Team Building

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.

Ignoring the emotional impact of change, or attempting to depress or devalue people's response to change tends to amplify their emotions. Empathy, the author explains, is "the ability to recognize and vicariously identify someone else’s experience and 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." Empathy is about respect, where one person seeks to acknowledge, understand, and accept the feelings of another as legitimate.

There are three kinds of empathy: 1) Emotional empathy, which is understanding another's emotions. Too often the feelings generated by change (excitement, grief, joy, anger, loss of confidence) get dismissed and people are urged to suppress them. 2) Cognitive empathy, which is understanding another's patterns of thought and how they make sense of the situation. This helps you frame a new idea in a way that is compatible to the other person. 3) Point-of-view empathy, which combines both and allows us to put ourselves in the other person's shoes.

Empathy allows you to help others overcome change by targeting a more refined message (since the more you listen the more you learn), and because people listen more after they have been listened to.

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

Many organizations place their trust on Agile Maturity Metrics to measure individual, team and organizational levels. However, many implementations fail to place the measurement attributes into different states of maturity - digressing the effort into check-list-checking. Companies that push for bucketed AMMs (separating measurements by maturity) typically face three challenges: 1) System Gaming, where individuals can "play the system" for personal gain; 2) Conditional Attribute-to-Maturity, meaning attributes have difference relevance in different teams and in different maturities; and 3) Correlation between attributes is not linear at system-level, since there is a cause-and-effect relationship between attributes creating false and misleading results.

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

Most agile implementations focus on delivery, while management sets the strategy and cascades goals down to the teams. This top-down waterfall management style turns teams into "feature factories", coding and testing without a clear understanding of the bigger context. As the authors point out, "using Agile to deliver a waterfall plan has limited benefits".

A better way is proposed by embracing OKR (Objectives and Key Results) management in conjunction with Modern Agile principles. OKRs are evaluated frequently and are by-directional, where teams craft their own objectives only after understanding the overall corporate objective - creating contracts with their managers for their delivery.

OKRs also support the four Modern Agile principles: 1) Deliver Value Continuously, by ensuring day-to-day tasks actually achieve the desired outcome (meet the pre-defined Key Results); 2) Experiment & Learn Rapidly, by distributing objective setting down to the front line; 3) Make People Awesome, by enabling autonomous and self-organized teams deciding how they will reach the desired outcomes; and 4) Make Safety a Prerequisite, by decoupling OKRs from compensation and promotions and thus providing psychological safety for teams to try and fail fast.