Management at the Solstice

The winter solstice is upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere. The earth is tilted on its axis, making the days shorter as the earth goes about it's elliptical orbit around the sun, reaching the shortest day on the winter solstice. This doesn't coincide with the dead of winter, however, because of seasonal lag caused by us having lots of water around, giving off stored heat. (A little something to look forward to -- three more months of cold weather.) Speaking of colds, our solstice does, however, occur right after the start of cold and flu season. Lower relative humidity indoors and us being indoors more makes us more susceptible to viruses. The shortening days and more time spent indoors gives us the winter blues. Depression, more prevalence of illness, compounded by the dreaded annual performance review and holiday stress makes a nasty combination. All of this ultimately leads to poor productivity and unhappy people.

So what? What's that to do with me?

The manager's job is to create an environment in which people can be productive, even healthy. Help your team attack the winter blues and defeat viruses. Help them find their happy hat.

But how?

You've got to come up with your own ideas for your own environment, but here are some examples.

Improve lighting for a better mood. We might be saving energy, but we're killing productivity with those glare and headache inducing, flickering fluorescent lights. Indirect non-fluorescent lamps are easier on the eyes. Or set up a light therapy room in some meeting room or office. Why not?

And sunlight is great. Open the blinds and schedule some outdoor activities, maybe a team lunch that you can walk to or at least drive to. In other words, get out of the building during the middle of the day.

Stock the break rooms with fresh fruit, nuts, and disinfectant wipes. Oranges are great to have around, being good for overall health. The smell of a fresh orange around the office makes people smile inside, doesn't it? Apples are easy to wash and eat and some say provide a pick-me-up as good as coffee. But please, get a good eating apple like a Pink Lady. Shoot, do something unique -- buy and peel a pomegranate for each person in your group. Most folks have probably never seen a pomegranate. You'll be expanding their horizons.

As for nuts, we grow tired of peanuts and who likes cashews anyway? Try pecans, the healthy nut with the highest amount of anti-oxidants. Almonds and walnuts work too.

While you are passing out the hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes, encourage hand washing.

Do this and you'll create a happy, healthy work environment. Happy people are productive people. For more bright ideas, check out last December's post.

Yet Another Agile Reading List

I'm often asked for an agile reading list and each time I wish that I had already blogged it. What's kept me from doing it so far is that I tend to write a somewhat new list each time depending on the requester's level of experience, unique situation, and context. Such a list is also likely to change over time, but that shouldn't stop me from posting it -- this post is my thoughts at this point in time. My thoughts are likely to change.

That said, and without further ado or proof reading, here is an agile reading list.

I could make this easy for me and just say read Cohn's signature series plus the Beck signature series. That'd keep you busy for a while and cover the topic pretty well.

But I can put a little more effort into this. Don't let this long list scare you. Start with this 1st block, then supplement with some of the others. I'm writing this from the point of view of helping a total agile novice get started.

Most importantly, you need to understand the agile values: http://agilemanifesto.org/ and http://pmdoi.org/ and either http://www.extremeprogramming.org/values.html or http://www.softwarereality.com/lifecycle/xp/four_values.jsp or http://xp123.com/xplor/xp0209b/index.shtml.

Here are some links about agile in general and two specific agile processes, XP and Scrum, and one lean/agile approach called Kanban. Just read as little or as much of these as you desire to get the gist of what it's all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29

You need a good understanding of the Scrum process since it's the market
share leader right now. I've been advising people to find the Scrum book with the fewest number of pages, but there are so dog gone many Scrum books, which one is the shortest? Maybe that's not useful advice. So, how about this... Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn. Subscribe to Mike's blog.

I think I'll throw in http://scrumpocketguide.com/# from my friend Peter Saddington. I haven't read it, but it sounds short. :-)

Subscribe to http://www.leadingagile.com blog and my blog :-).

These next few are a bit old, but you need to have read something by "Uncle Bob" and Alistair. You could substitute some other book by them if you wish:
Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin.
Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn.

These eXtreme Programming books are great and short and solidly apply to Scrum:
Planning XP by Beck.
XP Installed by Jeffries.
XP Explored by Wake.
Don't get the original white XP Explained book by Beck. It's talks about Load Factors and Ideal Engineering Days which I don't recommend.

If you want to broaden beyond Scrum and XP, read about Crystal Clear and the other Crystal methods by Alistair Cockburn.

Now we move beyond the basics into some specifics. First, let's take a look at the Product Owner related literature:

http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htm

Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn.

Here are some great posts from my colleague on The Product Owner:
http://www.leadingagile.com/2011/03/why-a-product-owner-team/
http://www.leadingagile.com/2011/03/product-owner-team-who-needs-to-play/
http://www.leadingagile.com/2011/03/one-real-life-product-owner-team/
http://www.leadingagile.com/2011/03/product-owner-team-design-considerations/

The Product Owner role in agile is a big job. And very important. Many say it can't be filled by just one person because no one has all the necessary skills. They say you often need a team of people with diverse skills and responsibilities to do the job well. I tend to agree. Here is some food for thought:
http://blog.xebia.com/2008/05/22/scrum-the-mythical-product-owner-role/

Next, someone on your team needs to understand retrospectives in depth. If you don't get what you need to know out of the above books, this one is wonderful: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby. Subscribe to Esther's blog.


Here are some more assorted topics:

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin. Subscribe to Lisa's blog .

Read Beck's TDD book, Fowler's Refactoring book, Evans' Domain Driven Design book, and Williams' Pair Programming book.

At some point, you might need to know what people mean by Lean as it applies to software. Poppendieck wrote the books on it:

Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by Mary Poppendieck.

Before reading Poppendieck, it might possibly be better to read The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, a delightful book. We also have his Theory of Constraints (ToC) text. Goldratt is becoming a very important person to have read, at least for lean/agile consultants.

However, if you read Goldratt, you must also read The Principles of Product Development Flow by Reinertsen. Reinertsen takes exception with the over simplified or at least naïve implementations of ToC (et. al.).

ToC brings us to the kanban process which is gaining popularity. Kanban by David J Anderson is a wonderful book,but lacks specifics on how to do the metrics when the rubber meets the road. Subscribe to the kanbandev yahoo group.

There are books on scaling agile: Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development by Larman and Vodde. And Scaling Software Agility, Leffingwell.

Sadly, I cannot recommend this book, even thought I have a chapter in it: XP 2003 Proceedings.

Finally, find a local agile/lean/scrum user group to attend and make connections. I can tell you all about the ones in Atlanta and can connect you to people who know all about the ones in Ohio and Chicago and RTP, NC.

There are probably a thousand other folks with their own agile reading list. I wouldn't mind it at all if you were to post your list here or link from here to your site.

Slack and the Manager's Role in Scrum

photo credit: flikr dcwriterdawn

In his book Slack, Tom DeMarco makes the point is that you can't be creative when you are overworked or overburdened. Stress kills innovation as does busyness. To be creative, your mind needs to feel free and unallocated, uncluttered even.

In a waterfall shop, slack abounds. There's the project fuzzy front end where some are idle. There's the test and fix or stabilization cycle at the end of the project where some folks are slammed, and others are trying to not look as idle as they are. And there are times in the middle where this person or that one doesn't have enough work to do. Or maybe they are blocked. If you can put that slack time to good use improving the product, the work environment, your skills, or your process, then good for you.

The problem with Scrum and eXtreme Programming in particular and with iterative development in general is that they wring all the slack out of an organization. There is no unaccounted for time on a Scrum team. You must deliver value in every story. Every sprint must deliver valuable working software. You must help your teammates finish their work for the sprint if they get in a bind. Or add another small story to the sprint if possible. "If ya ain't working on the sprint backlog, ya ain't getting paid!" Little slack leads to little time to look around leads to little improvement.

Thankfully, we have a solution.

We have more than one, in fact. Let me first tell you about the solution that this article is not about. You can introduce slack into your organization with regular slack time. There are numerous well known examples of companies that do things like Fed-Ex days, time set aside for self-directed work, not allocated to Prioritized Product Backlog Items. Dan Pink recently endorsed this approach. As an aside, I like what Dan has to say about what motivates knowledge workers.

But there's another solution to the lack of slack that we should entertain first. In fact, you are less likely to do the FedEx day if you aren't first doing the following. But to introduce this I must first point out something that Scrum says about managers. Scrum doesn't say a whole lot about managers, but it does say at least this: mangers must stop assigning tasks. Too bad that many managers get their power and sense of self-worth from this activity. Deciding how to get the work done in Scrum is left up to the self-organizing cross-functional team. The people who can best decide how the work should be done are those closest to the work.

Just to be clear, managers in Scrum and eXtreme Programming should not:

• make assignments
• hand out work
• direct people or tell them what to do
• make the hiring decision solo
• SW architecture (in my opinion - debatable)
• do work
• be an individual contributor
• be a hero

Well, gosh, then shat should a manager do? Well, I'll tell ya! You could manage more people. You can still step in when the team needs help (but not too quickly). You are still an agent of the company, handling legal stuff, signing off on expenditures, etc. You can still manage risks, especially if you are a skilled Project Manager.

But you could also do something else.





Be the Slack.

Move up to a higher level of value to the organization. Be the slack that has been wrung out of the team. Here are some specific suggestions:

• Keep an eye on the system, looking for improvements
• Ensure cross-training is happening (not by making assignments, but making the team handle it)
• Understand the dynamics of the organization
• Understand how value is created
• Protect the team from interference
• Make the organization effective; learn to look at it as a system
• Support the team
• Clear roadblocks
• Provide good facilities -- fight the facilities police (better: teach facilities how value is created and how better facilities helps you guys create value)
• Ditto with more powerful computers, sufficient build machines and test machines (the people on the team are far more expensive than a PC)
• Use Derby's 13 essential questions for managers or the book on this topic she is working on
• Read Deming
• Watch interpersonal interaction -- watch when one team member pulls back, withdraws in a brainstorm (for example)
• Help the team learn TDD by making room for them to learn (time - remove the schedule pressure while they learn)
• Understand the capacity of the team (also a team and scrummaster job)
• Think through policies, procedures and reward/review systems and improve them (what messages do they send?)
• Understand what motivates knowledge workers (see the previous reference to Pink) and let creating that kind of environment be an imperative

I contend that we should focus on continuous improvement of process, of people’s skills and knowledge, with a strong focus on empowerment and self-organization. And work on open, honest feedback. You’ll have better results if you do all that and just completely scrap the individual annual review.* I love quoting Drucker here: "“the average person takes 6 months recovering from a performance review.”

I'm really straying off the point of the article there. Let me bring it back together by saying you can't do a good job with this other higher value stuff if you are down in the weeds assigning tasks to people. Delegate more. In fact, delegate everything, freeing yourself up to be the ultimate in valuable slack.


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* Not sure if that sentence is in my words or whether I've co-opted someone else's way of saying that. I think I've read a similar sentiment in either Management 3.0 or in Coaching Agile Teams. I don't think I've plagiarized there, but will gladly give due credit if I have.

How to Engage an Agile Coach

I'm often asked by companies how they can engage me as an Agile Coach. What would you do? For how long would you be there? How long would it take? My response is always tailored given their specific context. Each situation is different. However, here's an attempt to give a very general response to that question.

In short, you can pretty much design your own ideal engagement with an Agile Coach. I'm sure there is a coach out there that will be willing work with you toward your goals or activities, whatever they are. Although some coaches only do deals of a certain size or of a certain type of work, there is generally lots of flexibility to be found.

For example, depending on what you are after and on your budget, the number of days and the frequency of involvement can vary.

• Very limited: A day or a small number of days
• Regular or periodic: A day or three each iteration
• Full time but temporary: like 1 to 6 months
• Full time permanent: unbounded

A single small team that just wants some outside eyes once, or once in a while, can get help with a small budget. Involving the coach with more teams and more people typically means more days are needed to accomplish your improvement or transformation goals. An organization looking for coaching for many large non-collocated teams is a much larger deal.

The engagement can be just as simple as "hey, I think we're doing pretty good, but we'd like to have a fresh set of eyes to point out what we're overlooking." That could lead to any number of recommendations that the team is free to tackle on their own. Or that could lead to an additional engagement designed to address some specific issues. Or an engagement can be as broad as be here every day and work with us for three months.

As for the type of work that a coach may do for you, the work of the coach may be in the form of training and workshops, mentoring, coaching, consulting/advising, or getting his hands dirty.

Here are some examples of what you might engage a coach to help you with. This is not an exhaustive list.

• Limiting WIP and setting limits
• Using Kanban and Lean metrics
• Eliminating delay, prioritizing work via cost of delay, and improving flow
• A3 problem solving
• Demonstrate many retrospective techniques, lead retrospectives, mentor others as they use these techniques
• Spotting and removing impediments and managing risks
• Creating and sizing / estimating the release backlog, using velocity
• Identifying the MMF set
• Story mapping
• Project chartering, vision casting
• Planning and preplanning
• Communicating
• Using BVCs and information radiators, addressing why they are stale and not being used
• Space and facilities
• Pair programming, SOLID design, emergent architecture, TDD, CI, continuous deployment, etc.
• Defining Done
• Coding katas
• Design patterns, refactoring, etc., for example through lunch-n-learns
• Designing and tasking-out of stories; design review; shared task list and working as a team on each story
• A myriad of dysfunctions
• Issues with interpersonal relationships, working agreements, appreciation, active listening and working as a genuine team instead of as a simple working group, team accountability
• Team goals, rewards, recognition, MBOs and other HR/management policies
• The management role, including management influence and interference, people management
• Scrum of scrums, multi-layer scrum and kanban
• Working effectively with remote workers
• Project portfolio management
• Documentation
• Q&A - Address the team's concerns and questions such as:
  
  • "How should we handle defects and minor changes in our specific context? Plan them and estimate them? Treat them as high priority and don't plan/estimate?"
  • "What should we do if we don't finish a story in the iteration?"
  • "On what day of the week should we have planning?"
  • "We're considering changing the way we do xxxxxx, what do you think?"
  • "We have work left over at the end of each iteration. What do we do?"
    

This list could go on and on and on. Each coach has their specialties and strengths and would come up with a somewhat different list.

Give me a call and we'll set up a time to craft an engagement of your own, suitable for your needs and your context.

What is an Agile Coach?

This is an unusual post for me in that it's just a quote from someone else. I wanted a pointer to it from my blog, so here it comes. Brian Bozzuto over at BigVisible describes an Agile Coach thusly:

An Agile Coach is a professional, working internally as a full time employee or externally as a hired consultant, who is working to help realize a profound organizational change to better embrace the values and principles espoused in the Agile Manifesto. Specifically, this is a person who is doing a blend of a number of activities based on the situation to help that organization overcome barriers to change – be they technical, organizational, or skills based. One of the key values of such a person is their ability to play different roles based on the context, and a high level of awareness of these different potential roles can be a critical factor in their effectiveness.

You should go read the rest of Brian's article.

Compact Crank: You Want One #roadcycling

Earlier this year I finally had Atlanta Cycling put a compact crank on my road bike. I'm here to tell you about it. If you know all about bicycles and cranks and stuff, this article isn't for you. This is for those who are wondering if they should change out their standard for a compact crank. If you are wondering this as you struggle climbing hills, then you could just stop reading now and go ahead change your crank. I can say with confidence that you should. Read on if you want to understand what this is all about.

Note that I'm assuming that you don't already have a three-ring crank. If you have a three-ring crank, the only thing a compact crank might do for you is save a very small amount of weight. It will not make it easier to get up hills because a compact crank's smallest ring is going to be larger than your triple's smallest ring. Stick with what you have.

Background

The crank-set is the two or three rings with teeth connected to the crank arms. The crank arms are connected to the pedals. The pedals are connected to the cleats. The cleats are connected to the shoes. The shoes are connected to the foot bone. The foot bone's connected to the...

Anyway, a regular crank typically has 39 teeth on one ring and about 52 teeth on the other. A compact crank typically has 34 and 48, or maybe a couple more. The lower number of teeth in the compact crank-set allows you to spin faster in your lowest gear, making it easier to get up hills.

Notice that I didn't say easy. I said easier. Don't set your expectations too high or you'll be disappointed. A compact crank will not make a hard hill easy. But it can help you make it up the hill without having to mash as hard.

As an aside, developing a fast cadence is good. 'Fast' is, say, faster than 90 RPM. A compact crank isn't going to help you have 90 RPM up a steep hill. I'm just saying that a fast cadence everywhere else is better for your knees and muscles (it's easier n them). It's also better for your heart and lungs (gives them a better workout, which they could probably use). Your heart and lungs can recover more quickly and take punishment for longer periods. There are other benefits to a fast cadence such as the ability to respond and accelerate more quickly. Coach Levi wrote a nice article on this topic.

The Verdict

I like my new crank. As I said above, if you are thinking you might want a compact crank but you are just not sure, just be sure. I'm sure; you want one. I can get to the top now with less fatigue. Not "no fatigue"; less fatigue. If you don't ride much, you might not even notice how much easier it is. I ride the same hills every week and have done so for 4 years or so. That's enough riding that I can notice the difference. If you ride some big hill only once per month, you might not notice the benefit of the compact crank, but it's there.

I also enjoy the 3-gaps North Georgia mountain route much better with a compact crank.

Concerns Debunked

Some people say that a compact crank will make you run out of gear and cut your top-end speed. Eh, well, maybe. They note that you'll "spin-out". Spin-out isn't wiping out, thankfully. Spin-out is when you can't or don't want to pedal any faster. With the compact, I spin-out north of 37 MPH (though I don't remember when I ran out of gear with the standard -- sorry). And I can still coast down hill at 40 miles per hour on my rides. That's fast enough for me. Besides, I'd just as soon coast down hill to rest up for the next climb. I don't need any more top-end. I'd rather enjoy the easier up-hills than the faster down-hills.

Another concern you might have is that you'll run out of gear on the small chain ring and that you'll therefore need to spend more time in the big chain ring. You may be concerned about having to do more shifting. Well, I guess this is true. I do spend more time in the big chain ring. And I do change gears using the front derailleur more often. However, it's not quite as much as you might think. Besides, with the compact crank I can start off from a standstill in the big chain ring as long as I'm not pointing up hill. You need to get good at shifting anyway and if your bike doesn't shift well, fix it.

If you are young, strong and getting stronger, a compact crank may make you slower and cause you to plateau. If you find a mountain climb strenuous, but you can do it and enjoy it in a standard crank, then keep using the standard. It will make you stronger. But if you are young, strong, and getting stronger, then this article probably isn't for you anyway.

Cadence

I wasn't expecting to have a faster average cadence with the compact, but it looks like I do. I was expecting my cadence on most of the route to be the same, with a faster cadence only on the worst hills. I thought the time spent in the lowest gear would be short enough to not impact the average over the length of the ride.

My average cadence on my regular ride used to be 84 to 88. Now it's 87 to 90. Nice. But I do not think it has impacted my pace.

Here's an example with the regular crank: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/29757090

Here's a comparable example with the compact: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/72575356

Same pace, same time of year (winter), faster cadence.

My Dunwoody Cycling group does a faster pace in the summer and fall. My otherwise comparable rides with the regular crank have a lower cadence: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/55940780

But I'm Not Mechanical

I'm quite mechanical and am confident that I could have figured out what to buy and how to change out the crank-set. But I'm not really interested in bicycle maintenance these days. Too many other time demands. If you enjoy bicycle maintenance, then you probably know whether you could do this yourself. If you are unsure, then take it to a bicycle shop. That's what I did and don't regret it.

What's it cost?

I paid less than $350 (January 2011) for a new compact chain ring and crank arms and new shifter cable guides, including labor. It would have been more like $500 if I went with a Shimano Ultrega crank-set, but I went the cheaper route. There are certainly lots of variables, so your cost could be much different.

Recommendation

Just do it. If you switch (or have switched) to a compact crank, share your experience in the comments.

Partial Points and an Unstable Velocity

Years ago, back when I was dumber…

Once every three months or so we'd have some incomplete story and we'd split the points, allocating some to this iteration and some to the next iteration. That's dumb.

Instead, for the last couple years when this happens I give no points to this iteration and points remaining (we estimate the remaining work) to the next iteration. Back then, the lower velocity would have caused angst in upper management, but read on.

We estimated our stories in points. We did not estimate our tasks. Our tasks were very fine grained. Most tasks were half an hour to half a day. We did not come up with tasks in planning. I wouldn't change any of that. In fact, it's what I currently try to get my clients to do. The difficult part seems to be the very fine grained tasks.

For us, 0 and 1 point stories were trivial. Normal estimates could be 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 40 points. If it was 40 or below, the story could go into an iteration. We would also use 60 and 100 point estimates, but those stories had to be split. Our problem was that the 30s and 40s were always underestimated relative to the 5s through 20s. The scale wasn't linear. We knew this. Knowing it didn't fix it. That made our velocity unstable.

Our unstable velocity caused lots of heart-burn in the upper management ranks and contributed to a lack of trust. If I had a do-over, I would solve this by narrowing the range of estimates allowed which would drive more of the larger stories to be split. I'd limit the range to, say, 5 to 20.

I've also considered solving an unstable velocity by clearly setting a high level of commitment for each iteration. Not stretch goal. Not aggressive goal. A high level of commitment. The team would of course still say what they would commit to. But I would have expected them to meet it. (This has sense been deemphasized in Scrum, and I didn't do it then and I wouldn't do it on most teams now, but it might have helped in this situation, as I describe next.) This surely would have initially led the team to commit to a smaller amount of work. And it would have eventually led to more care being made at the start of the iteration and in advance of the iteration in order to have a well thought out plan. We would have gotten back to committing to the normal amount of work over the long term, but would have given us a much more stable velocity and more predictable pace. Maybe. If done wrong it would have just angered the programmers.

Another way of getting at smaller stories and better planning would have been for us to drop from two-week to one-week iterations. That would also force us to split the larger stories. We already had a great design/task-creation/review approach, but we did that design just in time, during the iteration, immediately before development. With one-week iterations, we could do that work for each story on the 1st day of the iteration between planning and commitment.

And yet another way to crack this nut would have been to switch to a cycle time metric (as in Kanban) or publish only an average velocity measured over four to six iterations.

A BVC for Tech Debt

Thinking back to some of my days in management years ago, if I had a do-over, I would create a better big visible chart for our technical debt. What we had was a list of code examples to not follow, some cleanup tags in the code, the occasional debt reduction story card, and sometimes a list of debt-full areas written on the whiteboard.

What else we needed was a consolidated list of our debt on a single Big Visible Chart (BVC). We'd write each technical debt on the BVC as we either encounter it the first time or when we knowingly introduce it. Then each time we encounter it thereafter we could put a dot next to it. A dot for each day it slows us down or for each day of impact it causes.

Most teams I've seen could benefit from quantifying technical debt in this way. You've got to make the impact visible. Otherwise it can be difficult to get the understanding of, or even support from, others in the business. It easy for those who don't interact regularly with the developers and who don't have a recent development background and experience with better practices to lack trust. Not only that, quantifying debt can help a team prioritize their debt reduction efforts and keep them on top of it.

Off the Road Again

I'm back! I'm definitely back in Atlanta and hopefully back into my blog as well. As of this month I'm once again focused on the Southeast, but now as an independent lean and agile coach.

Working with Pillar Technology was fun. They are a great bunch of people and have some amazing programmer talent. I'm glad I followed Mike Cottmeyer to Pillar and really enjoyed working with him. I can't thank him enough for the help he gave me early on. I'm appreciative of the slack and the support Matt VanVleet gave me. Working with Pillar also gave me lots of opportunity to work with and be challenged by Matt Barcomb. Always a plus. But going independent gives Pillar and I some relief from the costs and pressures of my travel to the Northeast.

I am engaged with a great client here in Sandy Springs but my calendar through the end of the year isn't full. Help me fill it! I’d enjoy talking through your projects and the challenges they bring and how we can work together. Let's meet up. Give me a call or drop me an email.

These last couple of years I've re-learned how passionate I am about coaching and training. I've never had more joy from work than when I help a team improve their environment and see their appreciation. I've been blessed to be able to do that as part of my job from '99 through '09. And I have been even more blessed to make it my sole focus since then.

Each context is different, a unique challenge requiring a unique prescription. I'm looking forward to bringing this passion and experience to new challenges, in your context, to your environment.

Bias

The other night I found a credit card receipt from The Pampered Chef. This is one of those Tupperware party kind of things that women go to and overpay for stuff because they feel guilty for insulting the party giver if they don't buy something. I told Laura before she went to that party to not buy anything. I had just started my own business and had made it clear in a Family Meeting that we're going to restrict our spending until I see what kind of cash flow we're going to have. We were to buy nothing unless we could eat it.

So, as Laura was heading off to this Pampered Chef party the other day and I told her not to buy anything, she told me she was getting a free meal out of it so I should relax. I can't remember if she explicitly agreed to not buy anything but I know she heard and understood my request to not-buy-anything.

What was she thinking? I stewed over this all night. Laura was already asleep when I found the receipt. I didn't think I should wake her up to discuss this. I knew that wouldn't go over well. So I stayed up thinking about how I'd approach this in the morning.

I avoided my wife for a while the next morning. When I could avoid her no longer I told her I thought we agreed that she wasn't going to buy anything at that party. Laura calmly told me she bought me a birthday present. A $22.26 birthday present. She bought something inexpensive which is exactly what I would have wanted her to do. And I bet it's an incredibly thoughtful gift.

Man did I feel like a heel.

I've been reading lately about biases. In The Principles of Product Development Flow, Donald G. Reinertsen says that psychologists know that "…[humans] have a general bias to interpret the behavior of other people negatively."

There is a nice list of cognitive biases on wikipedia. Some that are particularly relevant to this topic are:

• Actor–observer bias – the tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
• Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).

These are amplified by an additional set of biases:

• Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people.
• Negativity bias – the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
• Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or "repeat something long enough and it will become true").
• Halo effect – the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
• Illusion of asymmetric insight – people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
• Illusion of transparency – people overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
• Illusory superiority – overestimating one's desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as "Lake Wobegon effect," "better-than-average effect," or "superiority bias").
• Ingroup bias – the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.
• Projection bias – the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one's future selves) share one's current emotional states, thoughts and values.

But why would I assume the worst of my spouse? That's ridiculous. Of all the people in the world, I should not have these biases towards her. If this can happen within my family, how much more so can it happen in the workplace?

What I learned from this experience is how real these biases are and how on-guard we as humans need to be. Poor communication skills (or just a simple mismatch in communication styles), fear of reprisal and fear of confrontation can make matters worse. The problem with poor communication is we always assume it's the other person who can't communicate.

Kerth's Retrospective Prime Directive hints at a solution:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

How do you encourage that other than posting it and reviewing it before retrospectives?

And in Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins says to "...create a positive regard for them. Do this by changing your view of them. Regard the person as a human being with hopes, dreams and desires (like your own) so that you can approach them with love and compassion..."

How do you foster this in an organization?

Reinersten offers this advice:

This tendency [toward bias] is reduced when we get to know others as complex hum beings, much like ourselves. Task related (job related) communications by itself is not enough to create an appreciation of this complexity. Non-task-related interpersonal communication that comes from colocation is key to developing cohesive teams.

Chats around the water cooler, going out to lunch together, after-work drinks, post iteration and post release celebrations and kick offs beforehand are good things to try. Fantasy football and office baby birth date/weight pools and the like can help. Team working agreements (norms) posted on a big visible chart can help. Praying daily for your co-workers by name helps remarkably well. Other ideas?

We can bring up the elephant in the room in our retrospectives, but other than just hashing it out, what techniques or exercises have you found useful?

Most of us don't enjoy a tense and confrontational workplace. Likewise, most of us don't recognize how much we ourselves contribute to that situation.

What additional advice do you have to combat bias, increase non-task-related interpersonal communication and improve interpersonal relationships?