Reteaming and context-switching
Jurgen Appelo
Writer, Speaker, Entrepreneur in Agility, Innovation, and Leadership. Creator of the unFIX Model and Management 3.0, Author of the sci-fi novel Glitches of Gods. Slightly anarchistic, autistic, and eccentric.
The long-lived, stable team is NOT the only way.?I'm not the first author/speaker to acknowledge that it's possible (and sometimes desirable) to allow people to change teams regularly or to work in multiple contexts in parallel.
Reteaming and context-switching are not easy concepts to swallow, apparently. It seems like every week, people are arguing with me that long-lived, stable teams and "one person, one team" are the?best?approach to doing complex, creative knowledge work. They are wrong.?The Steady Team (as we call it in the unFIX model) is just?one?option. There are more.
Note: context-switching is?not?the same as multitasking. When I participate in a conference in the morning and write blog posts in the afternoon, I am context-switching. I am not multitasking because I focus on only one thing at a time. (It's also why I never pick up the phone. I refuse interruptions when I'm speaking and when I'm writing.)
Context-switching comes with benefits?and?risks, of course.?It is essential to be aware of those and to have an honest discussion about the consequences. It means we should be able to switch between identities, limit the number of things we sign up for, and agree on what others can expect from us in each role.
On the next unFIX Community meetup (Monday, February 3 at 18:00 ), we offer three new sets of patterns that can help organizations to design their reteaming efforts and context-switching safely and responsibly:?Common Roles,?Time Commitment,?and?Participation Levels.
Will you join us?
Let's be honest and not fool ourselves with useless dogma. A long-term focus on one team can be good. But sometimes, it's not.?Reteaming and context-switching are not going away.
Jurgen
P.S. I am not against teams; I am against dogma.
Calendar
unFIX Community Meetup: participation, role, and time [EN] ?online?on?3 Apr 2023?with?Jurgen Appelo
unFIX Foundation Workshop - Open 1 [ES] ?online?on?8 Apr 2023?with?Vladimir Baglietto
unFIX Foundation workshop [EN] ?Milan?on?12 Apr 2023?with?Jurgen Appelo
unFIX Einführungs-Workshop (Deutsch) [DE] ?Hamburg?on?13 Apr 2023?with?David Cummins
unFIX Foundation Core Workshop - München (Deutsch) [DE] ?München?on?19 Apr 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX Online en Espa?ol (1 day workshop) [ES] ?online?on?20 Apr 2023?with?Gerardo Barcia
unFIX Foundation Workshop - On LIne [ES] ?online?on?22 Apr 2023?with?Vladimir Baglietto
unFIX Foundation Workshop - München [DE] ?München?on?2 May 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX online Workshop (Deutsch) [DE] ?online?on?2 May 2023?with?David Cummins
unFIX Foundation workshop [PT] ?online?on?7 May 2023?with?Thiago Brant
unFIX Foundation workshop [NL,EN] ?Netherlands?on?12 May 2023?with?Andy Joghi
unFIX Foundation workshop [EN] ?Budapest?on?16 May 2023?with?Jurgen Appelo
unFIX Foundation (Small Groups - Online Workshop) [EN] ?online?on?25 May 2023?with?Javier Camarasa Garcia
The Versatile Organization with the unFIX model [EN] ?Bratislava?on?15 Jun 2023?with?Jurgen Appelo
unFIX Foundation Core Workshop - Frankfurt/Main (Deutsch) [DE] ?Frankfurt am Main?on?21 Jun 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX Foundation Core Workshop - München (Deutsch) [DE] ?München?on?21 Jun 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX Foundation Workshop - München [DE] ?München?on?3 Jul 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX Foundation workshop [NL,EN] ?Netherlands?on?7 Jul 2023?with?Andy Joghi
unFIX Foundation Workshop - München [DE] ?Frankfurt am Main?on?25 Sep 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
unFIX Foundation Workshop - München [DE] ?München?on?15 Nov 2023?with?Jürgen Dittmar
The Agile Accountant - author of Seeing Money Clearly - Leveraging Throughput Accounting for Knowledge Work Author of Tame Your Workflow and No Bozos Allowed LinkedIn Newsletter
1 年Scrum is based on stable and permanent teams. Is it not ?
I think reteaming and context switching are quite different. I agree that reteaming can have advantages in increasing both people's knowledge and their familiarity with other people from having worked closely with them. Context switching however is almost always counter productive when it does not align with a "natural boundary" in the work. That boundary isn't really time based but "brain context based". It is highly dependent on both the person and the exact work they are doing at the time (which may change from day to day). For instance in my case when I'm doing "normal" development work I find it is generally possible to context switch if needed after a commit when the system is in a working, if incomplete state. This is a good "save point" where most of the context has been saved from brain to git so if I switch to something else it won't be too problematic. Typically this would be possible once or twice per day. However if I'm doing complex problem investigation (often at the hardware / software interface) then the amount of brain context required is often much higher and context switches are far more problematic. Paul Graham has an essay on this https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Coach Agile | Formateur | Partenaire unFIX | SPC SAFe - Disponible sur site à Besan?on, Lyon ou Dijon + remote.
1 年I agree, I think that it's on the behalf of an organisation to ease human interactions and not only at a team level. The postulat of having long life stable teams is based, somehow, on the fact that human behavior is 'hard' to managed and limited. And rebraining links between people is 'hard' too?(hello Sir Dunbar). True. Then, if you have a working team, don't touch it. Like when you do not replace a software that works :)? But, in my opinion, cultivating the working agreements and knowledge sharing (as 'Chapter' would do it, -averagely-) at an organisation level, by common understandings and means, is much more beneficial from having distributed agreement between teams and stability of relationship. I have seen so many situations where teams are stuck after a long time static living, even if there are still efficient. I have seen so many different teams failing because their environment is to much team/product/application oriented.? A pool of people should be able to reteam on purpose without the cost of knowing each other, 'just' because the organisation has been able to sustain the relationships above the teams of humans. I'm not speaking about team building but more of supporting human experience across work.?
In short: Nothing good ever came from a dogma!