In a New York Times article: “The Rise of the New Groupthink” this week Susan Cain claims that teams and collaborative work give rise to groupthink. Groupthink is not out of the question, as Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate in “The Invisible Gorilla” group think is a risk – cite the example of the Georgian War in 2008:

When Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president of Georgia in 2004. he was only thirty —six years old. He stocked the government with loyal ministers who were also in their thirties and lacked military experience but sympathized with their leader’s views about the importance of reclaiming the breakaway regions from Russian influence. Over the next four years they managed to convince themselves that it was a good idea to fight an army that outnumbered theirs by twenty five to one. It’s not hard to imagine how a group of like—minded government officials could take a set of opinions that none of them held with great confidence individually and aggregate them, by deliberating among themselves and reinforcing one another’s public statements, into a high-confidence conclusion.

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The team are holding a daily standup mid-sprint. During the meeting Tonia the world’s best tester answers the obstacles question by saying: “The test server is down for the third time this week and I will spend the day writing new test cases.” Meanwhile Doug doesn’t raise any impediments but notes that he has spent his third day trying to write Unit Tests for a previously completed class (Ed: The team doesn’t know about Test Driven Development yet). This task was originally estimated to take one day. Read More…

This question often comes up. Usually because a team has become bored with their retrospectives. I suggest you don’t use the same style or format more three times running. The question came up again today with a person saying that their team was doing well and had achieved a steady state. To my mind steady state isn’t the point of Scrum. Scrum is a tool to help you be the best in your industry. Scrum should be a tool you use to disrupt an industry. To that end the next time you tell me that I hear that you’re team is a good as it gets my reply will be: “Ask the team what it would take for them to be the best in their industry, worthy of a case study on Infoq or a major conference presentation. Everything between the team and that case study is an impediment. Go forth and remove the impediments”. Read More…

Organizational Neuroscience: Taking Organizational Theory Inside the Neural Black Box is both the most significant and also most complex article I’ve read this month. Its a survey of key findings from the realm of neuroscience that the authors feel will be relevant to “Organizational Researchers”. Unfortunately being a research paper I find the language very stilted but it was still worth the effort.

• Implicit Attitudes: attitudes we hold that we’re not aware of – sometimes ones that are in contradiction to our explicit attitudes. Furthermore Strong Implicit attitudes are quick formed and once formed are hard to change. I’m guessing that these are part of why effective organizational change is so hard.
• Unfairness – being treated unfairly will often provoke a emotional reactions that trump monetary/economic self interest.
• Empathy with respect to fairness – when we see others experiencing pain we feel an echo of the pain ourselves. When it comes to unfairness we take a personal interest in the treatment of others.
• In many cases rationalization is an afterthought our brain uses to explain how it reached a conclusion. In reality our brains perceive a much smaller amount than we think we do. As a result we interpolate. Read More…

Last week at Agile Tour Toronto I had the privilege of working with my friend Paul Heidema to help introduce the basic concepts of Scrum in 60 minutes. This is a really interesting challenge, what’s the minimum amount you can teach people and still give them a taste of Scrum. In end we opted for about ~10 minutes of talking heads (spread throughout), ~30 minutes of simulation time and 15 minutes of debrief.

We invited our teams to create Children’s Books of the Goldilocks story. Along with the basic Story participants were asked to offer advertising, public service announcements etc.

Comments from participants:

• A number said it was surprising how well teams of complete strangers came together after two sprints.
• Several didn’t like the way I set them up for a mini “failure” by not playing the Product Owner role poorly and not communicating my needs. This is a fair point however it does simulate life with a real product owner

Feel free to use this simple simulation to help teach the very basic concepts of Scrum.

Part of an ongoing series called Scrum Master Tales. The series covers ScrumMaster John and his team as they develop an online bookstore.

Last time we read about our team they were suffering from a very high rate of interruptions after the product had gone live: The Story of Production Support.

After another couple of sprints using the one “person off” strategy the production support problem wasn’t completely fixed but the team was starting to spend less time on support. However John started to notice a new problem, even though production support wasn’t the primary cause there were still alot of interruptions, he still noticed that team members were being interrupted (a mix of drop by, phone calls and email).

John spent the next few days just taking notes on the interruptions. Discounting friends dropping by for coffee or smokes and calls on personal phones (presumably family or friends), he could still see that his team members were being bothered 2-3 times a day. Taking the best notes he could without outright spying on people, some of the interruptions were obvious:

• a couple of people called Martin every time there was a database problem (big or small)
• team members attended meetings (corporate, HR, …) sometimes more than one
• Tonia (the world’s best Agile Tester) has become a focus for Agile testing questions with people stopping by her desk 2-3 times a day to ask questions about Agile testing.

To track these issues John didn’t need to spy, he just watched the flow of people in and out of the team space, listened for phone calls and read the email trail that filled his inbox.

Once John noticed the issue he mentioned into a standup and asked people to start tracking what sort of interruptions they had. In the retrospective the team discussed sources of interruptions (again using a timeline as reminder). Read More…

At Agile2011 Kevlin Henney provactively suggested that we don’t learn from mistakes (see: Why we don’t learn from our mistakes, The Optimism Bias), suggesting that we learn more from our successes. This seems to against the core agile principle that we learn from our mistakes (i.e. my motto “Fail Fast” etc). It also seemed to contradict the message in Linda Rising’s keynote that followed Kevlin. This makes me very happy to have seen a pair of articles in the past few days that bridge the gap: How Your Brain Reacts to Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset (a short summary from Science Daily) and Why Do Some People Learn Faster? (a longer item from Jonah Lehrer that ties several ideas together). The upshot both Kevlin and Linda were right. We do learn from our mistakes but not everyone has the mindset to do it.

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When we left John and the team they were just getting the shipping features ready and were waiting to go live with the site. This turns out to be a blessing and a curse. Its a blessing because the business is making money, a curse because with it come support issues.

John spends some of his time and energy just watching the team and their flow everyday. In the first two sprints after the release the team struggles and fails to meet its planning commitments. At first he’s ok and just says its the inevitable post release hiccups (I don’t agree with John on this one, its not inevitable I think it was a first warning sign – ed), but when its clear that its continuing into the 3rd sprint he starts to get worried. John notices that team members are being interrupted often several times a day. Most of the interruptions are support issues.

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Caveat – given the way I’m writing this series occasionally things will happen out of order, i.e. I will be reminded of points I wish I had made earlier.

John, Sue and the rest of the team have started another sprint this time they committed to fewer stories and part way through the sprint are well on the way to getting stories completed. This time they committed to 8 stories with sizes ranging from 2 – 8 points. Every couple of days they get a story accepted. Things are going awesomely well.

Story

• As a Canadian book buyer I want to Amazon to ship my book to Canada so I can get my book home – Story Points: 8
• As a Canadian book buyer I want to Amazon to calculate the import duty on my books – Story Points: 3
• As a Canadian book buyer living in Ontario I want Amazon to calculate the local sales tax (HST) – Story Points: 2
• …

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Last time we met John (ScrumMaster) and the team, they had just discovered that their backlog had many large stories and no-estimates. The team delayed the start of their first sprint, did some Product Backlog Grooming. When we meet them again their first sprint in is in progress.

Story

Coming out of the planning meeting the team committed to five stories totalling 42 Story Points. Their overall Sprint Goal get the customer’s book home:

• As a book buyer I want to add my book to my shopping cart so that I can purchase it – Story Points: 13
• As a book buyer I want to tell Amazon where I want my book shipped to so I can get it – Story Points: 8
• As a book buyer I want to see the price for my books with shipping and tax so I can see whether I’m ok with the price – Story Points: 3
• As a book buyer I want to choose my payment type (MasterCard, Visa, Amex or Paypal) so that I can pay for my book(s) – Story Points: 3
• As a book buyer I want to pay for my book(s) so I can get it home – Story Points: 13
• As a book buyer I want a confirmation message so I can see that the purchase was successful – Story Points: 2

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