged for multiple end goals, and require a different set of capabilities.

Getting teams to solve problems in ways our customers love, focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output).

A follow-on article addressing many of the questions received about the "Product vs. Feature Teams" article.

Astronauts on the International Space Station live in capsules together for months, and share insights about handling conflict and building trust.

Using Brené Brown's anatomy of trust model to explore the elements to build trust.

Trust is complex and challenging, yet essential to enable agility. It is a feeling, and therefore it is fluid and constantly evolving. In this article, Stephanie Ockerman defines what trust is, and the elements required to build trust. She describes each element that composes the anatomy of trust, and concludes with questions to help you reflect on how to build trust in your own personal relationships.

Discussing how organizations align emerging work to the overall strategy, its failure/success patterns and using OKRs to improve alignment.

It’s not unusual to go into an organization and see that things are out of sync from top to bottom - and usually, the root cause of most of these problems is a lack of alignment. Lack of alignment within an organization manifests in many ways, from a lack of discretionary effort from employees to ample activity that’s not meeting the market needs or advancing the strategy of the organization. In this episode, Chris helps identify these failure patterns, along with the success patterns. He also gives a thorough 101 on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) - a powerful strategy to better align an organization.