Agile Manchester – Day 3

My final (And slightly delayed by travelling home) blog post on the Agile Manchester conference.

Keynote – The changing face of teamwork – Alison Coward

Alison presented a great keynote talk on fluid teams and posed the question ‘If we accept that teams can and do change, has our thinking caught up with how these teams work?’

Alison covered off the benefits of having a check-in or as she beautifully described it ‘a micro-moment of mindfulness’ for the group to share something personal or team related before the main part of a meeting starts.

She also covered activation phenomena (A term described in the rather excellent Checklist Manifesto book – read it if you haven’t yet discovered this book!) and how people who speak at the start of a meeting tend to be more productive and willing to speak later.

There were some pretty terrifying stats in the keynote as well. Did you know for example that: -

• 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional (According to HBR)?
• 80% is the proportion of time workers spend responding to emails, in meetings or on the phone (Or reading blog posts like this!)
• 95% of us are working across multiple teams (Whether we realise it or not)
• $58 billion will be wasted on unproductive meetings in 2019

Alison explained the most important motivating factor for individuals is a sense of progress and then proceeded to go through a very helpful toolkit of ideas and techniques to help make teams thrive: -

• Providing the bigger picture
• Starting with individuals
• Designing new ways of working
• Building good team habits

Things such as personal read-me documents the entire team can create, having no meeting days, writing things down that you want to do (You’re more likely to do it that way)

It was a very useful keynote to start the day and one of those sessions were I found myself manically scribbling down all the tips and techniques Alison shared so I could bring them back to try with my own teams.

Morning Session – Agents of change – Jon Fulton

Along with a great side line in cute baby photos of his own new arrival, Jon got all of us in the room to share whether we had been involved in implementing a change in our own organisations (Everyone in the room raised their hands) and then, how many of us had felt frustration or resistance as part of this change (Not surprisingly, the entire rooms hands went up again).

Jon explained though that peoples perspectives only change with experience (Something I’d heard mentioned already during this conference) and how people need to experience change for themselves to really ‘get it’. He posed the interesting question though of ‘What if its our own behaviors as change agents that cause this frustration and resistance in others?’

We had a brief history lesson on RJ Mitchell, a plane designer who came up with a design for a much faster plane in the 1920’s, yet found the RAF uninterested in taking up his designs (He ended up going to Canada to build racing planes) and died a frustrated man (According to his obituary). Those designs eventually got taken up by the RAF and became probably the most famous fighter plane of WW2 (I’ll let you figure out which one it was)

Jon gave us all some useful suggestions on ensuring change is successful. Suggestions such as the Overton Window – windows of opportunity, ShuHaRi (3 stage process of Shu – learning by repetition, Ha – evolving and experimenting and Ri – transcendence or evolution) and making change sustainable by starting small and going slow.

Along the way Jon shared his observations of SCRUM and the many examples he’d seen where change had failed to take hold in a Scrum team, leading to Jon’s description of these teams as: -

• Zombie scrum – a team that’s lost all engagement
• The ‘lost dressing room’ – the Scrum Master has lost the trust and respect of the team
• Dark Scrum – old school waterfall practices
• Cargo cult scrum – copying what others do
• Silver bullet scrum – scrum will solve all our problems

It was a funny and helpful session (Along with a cracking history lesson on plane design)

Afternoon Session – How to make multicultural agility work – Guy Marshall

A real thought-provoker of a session from Guy that barely touched on agile techniques and frameworks but left me puzzling on what I can do to ensure my teams understand cultural differences when it comes to communication, conflict and working together effectively.

Guy asked us to define what culture means – behavioral conventions that can be fuzzy and influence but don’t determine who people are. He discussed the increase in diversity in teams and how things are becoming more inter-disciplinary.

But diversity can be difficult. We naturally like and are attracted to people who are like us, which makes having diverse teams psychologically safe. The benefits however are clear. 19% more innovation is associated with having diverse leadership teams.

Language also plays a huge part in how we build agility in a diverse team, but most miscommunication is down to language and the patterns of discourse this creates. We talked about how this discourse can present itself.

Guy gave a great example where he was working with a Polish team and discussing strong leadership and used the example of Churchill – a strong British wartime leader. But to the Polish team Churchill was felt to have betrayed the Poles during WW2 by not entering the war soon enough (Despite the fact it was actually Chamberlain in charge at the time!

Guy also gave some useful tips for building relationships with multicultural teams, something as simple as learning a few lines of the language of a team in another country shows an interest and that you care enough to try to understand their language. He also covered off the context of languages i.e. German is seen as direct, saying what they mean, whereas Indian and Chinese is less direct and cannot necessarily be taken literally.

We ended the session by sharing our own experiences of working with multicultural teams. With everything from how waving two fingers around is seen completely differently by someone in Portugal to how a South African worker saying ‘I’m doing it right now’ actually means they’ll get it done today.

It was a fascinating delve into the complexities of language and communication and how critical a part these play in building real agility into teams that could be based across the world.

End-Note – Does agile make us less secure? – Michael Brunton-Spall

Michael blitzed through this end-note at 100 words a minute (He did warn us to be fair) on whether agile techniques and teams actually make us all less secure when it comes to our data and products.

He started by pointing out that the definition of security used by most organisations is factually incorrect and is actually more about assurance over security.

We then went on a frankly terrifying journey through the history of mass data leaks, hacks and general bad actors on the internet since the early 2000’s through to 2019 and how our alleged improvements in detecting and improving security had left us no better off now than 20 years ago. We covered everything from the Yahoo data breach, US Embassy cable leaks and Target sharing payment data for millions of customers.

As much as it may be a surprise to some people using the world wide web, it is filled with criminals with an estimated cost of £1.5 trillion a year!

Michael proceeded to then pick apart most of the accusations hurled at agile making us less secure (less documentation, more releases etc) and how these actually improved our security in our teams, organisations and companies. We had some great examples from GDS and HMRC of how they had improved agility whilst maintaining security.

It was a cracking end to the 3 days (If leaving me slightly apprehensive of the little padlock you see on ‘secure’ websites when you enter personal details).

In Summary

This is the first year I’ve been to Agile Manchester, but after the last 3 days it certainly won’t be my last. You pay (Or if your lucky enough), your company pays for you to attend these conferences and you kind of expect them to be worth the money. But it still surprises me how the organizers manage to pull together such a diverse, content rich and extremely useful set of talks, workshops, ideas and case studies at every conference I’ve attended.

There has not been one session I’ve gone to over the 3 days where I didn’t find myself jotting something down in my notebook that I thought would be useful to use with my own teams or try out myself. It’s a real acknowledgement of the hard work speakers, the organizers and brilliant venue staff put into these events which makes them so useful. If you’ve not attended a conference before then I’d urge you to submit a talk or workshop idea, or simply attend one for yourself.

I’m eagerly looking forward to submissions opening for 2020 in the next 3-4 months so I can plan my next trip up here.