“Assume positive intent”

When dealing with troublesome or difficult situations, someone will often chime in with the advice “assume positive intent”. Sometimes teams will even bake this into their working agreements as something they should always do. While I really do like the sentiment, if taken literally as a hard rule, this can be dangerous advice.

Perverse Incentives: Coffee Badging

I learned a new term today: “Coffee Badging”. This is when a company has mandated that people be in the office, so they travel in to the office, swipe their badges, grab a coffee and perhaps talk to someone, and then head home again, where they remain for the rest of their working day.

Tuckman model of team development

I was once called in to help a team, six months into a three month project. Yes, you read that correctly. It was supposed to be a three month project and after six months they had lots of code but nothing that actually worked, and no end in sight.

Playful learning with LEGO

Last week at Agile Open Canada, I brought out the LEGO again, to illustrate technical practices. While there is so much we can do effectively remotely, there are some things that really do benefit from being together in the same room, and this is one of them.

Ladder of Leadership

Sometimes our people aren’t taking initiative in the way we hope they will. This could be due to an issue of motivation or a lack of safety or more generally a system that discourages that initiative in some way. Whatever the reason might be, we need a way to change the conditions to get the result we want.

Dopamine and Learning

In order for us to learn something new, we need to store it in long term memory. If we’re unable to save it there, then we’ll immediately lose that learning the moment we focus our working memory on something new. Working memory is quite limited1 so we need to save those memories quickly if we’re going to.

  1. The research indicates that the typical person can hold 7±2 chunks of information in their working memory at once. There are reports of people who can store as many as 80 chunks of information but these people are extreme outliers. ↩

Autonomy

I’ve spoken to a number of people recently who have complained about a lack of autonomy at work. They talk about being micro-managed by their bosses. About being given solutions to implement, rather than problems to solve. About restrictions on what they can and cannot do in the environment.

Team working agreements with LEGO

Team working agreements (sometimes called team norms) are all about how we are going to work together as a group of people. To do this effectively, we need fairly deep and honest conversations, and yet we see many working agreement sessions stay fairly superficial. The approach in this article uses LEGO® Serious Play® for the core discussions to get those more meaningful conversations.