The Liberators Podcast

Do you start a new Scrum team by explaining the roles, artifacts, and events? Do you rarely consider how to build coalitions and persuade people in power to support your work with Scrum? Are you thinking about the psychological needs of people and how to motivate them to work with Scrum? You may be engaging in a bit too much blueprint thinking.

In this episode, we explore how blue-print thinking is too dominant in our profession. There are exceptions. But much of the professional discourse is focused on frameworks, processes, and structure — independent of the messy sociological, political, and psychological realities of organizations. We explore how this bias leads to blind spots. It also explains why so many framework implementations fail. This episode is based on the “Color Theory of Change”, and we think its quite eye-opening if you've never reflected on this before.

Find the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/is-blue-print-thinking-limiting-the-potential-of-the-agile-community-a2ee716b6888

Support the show

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.

Recently, the concept of “fluid teams”, “dynamic reteaming” or “ad-hoc teaming” has gained traction in the Agile community. Although the concept has many different definitions, a characteristic they share is that members move in and out of a team during its lifetime.

However, decades of academic research into teams and workgroups have underscored the importance of team stability as a requirement for high performance. Although these studies did not compare stable teams versus fluid teams specifically, the most reliable theories we currently have to understand team development also seem to favor stability over fluidity.

In this episode, I explore the research in this area. Considering just how popular the notion of fluid teams has become, I think it is important to weigh the evidence that supports it or contradicts it.

Read the transcript of the episode here (including all references):
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-stable-or-fluid-teams-what-does-the-science-say-95833b0b91a2

Read an in-depth post about team cognition:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-great-scrum-teams-have-a-mind-of-their-own-2ba4d9d17918

Read an in-depth post about social cohesion:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-coherence-and-cohesion-are-critical-to-scrum-f5ae1f3a1aef

Support the show

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.

Do high-performing teams communicate more than low-performing teams? 🤔

If you think "Yes!", you may want to reconsider. Scientific studies often find the reverse. When researchers compare high-performing teams with low-performing teams, they consistently find that high-performing teams communicate less. This has been observed with flight crews, nuclear plant control crews, and work teams.

These teams have not developed telepathy, but they've learned so well what is expected of each other that they don’t need to communicate explicitly for day-to-day coordination. This effectively keeps a lot of their bandwidth open for problem-solving, critical communication, and maintaining focus - and that makes them more effective.

There is so much to unpack here. It tells us much about cross-functionality, team cognition, and what it takes to grow high-performing teams. In a very practical sense, I think it shows us how important it is to develop work agreements and mental team models about how to:

- Coordinate work
- Coordinate the use and application of skills
- Coordinate the navigation of conflict
- Coordinate psychologically safety (the proper kind)
- Coordinate dealing with work pressure and stress

Read the transcript of the episode here (including all references):
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-to-create-better-work-agreements-for-your-team-7738e474ad13

Support the show

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.

Why is code quality so often an issue? Why do software teams — despite their best initial intentions — often end up fighting a codebase that is hard to test, resistant to change, and prone to strange bugs?

We have many intuitions about this. But we’ve learned the hard way that my intuitions are often wrong. So in this episode, we explore insights from scientific studies that have investigated technical and code smells. We also share evidence-based recommendations on how to write better code. This episode is interesting both for developers and non-developers.

And yes, it turns out that several of our intuitions are indeed wrong :D

Read the transcript of this episode (it includes the reference)

Support the show

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.

There is a growing trend in our industry to distinguish between “Agility” and “Business Agility”. The idea here is that Agile is limited only to teams and to software and that more is needed. Many consultancy firms are now jumping into that gap with additional frameworks and models.

This makes no sense to me. I think that this distinction reveals a glaring misunderstanding of the purpose of Agile. More importantly, I think that the distinction between Agility and Business Agility only muddies the waters and distracts leaders away from what it is they should be doing.

We take a history tour to visit some of the precursors of Agile and learn what made them different from what came before, and why. With this historical understanding, we then revisit the distinction between business agility and agility to see if it makes sense. We also explore the notion that "Agile is only for teams" and "Agile is only for software".

This episode is an opinion piece. You may agree or you may not. Either way, we hope you learn something from it.

A transcript is available here (an account for Medium is necessary)

Support the show

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.

Great Scrum Teams know that refinement is one of the best ways to optimize the flow of work and deliver more value to stakeholders. Refinement is the act of breaking down and clarifying work for this and upcoming Sprints. We also know this from our research with 1.200 Scrum Teams; teams that actively refine also release more frequently. And they have more satisfied stakeholders and higher morale.

Sounds good! But how? It is often surprisingly hard for teams to break down large chunks of work in such a way that the smaller pieces still deliver value on their own. Often, work is broken down across technical layers (horizontal) instead of functional layers (vertical).

In this podcast, we share the 10 strategies that have worked well for us, and the Scrum Teams we've been part of. Each strategy breaks work across functional layers. We give examples for each strategy and explain how they support your team and the Product Owner.  We still actively use them for our work on the Scrum Team Survey too!

We apologize for the length. You can easily listen to the episode in parts though.

Download the cheatsheet (it is free):
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/free-downloads/products/experiment-10-powerful-strategies-to-break-down-product-backlog-items

Get the Powerful Questions deck:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/scrum-teams/products/powerful-questions

Read the original post this podcast is based on:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/10-powerful-strategies-for-breaking-down-user-stories-in-scrum-with-cheatsheet-2cd9aae7d0eb

Support the show

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.

"Professionals don't need psychological safety" is what someone recently told us. Perhaps you are on the fence about the need for psychological safety too. Or you get the point, but always struggle to make it practical.

In this podcast, we explore psychological safety from a scientific perspective. And we offer many practical recommendations for what psychological safety looks like in teams and how to develop it. You can also hear some great ideas and suggestions that were generated by our growing community of patrons.

Read the transcript here (includes references):
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-psychological-safety-improves-the-effectiveness-of-your-team-7592d76f3c9b

Find many free do-it-yourself workshops to improve psychological safety (among other things):
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/scrum-teams/improve-continuous

Support the show

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.

Does refinement in your team feel like a slog? Do developers go there with lead in their shoes? Many Scrum Teams struggle with refinement, and understandably so. Yet, in many ways, this is where some of the most important work happens. And some of the hardest work.
 
In this episode, we offer a reflection on the purpose of refinement. And we offer recommendations to make the process more enjoyable and effective — many of which originate from a discussion we had with experienced Scrum Masters on the Discord server that is accessible to our patrons.

Check out the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/refinement-the-mise-en-place-of-great-scrum-teams-78d7556a7952

The paper we wrote with Daniel Russo is available here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.12439

Download the free cheatsheet with 10 breakdown strategies here:
https://shop.theliberators.com/products/canvas-10-powerful-strategies-to-break-down-product-backlog-items

Or try this fully prepared do-it-yourself workshop for refinement:
https://shop.theliberators.com/products/workshop-refine-tough-or-unclear-product-backlog-items-with-stakeholders

Support the show

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 biggest challenge in Product Development is to distinguish between what the product can become one day, and what it should incrementally become first to validate critical assumptions that clear the way towards that future. 

This presents a major struggle for Product Owners, customers, users, and developers as they are all inclined to spend most of their time thinking about the “Largest Potential Product” instead of the “Smallest Valuable Product”. 

In this podcast, Christiaan talks about product discovery, minimum valuable (or viable) products and offers many ideas on how to engage in product discovery.

Find a transcript here (requires a Medium-account):
https://medium.com/the-liberators/from-largest-potential-product-to-smallest-valuable-products-daa729080819

Support the show

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 "team cognition" make some Scrum teams more effective than others? In this podcast, we explore scientific research into team cognition and mental models. And we translate it into actionable improvements you can make to make your Scrum teams more effective.

By the end of the episode, you will have learned:

• How team cognition is essentially the "mind of a team", with its own memory and perception of the world.
• What team cognition is and how substantial its influence is on the effectiveness of teams according to large-scale research efforts
• How team cognition helps us understand what cross-functionality should look like for Scrum teams.
• What team cognition looks like for Scrum teams, and what signs tell you whether it's there or not. And if it isn't, what you can do about that.
• What research in this area tells us about how you can design, support, and encourage teams to develop team cognition and become high-performing.
• Why frequent changes to team composition are not a good idea if you want to maintain effectiveness, no matter how they are initiated.

More resources

• Read the transcript here (a medium account is, unfortunately, necessary until it is published)
• Barry Overeem and I created three do-it-yourself workshops (#1, #2, and #3) to help your team create shared goals.

References

Butler, A. C., Chapman, J. E., Forman, E. M., & Beck, A. T. (2006). The empirical status of cognitive-behavioral therapy: a review of meta-analyses. Clinical psychology review, 26(1), 17–31.

Cannon‐Bowers, J. A., & Salas, E. (2001). Reflections on shared cognition. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 22(2), 195–202.

DeChurch, L. A., & Mesmer-Magnus, J. R. (2010). The cognitive underpinnings of effective teamwork: a meta-analysis. Journal of applied psychology, 95(1), 32.

Kearney, E., Gebert, D., & Voelpel, S. C. (2009). When and how diversity benefits teams: The importance of team members’ need for cognition. Academy of Management journal, 52(3), 581–598.

Kozlowski, S. W., & Ilgen, D. R. (2006). Enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams. Psychological science in the public interest, 7(3), 77–124.

Mathieu, J. E., Heffner, T. S., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (2000). The influence of shared mental models on team process and performance. Journal of applied psychology, 85(2), 273.

Stout, R. J., Cannon-Bowers, J. A., & Salas, E. (2017). The role of shared mental models in developing team situational awareness: Implications for training. Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division.

Tolin, D. F. (2010). Is cognitive–behavioral therapy more effective than other the

Support the show

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.