A good perspective on teams, motivation and change in a recent article on InfoQ, posted by Urs Peter and summarising a keynote and book by Mark Lammers. Lammers is coach of the (six-times world champions) Netherlands women’s field hockey team. The book is not (yet?) translated, so its good to have these ideas summarised.
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When estimating and planning with a team, one kind of question that keeps coming up is “what if”. What if a server isn’t ready, what if another team hasn’t delivered a library, what if Harry isn’t around that day, what if there’s no coffee. In some cases of course, these represent real project risks, and you need to record, track and account for them, but in many cases they can reflect a more general sense of worry - worry that we don’t quite understand what will happen, worry that something unexpected (but I don’t know what) will derail our work.

It’s great to be able to kill these little worries. I’ve found something that helps is asking about whether, if the bad thing happens, we’re confident our ability to deal with it at the time. This is, of course, proposing a real option, but doing it in a way which hits on a team or individual’s ability to deal with a situation as it arises. Put this way, I’ve found most people able to put the worry in perspective, and it evaporates.

As Bobby McFerrin says, Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Having been - a little - disappointed by the Wieck/Sutcliffe book I talked about here, I went back to the source and dug out the article :from which the book draws some of its stories (specifically the narratives of operations on aircraft carriers). “Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks”, first published in 1993 and collected in Making Sense of the Organization.

Its a stimulating read (and convinces me of the value for practitioners of going back to the source - leave the management books for management types…). Among many insights - the contention that organisations concerned with reliability offer more examples of adaptive group intelligence (the “collective mind” of the title) that those that are concerned with efficiency.

In software, agile practices are directly concerned with building strong, adaptive teams - so one of the misunderstandings that arises when agile is implemented is that practitioners come at development process from the direction of reliability (we can build an iteration’s-worth of features again and again, under precise steering from product owners) whereas management thinking is grounded in organisational thinking that emphasises efficiency (lowest cost, predictability).

Organisations that develop reliable group practices often do so because “the consequences of any lapse in attention are swift and disabling”. At the other end of the scale, repetitive industrial processes are clearly areas in which cost and predictability rule. Software development is in the middle, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the tug-of-war between reliable (agile) and efficiency (outsourcing and its friends) continues…

Small victories … I’m working with e2x just now, and crosswords (Daily Telegraph and Guardian) are part of the company ritual. Over lunch yesterday five of us scored a first and completed one set by Araucaria, the Guardian’s celebrated and notorious setter.

For thirty minutes we were on a roll. It’s likely that none of us could have completed the puzzle, let alone in half an hour. Several times someone had an insight about a clue which was enough to trigger someone else’s half-solution, and a third or fourth of us would chip in with the complete answer. It’s a good while since I’ve seen as strong an instance of how a team can really work effectively towards a goal: achieving this level of group flow is something to aim for in all our teams.