Troubleshooting Agile

Last time we talked about sharing reasoning and building trust in your agile team using TDD for People, one way to use the Ladder of Inference. Today we look at how the Ladder can help you discover your own reasoning as well, to discover ways to promote mutual learning with your own behaviour.

SHOW LINKS:

- Top Business Podcasts for CEOs, from Fiona Anderson: https://www.rocktime.co.uk/insights/listen-and-learn-the-art-of-podcasting-for-ceos/

- The Ladder of Inference (annotated by Jeffrey): http://troubleshootingagile.com/docs/TheLadderOfInference.pdf

- The London Organisational Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/London-Action-Science-Meetup/

- Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

As promised, we start describing our favourite trust-building technique: the Ladder of Inference. Our take this week is on using the Ladder to understand someone else's reasoning and align your stories, creating trust as a foundation for further improvement in your agile team. Surprisingly, the experience of using the Ladder in this way is similar to Test-Driven Development: careful, understandable, small steps with confidence, and meaningful signals from both success and failure.

SHOW LINKS:

- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003ELY7OW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

- The Ladder of Inference (annotated by Jeffrey): http://troubleshootingagile.com/docs/TheLadderOfInference.pdf

- Cognitive biases book and more: https://youarenotsosmart.com/

- Schwarz on unilateral control (again!): http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- TDD for people video: https://www.douglassquirrel.com/how-i-work.html

- Schwarz 8 behaviours (Paula/Ted are on page 4): https://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/917018/Eight-Behaviors-for-Smarter-Teams-2.pdf

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

We start previewing the ideas in our forthcoming book on using conversations to improve your agile results. First up: why you need trust before you do anything else (including hold a standup, write unit tests, or move your desks together). Next week, a step-by-step technique to build trust.

SHOW LINKS:

- The first thing to build is trust, Brad Appleton: http://bradapp.blogspot.com/2005/02/first-thing-to-build-is-trust.html

- Psychological safety: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2666999?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

- The story I'm telling myself: https://blog.jeffreyfredrick.com/2015/08/31/the-story-im-making-up/

- Naive realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_%28psychology%29 and previous TA episode: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/how-to-fail-by-acting-unilaterally-part-i

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

We cap our five-part series on undermining your agile team with the pinnacle of ineffective behaviour: the belief that you are not contributing to the problem. Inaccurate estimates, useless meetings, directionless standups - so long as you're sure all these are entirely someone else's fault, you'll be sure never to fix them, and thus leave your team high and dry. Master this technique and never worry about having an effective team again! Bonus at the end on what's next for the podcast...

SHOW LINKS:

- Roger Schwarz on unilateral control: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- Belief bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias

- Emotional reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_reasoning

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

Why listen to team members and peers when your feelings and behaviours are obviously justified? We continue our how-to series on undermining your agile team with two stories about people who, believing they are clearly correct about how to improve their agile teams, move to shut down communication and manipulate the environment to ensure their approaches are adopted - with, predictably, zero internal commitment from the rest of the team.

SHOW LINKS:

- Roger Schwarz on unilateral control: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- Jeffrey's "Frustrated? It's Probably Your Fault" session: https://blog.jeffreyfredrick.com/2015/07/18/video-frustrated-it-is-probably-your-fault/

- Model I characteristics: http://infed.org/mobi/chris-argyris-theories-of-action-double-loop-learning-and-organizational-learning/#_Model_I_and

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

Another in our top tips for ensuring your agile team does not achieve its goals - assume you have pure motives and others are actively malicious. We describe several helpful biases that, if adopted, can help you take up this mindset, and describe a founder duo with negative beliefs about each other who had mastered the art of "Getting to No" - until they read Fisher/Ury and discovered they actually had a common interest and positive motives.

SHOW LINKS:

- Roger Schwarz on unilateral control: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- Geoff Watts Top Ten Agile Podcasts: https://twitter.com/geoffcwatts/status/1057310923218698241

- Biases: Bias blind spot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot , Negativity bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias , and naïve cynicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_cynicism

- Getting To Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

More this week on ways to fail with agile by making unilateral assumptions - this week's tip is to believe you are right and everyone else is wrong. In fact, even the underlying assumption that there is a single right answer should get you a long way to fracturing your team and ensuring discord. Squirrel tells a story of someone particularly skilled at explaining why he knows the One True Agile Way and Jeffrey recalls that Mark Twain quote about the problem being what you know that ain't so (and one thing that ain't so is that the quote is from Mark Twain!)

SHOW LINKS:

- Roger Schwarz on unilateral control: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- Dan North: https://dannorth.net/

- Jon Allspaw on the root cause fallacy: https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-only-jointly-sufficient/

- Twain's quote (or not): http://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-things-we-know-that-just-aint-so/

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

Turning our usual subject on its head, this week we start a short series on how to make sure your team does NOT improve. The first assumption to this end: the belief that you understand the situation while others don't. The change that's needed is obvious; all you have to do is convince others to adopt it. Easily adaptable to kanban, scrum, SAFe, or any other method that seems (to you!) to be the solution to your problems. Try it today, and tune in to further episodes for more ways to ensure you don't succeed in making effective changes!

SHOW LINKS:

- How Unilateral Control Undermines Team Results and Relationships, Schwarz: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-performance/how-unilateral-control-undermines-team-results-and-relationships-2/

- Naive realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

Squirrel and Jeffrey look at a recent article by Luke Tomas on the "employee engagement industry" (we didn't even know it *was* an industry!) Jeffrey rapidly links this to Brian Marick's idea of Ease and Joy at work and we all agree that engagement, happiness, and joy are all useful, but lagging, indicators of team success - so you can't improve them directly with bigger bonuses or tougher objectives. Instead alignment, focus, and autonomy work to create these results by creating the conditions for happiness and good performance.

SHOW LINKS:

- Luke Tomas, The Employee Engagement Myth: https://medium.com/@lukethomas14/the-employee-engagement-myth-3885526782d7

- Brian Marick, Ease and Joy at Work: http://exampler.com/ease-and-joy/

- Previous episode on technical excellence: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/fowlers-state-of-agile-part-two

- Reinventing Organisations (Teal and other colours): http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

- Theory X and Theory Y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

- Daniel Pink, Drive (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

- Niko Niko: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/nikoniko/

- Small Improvements: https://www.small-improvements.com/

- Joy, Inc : https://www.menloinnovations.com/joyinc/

- Joy At Work: http://www.dennisbakke.com/joy-at-work

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2

A Squirrel-only show since Jeffrey's away. Squirrel described the Post-It Factory Game which illustrates both work-in-progress limits and the more general notion of "Throughput over Utilisation" - as well as making your colleagues fall over themselves trying to produce blue squares at top speed.

SHOW LINKS:

Kanban by David Anderson: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technology-Business/dp/0984521402

Similar games to illustrate agile and kanban ideas: https://availagility.co.uk/resources/games/lego-flow-game/

https://www.agile42.com/en/training/kanban-pizza-game/

***

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us: see link on troubleshootingagile.com

Tweet us: twitter.com/TShootingAgile

Also, if you'd like to leave us a review on iTunes (or just like and subscribe), you'll find us here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?mt=2