Magic of Science and Teams – #GOAT13 Presentation

#GOAT13 is now but a fond memory. As promised to the attendees I’m posting the presentation slides including presenter’s notes:

and handout.

I’m also doing a bit of a retrospective to reflect on how to improve for next time. Many of the comments in my Perfection game are based on attendee’s feedback after the session.

Here’s what I promised:

• What simple communication patterns can we monitor to spot the health of the team?
• Team size – we all know Kent Beck’s famous 7+/-2, what was the source? What does the evidence suggest does that works?
• Dissent and Diversity – what are their roles within teams.
• Bonuses – we know that individual bonuses are bad. Are team bonuses might be OK. Are there any kinds of bonuses that do work?

In this 90-minute session I will give short snippets of a presentation. After every segment the audience will work in their table(s) to prepare a play. For the play they will be expected to demonstrate some aspect(s) of what they learned from the core material.

Perfection Game: 7/10

What went well:

• Covered a lot of new material that isn’t normally covered in a CSM class.
• Covered most of the bullet points that were mentioned above, and a few more.
• The Plays as tools for discussion and learning worked very well.
• Provided specific references to research for most of the claims.
• Gave people some specific tools to improve team communication.

What I would do to be closer to perfect next time:

• Say no to a theatre format – the organizing committee needed someone to take the theatre but in taking it I had to ditch some of my exercises which required participants sitting at tables.
• Cover much less material – several of the sections would have made perfect sessions on their own.
• Brief the concept of the Play more effectively perhaps by giving 2-3 concrete examples at the start.

There is a lot of excellent research available on what it has taken to build high performance teams and it applies across many industries. Agile/Scrum/Kanban teams often get some of it right by accident. What we need is to stop stumbling towards high performance and to start to use the science.