“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”
- Socrates
Gathering knowledge is important… And sharing knowledge is even more important. Deciding to present the most interesting topics (to me) from the amazing ALE15 experience my idea was to challenge the folks with the status quo in our beloved Continental and Predistic. It was not about providing answers and solutions (I’m sorry – just don’t have them all) – but to inspire and challenge.
(if you would like to just browse the presentation – scroll to the bottom of the post)
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Started with the ‘Real Options’ concept presented by Chris Matts (@PapaChrisMatts)
The idea of pricing the options is something we always struggled with. In a technical industry rarely people ask ‘why’, and usually just ‘what’ and ‘how’. But only after deeper understanding what the value of the option is we should turn it into a commitment…
So memorise those:
- Options have value – and we MUST calculate it and make it transparent
- Options expire – and we MUST know when and why they expire
- Never commit early unless you know why
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‘Your culture in the mirror’ presented by Ivana Gancheva (@IvanaGancheva).
This was the soul touching presentation (for me), probably because it tells the story of General Motors’ ‘faulty ignition switch’ and the death of more than 100 people unofficially related to the technical problem. I work with the Automotive industry and I am not with them to kill people… and none of my colleagues – all brilliant and amazing would be ok if the safety of the passengers are endangered by our products. But ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and it’s a strong and difficult beast to handle.
Changing company culture is something I have always been engaged with but at the same time somehow refused to believe how fundamental it is. ‘No matter what the culture is if you inspire and lead by example – it will all be alright in the end’ I always though. But the beast is strong and underestimating it means that a leader needs to break the walls with the head. And it hurts a lot and the chance of failure is high. So we really need to start from the management and then engage everybody and persistently integrate change after change after change… I’m up to the challenge … are you?
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Design thinking, presented by Mariana Ivanova (@olive_pro)
Had doubts whether should those slides be included in my recap. As the industry is highly regulated and we are limited on every level it is a shame the great minds working here are trapped in mundane tasks like fitting, fixing and optimising every day. Innovations and thinking-outside-of-the-box scarcity is frightening. The focus is usually on cutting costs, squeezing the maximum performance of the hardware and delivering on the lowest possible price instead of innovating the features of the future cars… yes, it is sad.
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Bernhard Bockelbrink presented Sociocracy 3.0
A neat idea, framework or just a way to involve everybody into the decision making processes in the company. Circles are perfect - so let's use them - put everyone in your team into a circle and debate, argue and agree on every decision or policy. Then elect a team representative to sit into the representatives circle and agree on higher level. And so on and so forth. We would like to gather more knowledge, inspire creativity and increase the engagement and commitment for everybody.
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'As a leader you are responsible for the emotional state of your people'... Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) said, and I would add that everybody should be responsible. Endorphin, Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin - all known as the happy hormones. Is there an easy way to help release them in the bodies of our fellow professional soulmates? Simply saying 'thank you' and recognising the work of our teammates proves to do the job perfectly. A little hint - 'don't wait for the retrospective - make it a daily habit'.
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For those of you who recognise my ugly handwriting - yes, it was I, engaging some brilliant minds (in one of the open sessions) into discussing 'How to engage the team into uninteresting tasks'. Really grateful for all the beautiful ideas the folks generated. The one, my evil half is particularly interested in is 'Let the team fail...' as I usually don't do this :)
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Olaf Lewitz (@OlafLewitz) and the different stages of 'motivation'. I would proudly say - usually we are at 'We do it, because we have to' and it's not that bad. Getting to 'We do it, because we want to' and staying there would be quite challenging for any team I would say... still wanna see the sustainability (for a long period) achieved somewhere.
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Meet Bob (not on the picture :)). He is the person (in any team) who is the one and only capable of doing specific tasks and is usually assigned first. Staff liquidity principles though, release Bob from actually doing the work - he should only train until we have 3 masters in all domains. Then Bob could go and train folks from other teams, spreading the knowledge.
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My two cents to the conference - Uncommon SCRUM practices - follow the link or look at my previous post if you dare to challenge yourself with some forbidden practices :).
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The blockers should be measured! (@mattphilip)
They run a project in Asynchrony only to reveal huge amount of time wasted in dependent stories. The most interesting revelation though was discovering the average delivery time in their flow is about 5-6 days instead of every 1-2 day/s (something the teams strongly believed in). The message is: 'always backup your beliefs with data and don't just rely on your gut feeling'. Matt's slides are all shared on slideshare.
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... and some basics on 'how to influence better teams'
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(@rachelcdavies) on some cool ideas about 'building learning into teams'.
Coding dojos, pair development - and more than two devs, lightning talks, swapping teams, and even knowledge tokens. All great practices to share the knowledge in and out of your organisaton/team.
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And finally - this is how they visualise the daily time spent into a team in Unruly. Looks cool.
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The entire presentation on slideshare (the questions are to challenge the colleagues to provide back some thoughts and feedback):
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