The Liberators Podcast

Scrum is great. We love it. And it's also just a recipe. It needs a lot more to result in a flavorful, delicious, and nutritious meal.

Understanding Scrum as merely a recipe has worked well for us to understand both its strengths and limitations. Its a useful metaphor to help others understand what to expect from Scrum and what other ingredients are needed to make it all work.

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/scrum-is-just-a-recipe-739665ae70db

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

How does working from home influence teamwork? This question came to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Most companies switched from fully co-located work to fully remote work for most of the pandemic. But since then, many of those policies have been reverted under the assumption that working from home negatively impacts performance, productivity, and teamwork.

In this episode, we bring a scientific perspective to this question. We review the current scientific evidence around how working from home affects employees and teams and offer practical recommendations. This episode is relevant to both Agile teams and other kinds of teams.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-does-working-from-home-influence-teamwork-6a14b4c804a

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

Have you ever noticed the many parallels between organized religion and Scrum? Or with Agile methodologies more broadly? It's been a recurring joke between us as we attend conferences, interact with critics and advocates of Scrum, and follow the comings and goings in our profession. Some of these parallels are merely funny to point out, whereas others are a bit more concerning.

So for this episode, I invite you to imagine that you’re future archeologists who uncover the traces of our Agile community many thousands of years into the future. How would they understand it? What would it look like to them? And please allow me some exaggeration, as there is a purpose to it that you will discover at the end of the episode.

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/the-church-of-scrum-16e14244b6bc

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"Agile is dead" is a contrarian opinion that gets thrown around a lot on social media. While it's a nice way to get attention, what does the evidence say? Agile can only be dead if it doesn't work, if it doesn't result in more effective teams and more satisfied customers.

In this episode, we take an evidence-based perspective. We explore the business case for Agile from three perspectives: stakeholder satisfaction, team morale and overall business outcomes. We report results from our own analyses as well as several scientific studies. We'll let the evidence speak for itself.

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-evidence-based-business-case-for-agile-60f38de3a6d2

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

“How do I prevent my high-performing team from burning out?” is a question that recently came up in a community meetup. It's an intriguing question because it starts from a positive situation. If you’ve ever been part of a high-performing team, you know how exhilarating it can be. But paradoxically, it's also a place where people for people to lose themselves in their work together and collapse under the strain — as I did.

In this episode, we apply an evidence-based perspective to this question. What do we know from scientific research about high-performing teams and how they can burn people out? What can do to prevent that, or at least diminish the chance of it happening?

Read the post here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-to-prevent-high-performing-teams-from-burning-out-409aa9896caa

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

We're back!

How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both?

This was the research question of an academic study we performed with Prof. Daniel Russo. This study has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal "Transactions on Software Engineering". This episode provides a non-technical overview of our investigation, core findings, and practical implications. 

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-double-edged-sword-of-diversity-in-teams-765ff72a55da

Read the peer-reviewed scientific publication:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3339881

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives.

One such perspective is motivation. Scrum is deeply rooted in insights from academic research into what motivates people and teams to become high-performing. And while those roots are strong, they are also mostly invisible and unknown to practitioners.

In this podcast, we take a scientific perspective on how Scrum can create motivating environments for teams and individuals. We also translate these insights into practical tips that you can use to make the work for your team more motivating.

Read the full post behind this episode, including all the links, here
https://bit.ly/3HKZRuE

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.”

The improvement actions that come out of Sprint Retrospectives and other reflective practices are weak when there is no sense of scope, no sense of timeline, and no sense of who is involved. Interestingly, this creates a clear connection with something else that good Agile teams spend a lot of time on: refinement.

In this episode, we explore how to refine your improvement actions to make them more actionable and thus easier to accomplish. We also offer a lot of practical tips for how to create better improvement actions.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/3KqtfGA

Or get our "Unleash Scrum In Your Organization"-kit which contains - among many other cool things - a deck with 100 Improvement Actions categorized into different areas. These are a good source of inspiration for your own improvements. Or you can use them verbatim:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/frontpage/products/scrum-teams-superpower-kit-also-for-virtual-teams

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more - or less - effective?

In this episode, we explore scientific research that investigated Product Owners. We also share some of our own research.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/2XXBaZ7

Or download do-it-yourself workshops to encourage shared product ownership:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/do-it-yourself-workshops-meetups-and-strings/build-what-stakeholders-need

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.

But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those were purely personal experiences. We also explored some actual research into these questions and found more nuanced results.

We wonder: why doesn't our community - that is all about empiricism - apply empiricism to itself and its claims? Why don't we gather actual objective evidence? Why do we allow each other to make bold claims that either lack evidence or aren't proportional to that evidence? Are we not harming our profession with this low bar?

In this episode, we discuss a professional crisis in our field. We also offer five things we can do to improve our profession. Ultimately, if we rely more on objective evidence we make a much stronger case for what we believe to be true. Or we may discover that our beliefs aren't actually true - which is a good thing too.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-doesnt-the-agile-community-practice-empiricism-12082e48ffba

Support the show

Support the show, our research, and community offerings via Patreon:
https://patreon.com/liberators

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.