Help Design Our Aristotle Pack

At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at [email protected] ?

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In the other newsletter this week - we’re being crystal clear that Psychological Safety needs to be raised by empowered teams . Anything else is lip service. We’re also underlining once more what Psychological Safety is NOT but also what it means to the business in $ so please head over if you wanted to read any of that.

On to another topic though. One of the main reasons why I am utterly bullish about Agile is that it simply makes us better. I have never, as a designer or product owner, ever made a feature that we designed a priori and it was better than its equivalent that would have come from the client directly.?

In other words, no matter how extraordinarily knowledgeable and in-depth or researched and analytical we’ve ever been about planning and delivering a certain piece of functionality, it has never been even comparable to that same piece of functionality having been asked for/hinted at/wondered about by the customer themselves.?

In fact, seeing how the team behind PeopleNotTech is not junior enough to be iffy around admitting wrong turns, we openly tell the stories of our failures, mistakes, deluded assumptions, product pivot moments (times when we realised our Dashboard wasn’t for the team leader but the entire team) or our killer features (how our Playbook was suggested by teams we worked with who wanted to showcase to others what actions they took that worked for them) being practically always the result of our clients being immensely smarter than we could have ever been.

That said, we know that not everyone has the luxury of the connection with -and at times even the awareness of- their end customer so this isn’t as easy for everybody but certainly worth getting creative and proactive about.

One of the things we’ve been excited about is our release of the “Aristotle Score” in our Team Dashboard . It comes with a specific set of questions around the coordinates that Google has determined to be the top predictors of teams’ ability to perform to the best of their abilities when they ran their famous study and those factors are, -in addition to the main one which is Psychological Safety- Structure and Clarity, Dependability, Meaning and Impact.?

We intersperse questions on those topics in between the usual Psychological Safety and Remote Working Satisfaction questions we ask team members and display an overall “Aristotle Score” on the team’s Dashboard to allow them to see how they are benchmarking against Google’s findings.?

The feature is optional and best suited to Agile teams who need to know how they are doing on these topics to move forward. Many of our smart customers use the launch of the feature to hold an Aristotle Study Findings Benchmarking Mini Kick-off play where they discuss each and every one of those categories and what they mean within their unique context.

Speaking of our smart customers - one has asked us last week if our Dashboard could serve as an augmentation -or replacement- for an Agile coach. When I challenged them to tell me what they envisioned the role of the coach to be and they said it was to keep the team motivated, help them facilitate the non-technical (people) work and keep reminding them of the principles behind Agile.?

If that’s the definition then the answer is yes, PNT’s Dashboard can do most of those things, judging by the reports from the teams using it, the fact that the data on people’s behaviours are clearly displayed keeps them motivated. The ability to affect their own “destiny” in terms of team dynamic and how everyone becomes a great facilitator helps with the non-technical/people work and so on.?

The only thing it doesn’t really do per se, is reminds the team of the point of Agile and the principles but then again we have a vehicle for that called the “Did You Know” feature which we have built to help with another piece of work that our advocates and superheroes had to do to increase the team’s awareness of the benefits of Psychological Safety and which flashes pieces of information from academia, research, studies and anecdotal history of other teams to reinforce its importance. Each team member of course has the ability to turn this off and never see the “Did you know…?” flashcards if they so desire and/or it annoys them.

So here I am asking you guys to help us design this “Did you know… for Agile” feature enhancement in a way that would be meaningful to an Agile team because I expect the quality of the information alongside the tone will make all the difference.?

The way I envision it a priori and before we asked our customer teams and yourselves the community what to pack into it would be to highlight big Agile wins and repeat principles such as:

“Did you know…. “

• One of the 4 main principles of Agile is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”
• One of the 4 main principles of Agile is “Working software over comprehensive documentation”
• One of the 4 main principles of Agile is “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”
• One of the 4 main principles of Agile is “Responding to change over following a plan”
• 60% of companies experience growth in profits after adopting an Agile approach.
• 93% of business units that had fully adopted an agile model before the current pandemic did better than business units that hadn’t. (Source: McKinsey)
• Of failed Agile implementations, 63% of respondents in one study blamed the clash between their business’s culture and Agile as a philosophy. (Source: VersionOne )
• Agile projects are 28% more successful than traditional projects. (Source: PwC )
• 50% of team members are motivated more by team success than by the company’s (27%) or individual’s (23%) personal goals. (Source: Atlassian )
• By 2030, artificial intelligence will automate 80% of routine Agile work. (Source: Smarter with Gartner )
• The biggest roadblocks to implementing Agile are too many projects per team member, unclear project scope and the lack of company vision.
• The top two benefits of Agile implementations are accelerated delivery speed (70%) and improved quality (62%) (Source: Digital.ai).
• Companies such as CapitalOne report deploying up to 50 times per day for a product, and Amazon, Google, and Netflix deploy thousands of times per day

What else? Or what not to include? Let us know in the comments -or inbox us-, please.

Could your team use this or do they know all this already in a way that is deeply internalised and makes them rarely falter agility wise?

Lastly, I’m toying with the idea of packaging both the Aristotle Score and this Agile-specific “Did you know…?” in an Aristotle Pack because not only did he believe the sum is greater than the parts he also taught us about productive knowledge and isn’t that the very heart of what we’re all trying to achieve but that navel-gazing metaphysical exploration can wait till more teams are happy and performing constantly from anywhere, settled in their people-work, paying back HumanDebt?at Tech Debt alike, running fast and being truly Agile at heart.?

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at?www.peoplenottech.com ?or reach out at?[email protected] ?and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.

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