Heh. I bet agile adoption would move faster with a few more murderous atrocities. *

hark, a vagrant on lenin

* I kid! I promise. But there are some interesting parallels in the ways companies adopt agile approaches and the use of communism as a revolutionary concept. Hey, workers! I command you to self-organize! Yeah. Totally effective.

I had an interesting conversation about conflict on teams last week that made we want to collect and share some stuff about conflict & how it plays out on teams.

I’m a bit in love with this manifesto…

We invite diversity into our community not because it is politically correct but because diverse viewpoints are demanded by the manifold mysteries of great things.
We embrace ambiguity not because we are confused or indecisive but because we understand the inadequacy of our concepts to embrace the vastness of great things.
We welcome creative conflict not because we are angry or hostile but because conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the nature of great things.
We practice honesty not only because we owe it to one another but because to lie about what we have seen would be to betray the truth of great things.
We experience humility not because we have fought and lost but because humility is the only lens through which great things can be seen – and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.
The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer

Conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the nature of great things. Wow. That’s a really important thing to think about. I recall reading something Alistair Cockburn said about teams needing conflict – it was less beautiful than that quote above, but the same idea. Despite our need for it, conflict is scary and socially unacceptable (well, depending on your society). But. Agile teams are, like the old MTV Real World (back when the people were actually interesting without manufactured melodrama), a place where people start getting real. So conflict is more likely to get expressed.

Knowing you’re going to have conflict, the team needs a way to talk about it – sometimes, the team needs permission to talk about it. It helps to bring this up as the team forms, which is conveniently an awesome time to practice, since learning to work together tends to bring out clashes of people and perspective.

You need, as a team, to essentially come to agreement that conflict can be useful or not: “I disagree with that… here’s why” is a natural part of collaboration, while an angry “everything about you infuriates me” vibe – while true, and an allowable feeling – sucks. So find a way to talk about degree of feeling/passion, and what’s safe to express within the team.

I think it’s easier to talk about conflict with a vocabulary model for the team. A team might choose their own, or use what others have created.

Plenty of experts and amateurs have developed models or theories to talk about types of and approaches to conflict. Here are a handful:

• Relationship-Data-Interest-Structure-Value
• Dependence-Style-Background-Leadership-Personality (The semi-inclusion of “gender” in “background” annoys my inner feminist – I think there’s a fine argument for learned gender differences as a form of background, but why call it out separate from any other quality?)
• The popular Thomas-Kilmann Accommodating-Competing-Avoiding-Compromising-Collaborating model (which is more about ways of handling conflict than types of it)

Just getting comfortable labeling and talking about conflict seems to help teams work in it. I’ll write more later on some of the resources I’ve seen for deciding what to do with a conflict.

Some less-organized thoughts on conflict…
While I was looking for whatever Alistair Cockburn said about conflict, I wandered into this blog post on conflict-handling dysfunctions; it’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s a nice little survey of quotes.

If you’re near Richmond, my friend Lyssa is doing an evening introduction to a conflict model I like: 9/15/09, info via Agile Richmond. She also presented it at Agile 2009 – and is doing it again for Agile Development Practices. So many ways to acquire this information.

There’s a bit in this chapter of Save the World & Still be Home for Dinner [Click on the pdf download link to read the full chapter - the teaser's not what I want to talk about.] that should be required reading for everyone I’ve ever worked with.

The answer to our stress is supposed to be something called work-life balance. This is achieved, we are told, through time management. But it’s an illusion. We try to balance work, family, and play on a preset schedule. The problem is, nothing important ever happens on schedule. Great opportunities and painful crises usually show up inconveniently.

Indeed. And particularly fun to see this coming from a dude who used to train for Covey (the “7 Habits of Disempowered Highly Effective People” dude), whose life’s work was all about managing time and tasks more “efficiently”. If you can’t tell from the snark, I dislike the proscriptive diet Whole New Way of Living approach. I prefer to think of value and values, which are unique to each person – and that’s what Marre is now doing. Obviously he’s right, now that he agrees with me!

I know a fair number of people for whom every task seems equally important as the next, and are caught up in an intense feeling of busy-ness that leaves them with a looming sense of something undone all the time. This, I think, is that “illusion of urgency”. Marre goes on to attribute this sense of everything as urgent, every project or activity having the same priority, as a result of the constant connection many of us have to information and work. I’m not sure that’s entirely true – that connection is just a thing; our relationship to it is what throws us off balance.

There’s an old-school management psych term: “locus of control” that I think is in play here. Feeling caught up in this Grid thing seems to me like a form of externality. I like my ability to plug into various types of work when the urge strikes, and not on a particularly fixed schedule [This is sometimes at odds with the sort of work I do for pay, since it needs people to interact directly & therefore to agree on when and how to do so.], but then, my locus of control is so internal it’s annoying.

I’m still affected by the MUST DO EVERYTHING NOW OMG HOW DO WE MANAGE OUR TIME sense of urgency that pervades work & communication, though – and that’s where value comes in. Rather than responding to the OMG of the moment, I try to think in terms of what I value, or if that’s irrelevant, what is of greatest value to whomever (the latter is a newer addition to my thinking, thanks to a few years of Agile and exposure to Lean). Agile work, I think, ensures that everyone on a team has to think beyond OMG and into what’s important.

this was cross-posted to my LJ/FB, since it’s relevant to several audiences.

Esther Derby is expounding on the performance appraisal questions she raised at Agile 2009. Yet another thing that makes me sad I missed Agile 20XX this year!

While I agree with her that appearing to work hard and contributing a lot are two different things, I’m not sure you can’t measure the latter – if you have the right tool, and you’re measuring something meaningful (which “working hard” is not). I still think, because I like science, that appraisals tied to compensation are demotivating, and tend to keep people from sharing honest feedback with each other. But. There are definitely ways to tell people how they’re doing within the team and help them grow.

Are there any organizational behavior studies on team performance assessment? I wonder if team-based rewards increase results (whatever meaningful thing you want to measure) or personal growth or whatever?

What motivates people? Money? Not if they’re doing tasks without obvious solutions. No, we need: Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose. Intrinsic, not extrinsic, factors are what drive people to perform creatively. Money, particularly, is just a hygiene factor (that is, its absence is demotivating, but, capitalists or not, more does not drive us the way we expect it might).
Dan Pink on TED, talking about the science of motivation and how rewards fail for creative work

Organizational behaviorists have known this since at least the early 90s when I picked it up in my undergraduate classes. And yet! Here are all these organizations that purport to tie pay to performance. Great… if what workers are doing is rote, obvious or routine. Ask them to just think things up, though – and the results aren’t so good.

I wonder how much more brilliant the people I’ve worked with would be if their intrinsic needs were satisfied? How much smarter we’d be as a workforce if this idea were universal?

Jeff Patton has written a pretty awesomely simple explanation of why, and how, teams do kanban, and he mentions a perception I keep hearing… but don’t see evidence of. Namely, that there’s a large population of agilists who dislike kanban as an “agile” practice. Yes, it is not Scrum or XP, or any other prior agile method, and people certainly do say that.

Patton’s explanation is a nice primer, in any case. Read it.

A little while ago, I posted about Benson’s Personal Kanban series. My at-home approach to planning and prioritizing work has devolved into “keep it all in my head; consider eventually freaking out about incomplete contents of head”. So. I’ve adopted a miniature version of this concept.

I keep two running backlog lists: Ready work and Coming work. Ready can be brought in as soon as I’ve cleared a spot for it, based on my perceived priority (which is vulnerable to the influence of whatever may be in my mind right now); Coming is stuff I will want to deal with but have incomplete information about or a reason I couldn’t tackle it in the next 2 weeks. Some “Coming” work may need to be pre-worked, but mostly it’s just not the right time, or I’m waiting for something to happen. It’s all written in shorthand that only I get, so while I think about value, it doesn’t look obvious in the items you see. There are things on that list like “Anna” (which I know means I’m taking Friday afternoon off to enjoy Busch Gardens, but you don’t just reading it).

From there, non-routine activities (that is, things that aren’t “buy groceries”, “go to work” or “spend time with nearest and dearest”) are slotted into a handful of categories (coaching stuff, social activities, creative work, administrative fuss). Each category has a maximum number of work-in-progress (WIP) slots at any time; I stole this from a preschool kanban board (on Benson’s blog) that sorted kids into activities. The categorization thing breaks down a little, though: I am only one person, so if I keep finishing administrative fuss work, I may never attack coaching assignments. It doesn’t follow Lean logic, but it does make any imbalance in my life glaringly obvious – if I’m moving 4 things out of one category every day, but keep the same two creative items on the board for a week… are those items wrong-sized? or am I shortchanging my creative life?

There’s a body category, too – the physical activities I plan to do in a week. That has become non-routine, and it’s an issue of balance as well as health for me. So. That work really doesn’t fit this model, but needs to be made visible. I imagine a better way will be figured out.

It’s new & imperfect, and is helping me feel both more useful and more relaxed. If I were in a household of people, I still suspect a Scrum-like approach to work planning & tracking would be cooler, more useful – certainly more inclined to facilitate planning conversations. I think houses need those. But a single person? Maybe not so much.

I get these emails from this dude who can conveniently abbreviate his name as be-do. Each one has a being and a doing “word of the day/week/whatever”.

Today is “complete”.

See, DOing things to completion is great and all, and is a practice that should be honored and respected. (All too often things are left incomplete. Like this sentence. ed: you can see why I like him)

Ah, but what is it like to BE Complete? To deeply and honestly believe that you are whole and all that needs to be? How is it to know that no matter what you DO, to what level that you DO it, you ARE complete? In fact, your completeness relies not on your accomplishments, but how you hold yourself.

I share this because, as I practice co-active coaching with people, the idea that one is not broken, and is in fact completely whole and creative, is sometimes astounding. Does this also apply to teams? Somehow, probably.

One of the agilist dudes is writing a series on kanban for individual/personal work. It’s an impressively simple and practical explanation of kanban, and good reading for agile/lean people.

And? Even if you know nothing about those two concepts, it’s an effective personal organization system. When I tried applying Scrum to getting things done at home, it sortof evolved into kanban: it became “I can do X things at a time, I’d like them to fall in Y categories – which were like personal value stream elements- and it makes the most sense to have them all be similar in size”, and the iterations fell away (planning happened in a fluid way to queue up more Xs, I didn’t really retrospect or review with myself on a set cadence, done was the equivalent of shipped, etc.).

So, worth reading if you’re interested in ways of organizing your doings. Whatever you happen to do.

I do not have to identify with my role so inflexibly that I cannot step out of the director shoes and allow another person to step into them and look at the play from the director’s point of view. In fact, this stepping away on my part while, say, the sound designer steps in, can be very useful for our shared process. (Anne Bogart’s blog)

That? Is real collaboration. It’s also something people have an extremely hard time doing. Someone stepping into your shoes or your window or your territory feels like an indictment of your expertise, an assumption of failure on your part; we’ve studied ownership and accountability for so long.

This is, I think, what collective ownership is really about: we own the product together, and everyone is able to look at the product, build the thing, from many angles. I like the notion of collectiveness as empathy -empathy with the product, with the space and the people around us.

It’s not the exclusive domain of theatre, though I’ve seen some of the most passionate collaboration there – it applies anywhere people make things together.

Your thoughts?