Searching For World's Best Agile Superheros

OK y'all, I need your help as you guys reading this, are the cream of the crop in the Agile world. If you can't help, no one can.

Some of you that read the other newsletter as well, have already seen this, but in short, I got a book deal from Bloomsbury I am beyond excited about. The provisional title is "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teams in the Digital Age" and a great deal of it explores the connection to Agile and new ways of work. So yes, buzzing :)

Monday's article with the announcement is here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/my-why-simple-im-lucky-duena-blomstrom

And yesterday's video with an open call is here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/book-announcement-open-call-history-makers-duena-blomstrom/

Now here's where I need your help - we are thinking of having a few different shops in the mini-research we are doing as explained above.

Do you know anyone who is nimble enough, smart enough, courageous enough and really (ha!) agile enough to recognise the potential, get excited about being part of possibly helping to prove the value of Agile to People through Psychological Safety, and can get organised fast enough to give us 2 teams with comparable backlogs in the next couple of weeks?

The idea is simple: we agree on some universal Agile KPIs to start with, then measure the Psychological Safety of both teams and then we support only one of the two team leaders in increasing their EQ, we ensure they are mindful of it in every kick-off and retro and generally do some pointy interventions to better the components of PS for 2 sprints (ideally under 8 weeks in total, I have a deadline to turn the manuscript in July for all my sins!) and then we see what happens.

If my hypothesis is correct, then we should see a direct correlation between increased PS and the Agile KPIs (I know, I hate that term too!) in even that short of a time frame. Either way, they would get their name in the book and we'll give them a year's free license to Psychological Safety Works for the whole enterprise as a "thank you".

Disclaimer before I get any more emails and messages to school me about being open-minded about the data and not pre-load the research, etc - this is not academically constructed, it has no ambitions to appear rigorous or exact, and I am not expecting a certain result -although I am crossing everything that I'm right to invest the hope in my dream scenario!- but will instead document the journey in the book chapters and simply show what we found either way. All I know is that these two topics are intrinsically connected and they can and should highlight each other. The rest is still unwritten (to quote Natasha Bedingfield).

To be perfectly frank, if I knew a pandemic was coming, I would have sped up this research so we don't have to always wonder what would have been in terms of results had the world not shifted its axis, but the "what would I have done if I knew this was coming" is not exactly a sane or productive game to play and there's huge potential this will be even better.

So this is a de-facto Agile Superhero beauty contest. I'm in search of the smartest and bestest CTO/CEO/No-O-Just-Doer who has the most awesome teams so please spread the word and get in touch as I think we'll give them the opportunity of a lifetime.

If you can't think of anyone that amazing (although have a post-isolation lens when you think about it, as many people have shown their true colours in this crisis and may surprise you!) then still get in touch to let me know your opinion - how crazy of a thesis do you think it is? That Agile's true calling is to prove the value of happy humans in psychologically safe teams through faster and better tech?

Stay safe, sane and Agile and let's make history together!

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

As a tech company passionately working on ways to create psychologically safe teams whatever their location, we at PeopleNotTech have been considering the role we can play in supporting teams in light of COVID-19. We all have to keep thinking of the work-family aka the team and the ways to redefine work in the digital playing field with an emphasis on EQ and we rapidly have to find ways to turn that into a comfortable and efficient reality for all of us.

If you’re preparing or supporting a team for remote working and want to kit them with the right tools to manage this, we are offering:

1. An extended trial of the Psychological Safety software i.e. we have opened up accounts to your teams for a period for free so your people can express how they are feeling (in particular in these anxious times) and so that team leaders can quickly assess their team on topics such as Morale, Resilience, Courage, Flexibility, Learning, Openness, Empathy and more;

2. A “Stay Connected” questions pack designed specifically for teams who are transitioning to remote working; 

3. A free 1-on-1 online EQ crash course for your team leaders to help them support their now remote team confidently.

It is painless to get anyone up on the software - there is no implementation, set-up, extensive training or data needed, teams can be using the work tool within hours. Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us more about your working-from-home efforts and readiness in light of COVID-19 and we’ll do our best to help.

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