Suggestions, Comments, Ideas, And (Some) Indignation Needed

Because of the book, I’ve been re-reading incessantly. It’s an eerie feeling to do that in a crisis-led pandemic world. With that said, I’ve worked in high pressure, fast tech environments my whole life so time for learning has always had to be carved out and always come with a tinge of guilt and a feeling of illicitness. I expect many of you reading this will know what I mean. 

A whole part of the book is about Agile. I address a number of things all having to do with my obsession about the fact that we “Can’t have the WoW (way of working) without the WoT (way of thinking)” but obviously it needs some digestible definitions that are all-encompassing of all the different flavours and possible pitfalls as my audience is likely not only technical and not necessarily Agile. That’s the tedious but relatively easy part, the definitions. Where it becomes “hairier” is when I talk about "fragile" or when I start defining the “digital elite” as mentioned in the DevOps report last year. All tying to the idea of high performance and how it all stems from autonomous, happy teams that are Agile at heart and who have Psychological Safety. 

If the software industry can teach the world a way to deal with some of its “human debt” as I am hoping it will, then we do need to give them loads and loads of examples where making it all about the people made productivity a welcomed by-product. 

The number one observation I have is that I am stunned by the scarcity of reading material on that topic alone. Somehow it doesn’t stand to reason there would be so little written about so much common sense anecdotal evidence. All of us reading this know instinctively that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of shops who are truly Agile and who are, for lack of a better scientific term, awesome-ing and winning, but that volume hardly seems to be displayed in the amount written about them. How is humanity to learn from others if they don’t know what they’ve been doing? I need a great big old anthology of Agile trials and tribulations to have documented the last 30 years in some companies and a clear glossary of the digital elite and what they do. We all need it. Not because anyone should be as silly as to believe best practices exist or they shouldn’t forge their own way and create their own unique flavours driven solely by the two parts of their people equation - their customer and their employees- but because I think we could all do with sharing learning to speed us up. 

Another observation is about the little I can find to definitively correlate the thesis of “command and control is ineffective” with Agile directly which is a link that definitely stands to reason to me. When I was considering the bits I don’t want on the big book epic I realised I really didn’t want this to be another “us versus them” managers vs. leaders debate and I didn’t, in fact, see the point of an entire part of the book referring to leadership alone any more than I wanted to make it about the organisation as a whole, or the individual themselves, simply because the one unit that we have to stay obsessed with is the team. As a result, I only touch on leadership as a subchapter in the Agile part of the book and only to define how Servant Leadership and Autonomy are a must. Nonetheless, it needs addressing. Over the years I’ve seen many of you doing talks about it and I have found a few articles and books but again, as above, not as much as I would have liked so I would appreciate any other suggestions. 

In terms of teams, we can count on to help us make history in the book correlating Agile to Psychological Safety numbers on high performance, you’ll be happy to hear I’ve met a few that are awesome and strong contenders in the week since I’ve put this call out but I will say I’ve also been disappointed by discovering some others were pure PR exercises. The most shocking of realisations so far has been with the scarcity of teams that actually live and die by obsessing about customer feedback and velocity or whatever else they measure success by. With the notable exception of one, none of them is doing so by design, but by accident, as the goal of keeping on top of everything has slipped through the cracks. 

Also, this week for us at PeopleNotTech has been all about onboarding a bevvy of awesome teams and changing engines in-flight while questioning all our values as we scurry to cram as much into sprints as our new customers say they need without compromising our own teams’ Psychological Safety while doing that. Thankfully we share that strong “why” so it’s doable. 

We’ve also realised that the teams who are asking for our help to use our team solution in order to finally define a real people practice in the software or knowledge industries do so from a serious concern with productivity whereas other industries (and we have had teams from all walks of life get in touch since this started, industries we, to our shame, didn’t even recall existed, but all sporting heavy “human debt” and all having in common one thing - a real people leader who gets the danger of no Psychological Safety in particular at a time like this) are not as performance-driven. 

Lastly - a cranky observation - loads and loads of articles are floating around about how boards are “waking up to Agile because of the crisis”. Of course, they aren’t. I avoid reading any more as continuous eye rolls may affect my vision but come on now - Agile is not a quick fix and it’s not a pandemic-generated-leadership-level revelation. They may be paying more attention to the de-facto in-built POCs of how humans can work from home or start understanding command and control is on its way out, or even shelled out for enough licenses to ask what Jira really was, so yeah, they may have more exposure to some elements, but this crisis wouldn’t have magically waved a way-of-thinking-change-spell over executives who previously resisted Agile obstinately and are firmly wed to their waterfall ways, let’s not kid ourselves. No, the same amount of heavy lifting is expected of all of us “woke” ones to push and pull them into changing mindsets as before I think. 

As we’re entering a new phase of this eerie reality, stay sane, stay safe and stay productive. 

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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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