How To Create Successful Experiments On Agile Teams

If you want to test out a hypothesis yet unsure where to begin — use these checklists to ensure success.

The ability to experiment is a building block of the agile mindset. One can argue experimentation is critical to the?Agile Manifesto’s fourth core value:

Responding to change over following a plan.

Goals Of Creative Experimentation

Organizations talk a lot about the need to experiment, yet, before embarking on the unknown, it is essential to understand the goals of a creative experiment within the agile context. Depending on the type of experiment proposed, goals can range from:

• Expand a person or team’s repertoire of behavior. Understanding why certain behaviors exist and either bolster the right actions or pivot away from undesirable ones is vital.
• Create conditions under which individuals on the agile team can see their lives as?their?creation and take ownership and accountability for actions.
• Stimulate each individual and team's experiential learning, evolving new concepts from behavioral creations. If an individual or team embarks upon an experiment, what will they learn about themselves and others in the process?
• Complete an unfinished situation and overcome blockages.
• Discover polarizations that were not originally in awareness.
• Stimulate the integration of conflictual forces in personality types within self and relation to the agile team. A deeper understanding of the various personality types and motivations will provide rich insights into solving an issue if an interpersonal challenge or conflict arises within the team's system or container.
• Dislodge and reintegrate introjects (internal conversations of “would, should, could”) and work through “misplaced” feelings, ideas, and actions to an improved state of being.
• Stimulate circumstances under which individuals or the team can feel and act stronger, more competent, more self-supported, more explorative, and actively responsible for the self.

While the above list is inexhaustive, notice how the majority of the goals focus on human behavior and relationships rather than implementing more processes. The orientation calls to mind the first value in the?Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

The Sequence Of Events In Successful Experiments

Once the goal(s) of an experiment are known and understood by all, a sequence of steps follows:

• Lay the groundwork — plan the experiment.
• Negotiate consensus between Agile Team Members. Who is going to run the experiment? What are the expected outcomes?
• Assess the work in terms of experienced difficulty. On a scale of 1–10, how difficult is the experiment based on available information?
• Surface the individual or team's awareness. What are the associated risks and issues related to the experiment? What outliers need to be revealed and come to light? What are the known unknowns?
• Locate the individual or team’s energy. How excited is the person or people before embarking on the experiment? High energy leads to excitement and persistence, whereas low energy may be unsustainable and unproductive in the long run.
• Focus awareness and energy toward creating choices. What unique possibilities and pathways can be explored?
• Generate self, team, and external support to participate in the experiment. Identify support systems required to hold the space for experimentation. Do you require Executive sponsorship? Or perhaps environmental support? Or maybe there is the need for technical or quality assistance. Finally, what support do you need to give to yourself — is it as simple as a good night's rest and a nutritious meal to get you through the experiment? Communicate needs to the right audience before embarking upon the task.
• Choose a particular experiment. What experiment are you going to embark upon? Is it the right task? How do you know?
• Enact the experiment. In the words of Nike —?Just Do It!
• De-brief on findings of the experiment with the right audience. What did you learn? How was the process followed? Were the original objectives met and what deviations occurred?

Experiments on Agile Delivery Teams should be engaging, informative, and fun! Before diving in with a knee-jerk reaction, consider what goals you wish to achieve and contemplate the logical process of entering into the practice. Your intentions and outcomes will be more robust.

P.S: Be careful you?do not?over plan an experiment. Find the equilibrium between?planning versus doing?otherwise “responding to change over following a plan” means nothing.

The Intersection Between Gestalt Psychotherapy & Coaching

Here’s an interesting fact. The above checklists are borrowed and redesigned from?Gestalt Psychotherapy?where experiments are used as a powerful aid to reveal new truths when working with clients. Here, I repurposed the therapeutic process to fit with the agile mindset of embedding experimentation into the teams. Ultimately, the intersection between psychology and agile is closer than we think!

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This story was originally published on?Medium?07-11-2021

Lisa Bradburn is transitioning into an Agile Coach and is a?Gestalt Psychotherapist-In-Training.?She writes about the intersection of technology and the human condition. Follow Lisa on?Medium.