Writing this article has been on my mind for quite some time, but I somehow didn’t get around to writing it due to a million reasons, mostly excuses.
In this article, I’d like to introduce you to a team I was fortunate enough to be part of. It’s a pretty common team, one that probably most of us have met or been part of during our time working in teams. It is probably a bit too large in team size and has team members with a variety of skills, with the aim of delivering software to customers. And, like other teams in the realm of software development, something was not quite right with this team — you could say that this team was stuck.
I was brought in as an external consultant to work with the team, as usual with my engagement in the form of ‘do something with the team and improve it.’
In this case study, I’d like to invite you on the journey we took, how we were able to get unstuck, and even more importantly, become a team of individuals that creates value — with some support from data that we always had but never thought of using.
Question to myself: Any regrets that I delayed writing the article?
It’s actually the opposite — I’m quite happy about it, because it was only when I got my hands on Jim Benson’s book “The Collaboration Equation” that I truly understood what was happening in this specific team I will write about.
The book, which is already my ‘must-read for 2024 recommendation,’ gave me the understanding and also the right words to describe what this team went through and how they moved from their learned helplessness to a state in which “individuals in teams create value.”
Learned Helplessness
Let’s start with the definition of Learned Helplessness — Jim Benson describes it as:
Learned Helplessness is the tendency not to act at all because you increasingly expect the system to thwart you and then penalize you for even trying. Logically, it is safer to not act (to give up your agency). It is easy to blame the victim and tell people to go that extra mile, but learned helplessness isn’t simply giving up. Learned helplessness is the result of realistically assessing no-win situations and realizing that action will yield no or negative results. In an anti-collaborative environment, acting with confidence is dangerous, which means that professionalism is dangerous — Jim Benson/The Collaboration Equation
Everyone working in this team would have noticed symptoms that were visible in this team — there we plenty of them.
If I had to pick three they would be:
not able to control their own working environment
a very limited flow of information within the team and outside the team
a self-fulfilling team identity of “that’s just how we are”
The last point is the most interesting to me, as it is also something often observed in individuals. After some time, we tend to believe a story others tell about us or that we tell ourselves. And given that the collaboration equation is ‘Individuals in teams create value,’ maybe it’s not so surprising after all.
What we usually do vs. what we should do instead
So what was it?
Did we start by changing the people?
Were these individuals who simply didn’t care?
I guess the usual tendency in most companies nowadays is to focus on the performance of individuals, conduct awkward yearly reviews, and just hope things will improve. And if not, they start looking again to find who could be accountable for the situation, change people, change managers, keep everyone seemingly busy, and yet generate no real change at all. It’s like being in a constant loop.
From my point of view, there is a better question we could ask instead:
Do these professionals work in an environment/system that allows them to be good professionals?”
As Jim Benson puts it:
No incentives, no negative reinforcement, no threats to their livelihood, can get people to perform well in an environment which does not give them the freedom or even the ability to perform well — Jim Benson/The Collaboration Equation
So instead of working on the people, let’s have a look into the system they worked in.
Collaborating when it was not avoidable
The team was working within a system that enforced the use of Scrum. To avoid any conversation that might completely miss the mark, I’d describe it more accurately as a “push” system.
Every two weeks, new work was pushed onto the team’s workflow.
While there was initial feedback from the team about this situation, it eventually subsided over time, leading to a state of learned helplessness within the team.
Now comes the most crucial part of it:
This situation dragged on for more than four years. During this time, every two weeks, new work was pushed into the system, regardless of whether the previous tasks were completed or not.
This often resulted in a sprint backlog of over 70–80 tasks, with a team struggling to survive week by week. The situation reached a point where even frustration wasn’t openly expressed anymore, as it became accepted as “just how things are.”
Team members simply picked up another ticket, worked on it, and moved to the next one, collaborating when it was not avoidable.
I’m pretty sure that if this team would have looked at the 5 dysfunctions of a team, we would have scored quite high in all of them.
And every attempt to help the team from the outside, came from the perspective of “fix them” and “make them understand” and never looked at the system the team was working in and if the system made it possible for good professionals to actually be good professionals.
Fix the system, not the people
So what happened?
Hopefully not surprising to a lot of my readers, it wasn’t a big transformation that helped this team move into the right direction.
What might be surprising is the fact that it all started with a simple question:
“What if we would just stop working as we do now?”
And, although it might have seemed like a fairly standard question from the outside, the reactions on the faces of those we were looking at on the screens told a different story. It appeared that in four years, no one had thought to ask this team what their ideal working environment would look like.
This was the beginning of what I call our “culture bubble” story.
Check Evolve2B for more information on Culture Bubbles
How the right environment looked for this team
I have to admit that I myself didn’t expect this to work as well as it did.
But more suprisingly, I was shocked on how quickly these professionals were able to be in charge of their professionalism again.
The first step was an obvious one:
We changed from a push system into a pull system. Work was not longer being pushed into the system every 2 weeks but instead was waiting in a backlog to be pulled by the team. We still kept our iterations of 2 weeks for 2 reasons:
we wanted to keep a dedicated time we would get together and discuss priorities, learnings and also look back at what we achieved
the second reason is that the system around kept on working in iterations of 2 weeks so we decided to build adapters and this way were able to reduce noise regarding the changes we have made and at the same time, were aligned with the teams outside the team
A next step was that we wanted to make sure that the way our work flows becomes visible — to us, but also to the people relying on our work.
So the look of our working board changed — we have added new columns that we hoped would make the progress of our work more visible:
We went from
to
As another point of discussion, we talked about Flow Metrics and decided that the data they provided could be a valuable indicator of our work.
This data would provide us with information, allowing us to act with confidence. We agreed to give this approach a try and have another conversation about it in six weeks, at which point we would decide if this was the right path.
I’d love to tell you more about what we did — about all the amazing workshops we conducted with the team, about the fruitful one-on-one sessions, and how we unlocked deep-seated personal issues.
But the truth is, we didn’t do anything else. It wasn’t that these professionals were incapable of working together, or even worse, unwilling.
Rather, the image that formed in my mind was that of individuals at work, chained to a wall. In this scenario, all that was necessary was to help them realize that they could break free from the chains themselves.
I already told you at the beginning of this section how quickly it went.
Well…how quickly did something change?
Professionals who are in charge of their professionalism
It took about two to three days for the new working system to click in.
Cleaning up the backlog was obviously necessary, and this wasn’t a task performed by a single person but rather a team effort.
Getting accustomed to accurately reflecting the status of our work on the new board was probably the hardest part for everyone on the team.
But once we overcame that, collaboration and work began to flow smoothly.
So, what did we see happening next?
Fruitful conversations about work in progress became a regular part of our daily huddles.
We shifted from dull daily meetings to ones where we:
Actively engaged in conversations about how we could collaborate to move aged items to the right side of the board (action on data)
Team members sought support from others
People decided to pair up for specific complex analyses or tasks
Challenged priorities using the information that was visible and available to us
Eliminating value-negative tasks
While sitting in meetings, we openly challenged their value, quickly agreeing to try alternatives. Mostly it was along the lines of, “Let’s see if we miss anything if we don’t have this meeting.”
The board introduced new ways to quickly and effortlessly find information.
We implemented quick fixes swiftly. For example, “Could we visualize information for the person who picks this up next right on the first screen? It would then be easier for them to decide what to do next.” This meant, for instance, letting the team member who would take over QA know in advance which environment was needed for testing:
The last part was an interesting one, as it happened naturally.
No Retrospective was performed for these changes. These were all things that simply happened or that were brought up during a daily huddle.
Quickly identifying bottlenecks and acting on them
Thanks to our new way of visualizing our work, we were quickly able to identify bottlenecks within the system we were working in. To my great surprise, even though most of these bottlenecks were beyond our direct control, the team realized that there was something they could do to alleviate these choke points to some extent, and they swiftly took action on it.
There was also an instance where the team, without any external interference, started discussions about having smaller work items and how it would benefit their feedback loop. (The 85th percentile cycle time proved quite useful in determining a good starting point for this.)
It’s important to note that we never started with a Work In Progress (WIP) limit. However, due to the collaboration and the pull-system in place, it never became a real issue. If a problem did arise, it was quickly addressed in the daily huddle, actions were taken, and we moved forward.
Increase in engagement
The points mentioned above already suggest an increase in engagement. But one aspect that really stands out to me is the atmosphere you experience when you enter a room with these individuals. There’s a palpable difference in their demeanor and in the way they work.
We see systems that engage people professionally, leaving them energized at the end of the day and not tired and spent. — Jim Benson/The Collaboration Equation
Give me the data
Although we rarely discussed the data itself, simply accepting it as information to enhance our team decision-making and our collaboration, we were still surprised by the results of the first data set.
This is what we got:
The graphic above shows what we were capable of achieving in the three months prior to the changes: a throughput of 140 items, with each taking 37 days or less to complete (as indicated by the 85th percentile, highlighted in light green).
When we took another measure after the first 3 months, and got the following:
With the same scope of three months, we now achieved a throughput of 186 items and reduced the cycle time from 37 days or less to 17 days or less (again, refer to the light green line for the 85th percentile).
Also, take note of the changes in the Y-graph.
Although we still had outliers, as unexpected things happened, we took action or were consciously aware of them. The more our items aged and approached our 85th percentile line, the more we discussed them in our huddle.
There is one aspect that is difficult to measure, and perhaps shouldn’t be, but it’s one that keeps this team continuously improving in their collaboration: the increase in the number of professionals who were empowered to work effectively.
A key learning for us was that having data helped shape our conversations within the team, leading to more informed and effective decisions.
What came after?
Understandably, people around this team became curious about how they managed to break free from their previous state and are now trying to adapt their systems to achieve something similar. This is the beauty of a “culture bubble”— extensive promotion isn’t even necessary.
People from the outside quickly notice the change and start asking questions.
Using data also opens up new opportunities to answer questions like, “When will it be done?” (Thank you, Monte Carlo simulations).
This hopefully serves as another example of how visualizing our work, and planning future tasks, aids in collaborating with others and making informed decisions.
Another interesting aspect is delving into the concepts of Obeya, as described in Benson’s book (Did I mention that it’s an absolute must-read?).
To me, the most significant takeaway remains the fact that no matter what we do, working within a system that allows individuals to excel in what they do best is crucial for awakening the professional within them.
Individuals in Teams create value- — Jim Benson/The Collaboration Equation
Do you want to learn more about Flow Metrics and how to shift the dynamics in your team? Then join one of our upcoming micro-sessions.
Check them out here: https://letpeoplework.eventbrite.com/
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