My talk at AgileNCR 2014 on exploring agile from the core foundations of what makes a great team, and whether agile is the panacea for everything that plagues the software development, or it is really a placebo in the sense that once you have all these pre-conditions that makes a team successful, irrespective of whether you practice agile methods, you will perhaps be equally successful, if not more.
3. “There is no single development, in either technology or
management technique, which by itself promises even one order
of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in
reliability, in simplicity.”
1987
11. EXTRAORDINARY GROUPS
• A compelling purpose that inspires and stretches members to make
the group and its work a top priority
• Shared leadership that encourages members to take mutual
responsibility for helping the group be successful
• Just-enough-structure to create confidance to move forward, but
not so much as to become bureaucratic or burdensome
• Full engagement that results in all members jumping in with
enthusiasm, sometimes passionately and chaotically, regardless of role
• Embracing differences so that group members see, value, and use
their diversity as a strength
• Unexpected learning that translates into personal and group growth
• Strengthened relationships among members characterized by trust,
collegiality, and friendship
• Great results, tangible and intangible
12. LEARNINGS FROM NATURE
• Collective Leadership: Any group
member can take the lead.
• Instant Messaging: Instant whole-
group broadcast communications.
• Ecosystems: Small is Beautiful …
but Big is Powerful.
• Clustering: Engaging many through
the few.
13. BIOTEAMING RULES
1. Stop Controlling: Communicate information not orders
2. Team Intelligence: Mobilize everyone to look for and manage team threats and opportunities
3. Permission Granted: Achieve accountability through transparency not permission
4. Always-On: Provide 24*7 instant “in-situ” message hotlines for all team members
5. Symbiosis:Treat external partners as fully trusted team members
6. Cluster: Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections
7. Swarm: Develop consistent autonomous team member behaviors
8. Tit-for-Tat: Team members must learn effective biological and interpersonal cooperation strategies
9. Genetic Algorithms: Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review
10. Self-Organizing Networks: Define the team in terms of “network transformations” – not outputs
11. Porous Membranes: Develop team boundaries that are open to energy but closed to waste
12. Emerge: Scale naturally through nature’s universal growth and decay cycles
14. CONCLUSIONS
• Sorry, there are no silver bullets
• Agile provides great training wheels
• Focus on people, teams and culture
• Believe in what you do, but test it first!