That’s Mr Wolf. He solves problems.
If you’ve watched Pulp Fiction, which you will have because it is awesome, then you’ll remember that he appraises what’s going on within “The Bonnie Situation”, figures out what resources are available and comes up with a plan.
That’s pretty much the dictionary description of resilience.
It’s also the backbone of the transactional theory of stress and coping.
Why is this relevant to high performing teams?
High performing teams solve problems effectively.
And they don’t do it dressed like a gangster at a dinner party while swearing at co-workers. If they did then they’d probably end up sat on their own. A lot.
Although they do eulogise about good coffee.
So…. There’s a number of theories relating to stress and how to deal with it. One that is particularly applicable is Transactional Theory. The main protagonists are Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman. If you search around you can find lots of details about their approach and theories. It’s super interesting.
Anyway, you can find out about Richie and Sue in your own time. Here let’s focus on why it’s relevant to high performing teams.
The coping model within transactional theory looks a bit like this….
That’s a fairly abstract model, but it’s very easy to apply it to interactions in software delivery. For example:
- Event: Outage
- Appraisal of event: What services are affected? How are they affected? How long will they be affected for? Who will be affected by this?
- Appraisal of resource: What tools are available/suitable? What team/people can do something to improve the situation? Is third party support online?
- Response: Activities to mitigate the outage, and associated comms.
It can also be applied to granular story generation/discussion within a structured agile workflow. You can probably recognise the following and associate the steps with things your team does.
- Event: User identified need, such as password reset. Initial story created.
- Appraisal of event: Story discussed and more detail added. Possibly within a three amigos or refinement session, outlining what the requirement is, for who and why.
- Appraisal of resource: Within a refinement session, the team will discuss; What is needed to deliver the story. When can it be delivered and is it a priority.
- Response: Story is agreed as something that can be delivered, the team have a shared understanding and it is prioritised within the backlog.
There’ll be differences in how this might happen in your team, but I think you get the idea. Having structured activities to deal with expected requests helps to alleviate stress. The activities help teams to understand the “ask” and formulate an informed response. They also don’t get stressed because the regular rhythm of sessions/ceremonies, like refinement sessions, means they can have confidence that stories won’t be missed.
Elite teams are a bit different.
High performing teams are pragmatic when appraising events, realistic about the resources they have available, and formulate an appropriate response. The interesting thing is that high performing teams don’t need to rely on structured events for this. They do it through behaviours.
- They self organise.
- They trust each other.
- There is mutual respect between team members.
- They communicate effectively.
- They collaborate often.
- They share knowledge.
- They have emergent leaders rather than appointed.
So how do you get your team to work on these behaviours so they can improve how they deal with events?
In my opinion, what you don’t do is a team building activity that is so abstracted away from how the team operate it doesn’t resonate.
Think about it. Repeatedly practicing activities that replicate actual activities are common practice.
Firefighters don’t team build using corporate team building “games”, they practice putting out fires or going into smoke filled buildings. Military units simulate hostage situations, or practice jumping out of aircraft. Now of course, these are a far cry from what digital delivery teams do but the concept is the same.
The two most beneficial activities I have observed that replicate what digital teams do are:
1- Hack days
A hack day allows teams to work within an artificially stressed environment (time bound), but without the pressure of reality. The biggest pressure reality brings is failure. In a hack day, failure has no consequence and is actually part of the learning process. Because the activity is time bound, the participants cannot rely on the structured ceremonies they use in a typical agile timeline. Instead they have to use the skills that agile fosters by design. They have to collaborate, communicate and organise effectively. Interestingly as time forces decisions to happen, consensus has to happen quickly. This is where emergent leadership comes in.
For me, emergent leadership is so important. If a team can identify who the most appropriate person is to lead them for a specific challenge, then it shows that they are aware of each others skills, aptitude and what’s required. I’ll probably write more about this another time.
2- Chaos sessions
Anyway… chaos sessions. These are something I hadn’t experienced until recently. What I like about them is that you test your actual infra/service/product. Unlike hack days where you have arbitrary goals and the primary outcome is developing team behaviours, in chaos sessions you get the team benefits, as well as evaluating system confidence. They feel less time consuming as you can fix it to a couple of hours, although you need to ensure that the environments you’re using are prepared.
Back to the science….
Remember, the objective of those activities is to improve team behaviours in order to be more effective in; understanding a situation, evaluating how to deal with it and then responding.
It’s behavioural science.
If you’re finding it tricky to comprehend how the theory works, try applying it to everyday activities. We continually appraise events around us, determining if they are a threat/opportunity, how we can mitigate the threat (or maximise the opportunity), and then acting upon our appraisal.
Often we decide we don’t need to do anything, and that’s ok.
Resilience is about dealing with stressors, and how rapidly we can recover from difficult challenges. As humans we’re pretty good at it.
When we build good relationships, communicate well, and collaborate effectively in teams, we have the capacity to be incredibly tough, and together do amazing things.
