Agile is the proposed mindset for driving initiatives especially in the space of uncertainty. Often agile and its framework as scrum are mainly associated with software teams as it stems from there. However the mindset and way of working is adapted in all different industries, areas of work from human resources to even schools. Using scrum as cultural change is also used in organisation and proposed explicit as in the Lean start up way by Eric Ries and inherently agile is the same as any iterative way of working in a space of complex uncertainty and fast change.
In challenges of scale, where the need is there to scale the agile of people and teams into greater communities, one will find scrum-of-scrum (SoS) constellation. SoS is the team of agile executional leaders of the agile teams within this set up and including maybe a chief agile executional leader. This goes for Scrum Alliance or SAFe frameworks.
The main purpose of those synchronizations is to align on execution and enable flow. That is mostly understood by removing impediments and driving way of working change.
This way of working change is founded on principles and inspired by principles, however we are acknowledging to work with highly complex system, meaning community of individuals and in the space of mindset to generate better ways of working which will result in more value in shorter time.
Are those changes we drive really helping? How are they helping? How are they not helping? What more could we do?
In our SoS team we wanted to work smarter, create more impact so we went out with this idea.
By scrumming our change with experiments, we will have more impact and learn how to create more impact.
With this hypothesis we went out and this is our story.
We set up a sprint planning with the goal of one experiment and whoop whoop we steam rolled!
It didn’t work off the bat as I thought.
Fascinating enough in the start we did not really understand. Agile leaders “preaching” iterative learning based of working were ironically resistant to apply this with their own work.
The buy in was shallow. The practices were foreign and conceptual questioned. We kept on focusing in our own areas. Persistently we continued with reviewing our not working experiments and retrospection of our ways of working.
While experiments didn’t flow as backlog items are intended to for some more sprints, collaboration in general increased for the “daily shit storm” work, as we call it. The collaboration level was unequal distributed, but it was growing in all team members.
Breakthrough
A common Lean start up workshop with enthusiast was attended by more members of our team. The workshop was a hands-on exercise explaining the Lean start up ideas of Eric Ries and went into practicing the loop of:
Challenge, solutioning, surfacing assumptions, plan test, run test and measure & learn
The team members who joined were super excited and started explaining the idea and sharing the intent that we should change experimentally over iterations. Everything changed from that day when we had a critical mass trained who emotionally experienced the power. Experiments were designed with passion and ONE experiment became several in every sprint.
Passion turned into a positive obsession with learning. Since then we design multiple experiments including metrics and measuring. We test our assumptions and gather data which is evaluated and journal-ed about to learn profoundly about our ideas, assumption, execution and how to drive change.
Additional effect on pulling together on a joint vision of creating value and learn was astounding.The collaborative interactions went steeply up, the distributed energy was outcome channeled and we sense a positive reaction from the tribe which we can support with data as:
- Retrospective outspoken feedback about our work.
- Heavy flow improvements in the heaviest burdened areas.
We transcended from a group to a team and to describe the state I would like to freely quote one of our team members.
Being here is amazing, this is so much fun it doesn’t feel like work.
This experiment evolved into a focused and playful learning journey and a transformational tool for ourselves as we or rather our assumptions are confronted with the truth on a content and ‘how we do things way’. Facilitated by our safe space this evoked into a transformation in our behavior to more honesty, pro-active interdependency and courage.
Challenges:
Amazed by the path we are facing ample of fun challenges in the “how” and particular on:
- How can we “objectively” take lead indicators as early as possible?
- How can we connect them to our outcomes and the impact we want to do?
- What are our paradigms for the outcome indicators?
Gladly take your insights!
Keep you posted!
0 Comments