Something to Consider...
Before I dive into my thoughts, trying to untangle them long enough so that I may write something half decent, I would like everyone to consider the following few lines of text. These sentences have been taken from the lyrics to a song by Faithless. The song is titled To All New Arrivals and the parts I am interested in are shown below:
"In our world, Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. Eleven Million children die every year of malnutrition. In our world, 15 Million children have been orphaned by AIDS. Thirty-thousand children die on preventable causes every day. In our world, two Million children are working in the sex trade this month. One point one Billion people in the world earn less than a dollar a day."
Behaviour, Behaviour, Behaviour...
I have gone through the exercise of verifying some of the numbers and those that I checked were close to the actually reported figures. In the wake of such profound statements what follows now seems little and pointless. Problems I am facing everyday are negligible if viewed in a wider context, but they may very well decide over the successful or unsuccessful adoption of Agile if not addressed properly.
Instead of giving a long list of the most common issues I have come across I would like to reflect on an experience which is fairly fresh. Myself and Matt Roadnight, a colleague of mine at Conchango, have spent the past week mentoring and teaching about Agile with a large international cooperation. If you have ever watched the news, they might have cited as the source.
The concept of having a time box, which is strict and immovable around all of the key area when you adopt Scrum as a framework seems to clash wickedly with an established meeting culture. Immersed in their current behaviour it was hard for participants of the many meetings and classroom session which we held over the last week to be on time. Getting in too late for the beginning and not being back on time after breaks seems so common there, that it is almost an expectation of their employees for us to accept such behaviour as a given.
Facilitation...
There are many lessons I learned from traveling and introducing Agile to a multitude of places, one of them is that you need to facilitate whenever possible and that small changes,very much like the butterfly effect teaches us, can have the biggest impact down the road. Being on time and accepting the fact that being punctual guarantees the smooth operation of the whole framework is not easy.
Being told to be on time usually does not work as extrinsic motivators are less sustainable and less powerful than intrinsic ones. Being punished for not being on time reinforces a negative learning experience, which is something most good facilitators would like to avoid. While the short term result is usually good, the long term suffers.
Locking the Door...
Without wanting to play with an individuals feelings, those are strong factors in ones behaviour and when properly triggered they often lead to a change in the way we act.
My desperate attempt to somehow stimulate the participants of our courses to be on time finally lead me to locking the door to the meeting room. The door has a simply twist lock that shuts it from the inside. By doing that, yet opening the door almost at once when someone was outside, it reinforced that they were actually late. It seemed to have much more significance, as there was some interaction on my part required to actually allow them back into the room.
This simple act of requiring me to interact, actually unlock the door, must have made them feel awkward or ashamed, or just a little ashamed to trouble me. The level of tardiness did drop significantly over the course of the day. Which leads me to believe that this is a successful strategy.
Mind you, we did set some rules for the course up-front, so it was well known that we would act in such a manner.
More Ideas...
After bringing my observation to Matt's attention he agreed with me and made some suggestion on how we might improve this little technique. As we are usually teaching introductory classes on Agile or Scrum it ends up being a full day session in most cases. It might be well worth to agree up-front how the classroom should react when someone breaks 'being-late-rule'.
- Do not wait for tardy participants, start on time.
- Halt what you are doing, wait until they are seated.
- Get everyone to focus their attention on the tardy individual until they are seated
- Lock the door
- Restart from the beginning, explaining that this is necessary due to someone being late
- Agree with all members on some form of 'punishment' for tardy participants
This list is far from perfect and I will try to better understand the possible implications of each point made as I move on an apply some of the ideas above. Known Facilitators such as Esther Derby and Diana Larsen describe a multitude of techniques in their books and articles online and I recommend that you have a look at their web-sites.
Apropos web-sites, I was quite delighted to see that one of my articles made it to the frontpage of the Scrum Alliance's web-site. For all of you interested in the facilitation of joy at your work place, it might prove to be an interesting read.