Agilität und Effizienz

Ich habe in den letzten Wochen darüber nachgedacht, wie Agilität Effizienz fördert und sammle meine Gedanken in einem Artikel, den ich in einer der nächsten Ausgaben der agile review veröffentlichen möchte.

Ich veröffentliche den gegenwärtigen Stand hier vorab, weil ich hoffe, dass er bereits "gut genug" ist, um euch nützlich zu sein – und weil ich hoffe, durch euer Feedback die weitere Arbeit effizienter zu gestalten.

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Agilität und Effizienz

von Urs Reupke

In den letzten Wochen bin ich umgezogen und renoviere jetzt die alte Wohnung. Viele Teilaufgaben führen mich durch Abende voll Beschaffung,Transport und Handwerk. Immer wieder frage ich mich abends: Hat sich das gelohnt? Habe ich effizient gearbeitet?
Daraus wuchs die Frage, was Agilität und Effizienz miteinander verbindet.

Review of "Functional Principles for Object-Oriented Development"

After a long time of agility and philosophy, here's something technical for a change.

Previously...

Yesterday, I was talking OO and functional programming with Alex Chythlook, who told me that some problems I faced in Anathema could have been solved much easier applying functional programming idioms.

When I asked for details, he pointed me to a talk Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) held at GOTO 2014.

Go here in case you're watching the talk and would like to actually see the slides.

tl;dr:

All of her points are well made, and she's an entertaining presenter. I am happy that she pointed out some things that I didn't have names for previously.

However, I am surprised that many of these ideas are functional, as they just appear to be thorough applications of OO principles to me. If they have been functional all the time, then it is certainly good to call them thus.

What stood out

"Errors are data too" Jessica said and told us to "not interrupt the execution flow". 

I've long spoken out against checked exceptions, and this nails it: If I treat an error as data, I am forced to deal with it. Right now, just where I would process the good result. No handing the exception outward, no wrap-to-catch-later.

That way, Exceptions are limited to things that I, as a programmer, have not foreseen, and that's the way they are meant to be used.

Idempotence, something she touches on in the very end, is quite important, too. Good to have a word, now. It describes the idea that an executable block of code (so, a function or a Single Abstract Method object) should change the world only once, even if it's called multiple times.

From her talk, I picked up the notion that this should be true for every function, and I don't fully agree with that because complexity increases when I build things out of things that build things, even if those are just functions.

The third main takeaway was her call for Lazy Evaluation. Doing that forces you to think in Objects or First Order Functions, and prevents procedural style – and that should always be a good thing.

What appears to be OO

I first stumbled when Jessica introduced a service object to limit a function's access to the database. Isn't that an application of the interface segregation principle (ISP) and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)? 

Smalltalk people always told me that even in Java, the client should define the exposed interface, and this is just that: If I need a service that just inserts, the method should have access to only that.

Next, she speaks about specific typing - again, isn't that just OO? If something represents a name, I should call it "Name", not "String". The DDD people have said it since 2004 and hardly anyone listened, so Jeff Bay had to point it out again in his paper on Object Calisthenics some seven years ago, calling on us to "wrap all primitives and Strings" (and numeric objects, of course).

Applying this principle in classes and productive code, I can well say that it is a game changer - your code becomes much more clear and expressive this way, even more so when you apply his next rule – "use first order collections" - as well.

Back to Jessica: Good on her picking up on that, I fully agree. It surprised me, though, that she watered down the principle by us to Options and Tuples later on in her talk. Those two are never domain specific, so effectively, she just put two new primitive types on our plate. 

More recent languages have more elegant ways of expressing these concepts, and they might feel more at home there.

I was surprised once more when she presented the lack of concern about when or how my code is executed as a principle of functional programming. With the OO concept of encapsulation comes the idea of Single Abstract Method objects, which are handed around as executable blocks. She even pointed us to the GoF patterns Command and Strategy, so clearly, this has been around for a while and was considered OO back then. 

Did the GoF silently sneak in functional ideas? How dare they!

What I didn't quite get

Apart from these three good points, there was one I didn't get: Structural Sharing? What was it about, memory efficiency? Didn't she just tell us that we should rely on our compilers instead of doing their work?

Summary

So, all in all, it doesn't matter. Whether it's OO or functional, this is a good talk to watch. 

If you want to brush up on intermediate concepts of coding or see some examples of how things might get easier if you break your common patterns: Go watch!

Teams R SEXI

In this post, I will explore what makes a good Development Team in Scrum from an organizational perspective.

Great teams

When it comes to structuring the Development Team, the Scrum Guide tells us that the team is “cross-functional, with all of the skills as a team necessary to create a product increment” and that the team should be structured to “organize and manage their own work”. Finally, we learn that the team should have between 3 and 9 developers, to be able to contain all the skills required while not increasing management complexity beyond the level self-organization can casually deal with.

Over the past few years, I have helped some clients to improve their teams’ setup and structure, and found that there are more criteria that the Scrum Guide only hints at but never mentioned explicitly.

Have few dependencies

While Scrum expects the team to be able to provide the product increment on their own, corporate reality often sees products with a scope much larger than what a single team can produce in reasonable time.

You may have read about scaling approaches like LeSS, and their call for feature teams. Rare is the product, though, where splitting into features is possible the moment your start with Scrum.

To alleviate the situation, I look for a setup where inter-team dependencies are as few as possible. In an ideal case, this means that the team has one team to receive input from and one more team to deliver output to.

For work to flow, the team has to be independent from other teams. Define your teams so that their scope covers a large, uninterrupted piece of the value chain, and integrate technical concerns as much as possible.

That way, you will reduce the number of handovers both in planning and in the actual work done.

Stay together

In a corporate environment, projects start and stop all the time. Project managers vie for resources, eyes on the deadline, not on the social effects. For team members, this means that today’s colleague may be gone tomorrow – so each of them looks out for their own piece of work first and foremost.

When introducing Scrum in such an environment, I emphasize the twin values of stability and reliability.

It takes a stable environment for employees to benefit from investing in the team’s success rather than their own achievements. Team members learn to trust each other over time and start to co-operate. In a stable teams, members can learn each other’s abilities and preferences – and that’s what it takes to get better.

Reliability, meanwhile, means that team members are on the team, period. Splitting people between projects eats up time beyond the numbers in your spreadsheet, as it introduces interruptions in the form of urgent requests from outside projects.

Now, any corporation worth the name will have a complex resource distribution in place already, and you will be hard pressed to change it all at once. What to do?

Allot people to the product as much as possible, and encourage them to block fixed slots of time for working on the product. If necessary, suggest they turn off phones, chat and mail clients; empower them to postpone dealing with incoming requests till team time is over.

That way, their team can learn rely on them, and teamwork improves.

Learn from each other

Remember what the Scrum Guide said? “Teams organize and manage their own work.”

It takes a certain level of experience to do that, and I have frequently heard managers or Scrum Masters complain that their team is not yet ready for this level of freedom – and next coordinate the work themselves, trampling the sprouts of self-organization.

So, it takes experience for the team to self-organize, and it takes laissez-faire.

The best teams I worked with did not consist of veterans only, though, since less experienced team members bring two crucial factors to the team: By embracing their curiosity, they challenge long-standing practices; by working with several of their more senior colleagues, they foster communication.

So, when building a team, I look for a good mix of old hands and new to make learning happen and self-organization possible, while still having all the skills to actually build the product.

Make work flow

This concludes my thoughts about criteria to watch out for when building great teams:

reliabilty, stability, experience, cross-functionality and independence.

So, when you are next thinking about how to improve your team, just think “Teams R SEXI”, and you are well on your way:

Reliable

Stable

Experienced adequately

X-functional and

Independent

Mind, though, that these criteria are strongly skewed towards the organizational perspective and pay no heed to the more mushy, social criteria that are well worth considering as well.

What criteria do you apply to find your teams? Did you go at it from an entirely different angle? 

I am looking forward to your comments.

Focus and focus time

In this post, I explore the Scrum value of focus, the notion of focus time and its implications for your Scrum team’s setup.

Focus as a Scrum value

Focus. It is one of the core values of Scrum, reminding us to be precise about our development goals and to stay on target at all times.

Focus tells Product Owners to build one product for a well defined audience, tells Scrum Masters to help their teams improve in one area at a time, and tells the Development Team to go for the Sprint goal and only the Sprint goal.

It is them - the team - I want to focus on in this post, although the thoughts apply to the other roles as well.

Focus time

Recently, a client introduced me to the notion of focus time. By his definition, focus time is the part of a Sprint that the team actually spends working on product backlog items directly contributing to the Sprint goal.

Thus, focus time is comprised of all the work required to get one specific product backlog item from “ready” to “done”, including design, implementation, testing, documentation and posing the odd question to the Product Owner or relevant stakeholders.

It is not: Helping to prepare the next Sprint, demonstrating the product increment in the review, improving the process in the retrospective or organizing the team in the Daily Scrum.¹ While all of these activities are important, they are by definition off-focus, as they do not directly improve the product².

Perfect world

In an ideal setup, the team spends most of their time focused. The Scrum Guide allows for up to 10% of the development team’s time to be taken for product backlog refinement³, while planning, review and retrospective take up 10% of the team’s time yet again.

Another 5% are eaten up by Daily Scrums and general communication with people in- and outside of our product: Even the best of bosses and stakeholders need some attention from time to time.

This leaves our ideal development team with
100% Sprint time

- 10% refinement

- 10% planning, review, retrospective

- 5% Daily Scrum and communication

=  75% focus time

That’s 7½ workdays out of your two week sprint! Contrast that with the common complaint that Scrum is all talking and keeps people from getting things done.

Half measures

Rare, however, is the team where all team member contribute all day, every day. The larger an organization, the larger its tendency to split people’s time and attention over several projects or products.

25 years ago, in 'Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking', Gerald Weinberg introduced us to the hidden cost of context switching, claiming that an even split across two projects left a knowledge worker with only 40% of his or her capacity to apply to each of them. (While Weinberg's original text is not available for free, his idea has spread beyond the cover of his book.)

So, let’s split some people and look at their focus time:

50% allotted time

- 10% context switching

- 5% refinement

- 10% planning, review and retrospective

-  5% Daily Scrum and communication

= 20% focus time

In case you’re wondering, I left the numbers for the four main Scrum rituals at their original value since all teams I have worked with so far insisted that their split members take part in all of them, since this is where the team makes all major decisions.

So, out of a promised 50% of somebody’s time and attention, only 20% contribute directly to the goals we set for the product – that’s hardly more than half of the 37.5% we might expect when looking at the original calculation.

Now, suddenly, Scrum is all talk and no action.

Said and done

So, the idea of focus – concentrating on what we ought to do – lead us to the notion of focus time, the time spent directly contributing to the Sprint goal. We have seen that ¾ of a team’s time could be spent focused, and that this number shrinks drastically when we split people’s time across products.

Now, I’d like to invite you to examine the time your team spends focused.

Do you get close to ideal numbers? Are you in the 20% range, even though everyone is on the project 100% of their time? Where does the time people don’t spend focused go and which of these activities are really necessary?

All in all: What could you do to improve the numbers?

Besides looking at things that distract the team, you might want to look at the product backlog items your team and Product Owner agree upon for the sprint. Is there a common theme, so that most or all of them contribute to a single goal?

If they have little in common, one could argue, there is not really one Sprint goal, and the team could never reach the lofty numbers I laid out above. However, there could be leverage in the way the Product Owner prioritizes the product backlog or the way you plan your sprints.

Let’s talk about your numbers and your findings in the comments!

Postscriptum

Writing this post brought to my mind a number of questions, among them:

“What keeps teams from focussing and how to get back there quickly?”, “How to show the value of Scrum’s rituals to the ‘rather do than talk’ faction?”, and “Is focus time a good measure for the quality of a Scrum process? What other metrics are there?”

Comment below if you have thoughts on any of these questions or are particularly interested in one of them.

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1 Neither is it taking part in communities of practice, performance reviews, answering mails, general discussion or undirected learning, along with most other things team members like to do.^↩

2 Actually, this is the main reason that some developers tend to resent them. Hackers want to do, not talk. As a Scrum Master, you could do worse than to think about this before your colleagues bring it up.^↩

3 Note that this is not the established practice of a “refinement meeting”, but rather includes all activities dealing with the process of refining the product backlog.^↩

Body scanner estimation

9 out of 10 coaches agree: Estimating is not about the numbers, but about the dialogue.

Even though, many teams find themselves discussing a meager difference in story points - often to the point of frustrated sighs - while the technical details are long clarified.

Today, I have been listening to an explanation of story point estimation. The team was just discussing a list of criteria to judge stories by, and I couldn't help but think: "What if we just cut to the dialogue instead of dealing with points, and used the criteria to encourage it?"

That thought led to a quasi-algorithmic way of estimating, quickly dubbed "Body scanner estimation" by my colleague Ilja Preuß (@ipreuss on twitter).

How to play

1. Discussing the story itself, and answer any questions.
2. Answer all of the following questions with either Yes or No.

• Inside/Outside
• Do we need to pull support or input from outside the team?
• Does it affect outside systems?
• Do we need to share knowledge about the results?
• Does it need management approval?
• Knowledge/Skill
• Does it need specialized knowledge? (Or can any of us do it?)
• Is this story the first of its kind for our team?
• Is it very time consuming?
• Is it annoying to complete?
• Technical
• Do we have technical debt in the vincinity?
• Does the change ripple throughout our system?
• Do we need to set up testing infrastructure?
• Do we need to set up build infrastructure?

3. Now, count the number of "Yes" and add 1 as the base cost.

4. Round the result to the nearest number from Fibonacci's sequence to get your estimation.

5. Sanity check the result.

This method of estimation gives teams a handrail to work with, with questions to spark further thought and discussion.

I yet to try Body scanner estimation, so I am eager to hear of your results. Do the questions make sense to you? Did you add some of your own?

More importantly, though, did you come up with a fresh way of estimating lately? 

Let us know in the comments.

A template to communicate intent

In a corporate environment, teams face many different stakeholders.

Despite of best efforts, team members often have trouble judging requests for what they are actually worth, and tend to react to apparent urgency instead of actual value.

A team lead I recently met found himself in the very same situation, and prompted me for advice. In our conversation, we found out that in his particular case, the issue was partly about communication: the team members didn't know the teams goals, and so they had little to go against.

However, knowing that goal would only get them so far, because things are rarely cut clearly - a request may be out of scope for the team, but fully aligned with the division goal.

The template

Shortly after, I came up with a template to cover three levels of goals and intent:

We will [achieve the team goal],
in order to [achieve the division's goal]
so that the company can [achieve the company's goal].

For example:
"We will ensure the performance of the mainframe
in order to enable the free flow of data
so that Skynet always remains one step ahead of the resistance."

How to apply it

Facing fresh input, this enables team members to think on their feet and look beyond the team's immediate goals, judging issues not only by what their team lead told them, but also by the larger objectives.

This mirrors the military concept of commander's intent, where doctrine says that the aim, purpose and implications of an operation have to be understood two echelons down - something that can hardly be achieved in a single sentence.

By that measure, just filling in the blanks makes for a nice poster, but leaves half the work undone: The actual act of face-to-face communication, where the team lead informs his colleagues about the three levels and their implications - once to make them clear, and once again whenever they change.

Obviously, a dialogue like this requires knowledge of the higher level's intent - but that is hardly a bad thing, since communication goals in a clear and concise fashion is part of proper leadership.

By my assessment, this template works best when the team has an overarching goal or mission that keeps constant for at least some weeks. With small adjustments, though, you could easily use the template for short term objectives like Sprint goals in a Scrum process.

What do you think of the template? What do you do to communicate management intent to your teams? Please tell me in the comments.

Der Agile Entdecker

Gemeinsamer Post mit Sandra Reupke-Sieroux und Olaf Lewitz:

Bei der play4agile 2014 hat Olaf mir erzählt, dass er schon eine Weile daran sitzt, Tobias Mayers Buch "The People's Scrum" ins Deutsche zu übertragen. Im Gespräch am Abend hat er mich und Sandra eingeladen mitzumachen. Alan Cyment, der an der spanischen Version arbeitet, gab uns drei einen Haufen Tips, und seitdem arbeiten wir daran.

Wir wollen in den nächsten Wochen einige der Essays vorab veröffentlichen - das Buch ist ja aus einem Blog entstanden. Auch für die deutsche Version sind wir gespannt auf euer Feedback!

"Der Agile Entdecker" haben wir als ersten gemeinsamen Post ausgewählt, weil es der Essay im Buch war, bei dem wir unsere gemeinsame Sprache gefunden haben. Wie viele seiner Essays vereint er Kritik an einem bekannten und verbreiteten Konzept mit einer neue Idee - gerade ausreichend skizziert, um sich inspirieren zu lassen. Tobias sagt uns nicht, was wir tun sollen. Er öffnet unser Herz und unseren Verstand für Neues, manchmal Radikales.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen! Habt ihr Agile Entdecker im Unternehmen? Habt ihr so was schon mal gemacht?

Der Agile Entdecker

Während eines Projekts in Indianapolis unterhielt ich mich mit einem Entwickler.
“Was weißt Du über Atomkraft?” fragte er mich, und erzählte dann, dass er in einem Atomkraftwerk gearbeitet habe. Dort erfuhren alle Arbeiter regelmäßige Schulungen über die Sicherheitsbestimmungen, sogar noch nach langjähriger Anstellung.

Die beste Absicherung gegen eine Kernschmelze sei, sagte er, die Köpfe der Kollegen stets durch aktuelle Erkenntnisse und häufige Erinnerungen an gutes Vorgehen wach zu halten.

Er fragte mich, warum agile Ausbildungen nach einem Durchgang vorüber wären. Er habe in verschiedenen Organisationen während der agilen Transition beobachtet, dass die Leute nach dem Training gut voran kamen und voller Wissen und Begeisterung steckten, diese Energie jedoch schnell verebbte und das gewohnte Verhalten zurückkehrte.

“Auch Softwarefirmen schmelzen”, stellte er fest.

Daraufhin hab ich mich damit beschäftigt, wie Firmen Scrum einführen und verwalten. Die meisten heuern für eine kurze Zeit Berater oder Trainer an.

Die Engagierteren unter ihnen besorgen sich einen Scrum Master, der von einem der zahllosen Verbände zertifiziert ist - im festen Glauben, das Zertifikat gewähre Qualität. Beide Ansätze erreichen dieses Ziel selten.

Hin und wieder habe ich den Gedanken, dass der Begriff des “Scrum Masters” die Agile Bewegung aufhält, dass diese Position die Selbstorganisation behindert. Zwar ist die Absicht gut, doch in der Praxis wird die Rolle viel zu oft herabgewürdigt zum Metriksammler, zum Prozesswachhund, im schlimmsten Fall sogar zur Scrumpolizei oder zum agilen Projektmanager.

Dadurch entreißt man dem Team Verantwortung, und die Menschen unterwerfen sich dem Prozess, der ihnen aufgebürdet wird.

Tobias Mayer

In den letzten zwei Jahren ist die Rolle des Scrum Masters in meinen Kursen immer mehr in den Hintergrund getreten. Ich beschreibe Scrum als die Beziehung zwischen Product Owner und Team und erforsche diese Beziehung in Hinblick auf Teamkultur, Fokus, gemeinsame Ausrichtung und Zusammenarbeit.

Scrum verspricht engagierte Teams und glückliche Kunden, aber dieses Versprechen löst das Problem der Kernschmelze nicht. Die Organisation muss nach wie vor einen nachhaltigen Weg finden, um kontinuierliche Verbesserung rund um die Grundprinzipien des Scrum-Frameworks zu etablieren.

Scrum Master sind dieser Weg nicht, denn Scrum Master sind stets auf den untersten Rängen des hierarchischen Totempfahls angesiedelt. Häufig müssen sie einer Projektmanagementabteilung Rede und Antwort stehen oder einem Entwicklungsleiter. Sie haben wenig Autonomie und werden oft zu Helfershelfern des Status Quo.

Auch agiles Coaching ist nicht der Weg. Coaching hilft Einzelnen und Teams sich selbst zu verwirklichen, doch wie bei einer Therapie kommt der Moment, an dem der Coachee die Beziehung beenden muss. Tut er es nicht, läuft er Gefahr, sich mit seinem Coach im Kreis zu drehen und gemeinsam eine ungesunde Beziehung gegenseitiger Abhängigkeit zu schaffen.

Der Weg scheint mir zu sein, Agilität in die DNS der Organisation zu injizieren. Wir wissen, dass Viren die DNS von Organismen verändern können, wenn sie nur stark genug sind, die Antikörper des Wirts abzuwehren. Um die Kultur der Organisation zu verändern, brauchen wir genau so ein Virus.

Daher möchte ich eine neue Rolle vorschlagen, um das Virus zu verbreiten: Den Agilen Entdecker. Diese Rolle ist anders als die des “Paten der Agilität”. Der Pate ist jemand - häufig ein Geschäftsführer oder der Chef der Entwicklungsabteilung - der sagt: “Jetzt aber agil!”, aber der weder versteht, welcher Änderungen in der Organisation dieser Schritt bedarf, noch die Zeit hat, sich auf wirkliche Veränderung einzulassen.

Der Agile Entdecker ist jemand, der auf der Suche nach Wissen in unerforschtes Land reist. Er oder sie ist ein Visionär und ein furchtloser Abenteurer, der durch seine Handlungen andere inspiriert selbst aufzubrechen.

Agiler Entdecker ist ein Vollzeitjob. Am besten ist es, wenn er niemandem unterstellt ist, doch wenn es sein muss, dann sollte er der Geschäftsführung berichten, und zwar in einer autonome Position, deren Leistung nicht gemessen wird.

Es ist nicht die Aufgabe des Entdeckers, Teams zu coachen oder anderen zu helfen, besser mit Scrum umzugehen.

Er oder sie soll zuhören, denken, inspirieren, konfrontieren, anheizen, herausfordern und die kollektiven Augen der Organisation öffnen, damit sie neue Möglichkeiten erblicken können. So sät er die Saat eines neuen Seins.

Ein guter Agiler Entdecker bringt sich in die agile Gemeinschaft außerhalb seiner Firma ein, nimmt an Veranstaltungen teil, diskutiert online, liest ausgiebig, lernt Neues und fördert den Dialog mit anderen Organisationen und Individuen. Er sorgt für den Austausch im Haus, begründet Gesprächsrunden und Workshops und fördert Ideen rund um experimentelle Verbesserung.

Insbesondere aber ermutigt er andere, es ihm gleich zu tun.

Der Agile Entdecker webt aus Silos und Hierarchien faszinierende Werke kinetischer Kunst, die Ehrfurcht und Erstaunen erwecken. Diese Umgebungen lassen Selbstorganisation gedeihen; gegenseitiges Coaching floriert und ersetzt teure Hilfsarbeiter, die sich nicht ums Ergebnis scheren. Das Engagement wird stärker, die Freude wächst - und die Kernschmelze bleibt aus, Tag um inspirierten Tag.

Tobias Mayer, 19. April 2012

Respite and Trust in Timeboxes

Looking for a proper translation for the concept of a "time-box" in the context of Scrum, I looked up the German word "Frist". The word describes a period of time in which a certain action may (or may not) be taken, it's mostly used in a judicial context.

Inspired by a note on the words roots in Old High German, I consulted Wiktionary, and discovered that the word has siblings in several Germanic languages and is known even in English (albeit obsolete).

I was delighted by the connotations on offer: Throughout the languages, the concept denotes not only an allowance of time, but also signals a respite or truce as well as trust - all of which are on display when mutually agreeing on a time-box in Scrum.

I couldn't wish for a better match.

A case against hierarchy

Re-reading Mastering the Art of War, I came across an excerpt from The Masters of Huainan:

In it, a lord asks his minister about the fate of another nation, and learns that it was destroyed through repeated victories in repeated wars. He voices his surprise, for victories are a good thing, thus prompting the minister to remind him:

"Where there are repeated wars, the people are weakened; when they score repeated victories, rulers become haughty. Let haughty rulers command weakened people, and rare is the nation that will not perish as a result."

Once again, there is striking similarity between the martial domain and that of business.
Think of a manager in a hierarchical organisation, successfully delivering project after project; yet without time for reflection and calibration.
Soon, he will rise to heroic status within his company and with growing responsibility grow estranged from those who work with him.

At the same time, his project teams won't have time to re-build their mind, their spirit and their tools - pressure is too high to take time for that, and slowly, they start to believe that there actually are more important things to do.
Over time, they will even come to believe in the manager's (and by extension, their own) invincibility.

They won't stand in for their needs, instead voicing their oppositon only among themselves - if at all, and even if they do, nobody will listen to those arguing against success.

With no one to correct or support him, the manager will fail at last, and - by definition - in his most important project yet.

In this, I see a strong point for eschewing hierarchy. Leadership should emerge ad-hoc, from the person, not the position. Thus, all are constantly reminded that everyone contributes equally to a shared success, that thinking, planning and action are parts of the same.
As a team, people grow together, fail together, learn together, with no room to grow haughty, to grow estranged or weak.

Did you see examples for this in your work? Did the contrary happen? How did you handle it?

One-Pagers: A tool to quickly summarize a topic

In 140 characters

One-pagers are a tool to quickly summarize any given topic, easily created in a group workshop.

In 200 words

A one-pager contains a tweetable summary, a concise description, a compilation of further reading and an an illustration of the topic.

Using the workshop format, all of this will exist after one hour:

Start up

1.  Take 5 minutes to explain the general process.

Create Tweets

Use Brain-Writing:

2.  Grab a sheet of paper each; put an extra one in the middle.

3.  For 3 minutes, write a tweetable text on the topic, exchange your sheet with the excess one. Repeat.
4.  In 3 more minutes, swap sheets and read through all of them.

5.  In 4 more minutes, agree on a single text or compile one.
6. Write it down on a fresh paper.

Create Details

7.  Grab a sheet of paper each.
8.  For 5 minutes, list bullet points for the various aspects of the topic.
9.  Hand your sheet to your neighbor.
10.  In 5 more minutes, select the entries you think are most valuable. The number to mark depends on the number of participants.
11.  In 5 more minutes, aggregate a list of most important points on a fresh sheet of paper. Add some front-matter text. Note some blog posts or books on the topic.

Illustrate

12.  Grab a sheet of paper each.
13.  In 10 minutes sketch an explanation of the topic.
14.  In 15 more minutes, look over each other’s drawings and select the best elements. Copy those elements on a fresh sheet or amend one of the existing pictures.

Wrap up

15.  In the 5 final minutes, hold a short presentation and wrap up the workshop.

Unlimited Info

• To learn, look for a One Page Universe-workshop near you
• For examples, see Fabian Schiller's "Agile Planet"
• For details, see Fabian Schiller's blog (German)

Illustrated

Final remarks

I learned about this technique in Martin Heider's workshop at play4agile 2014. Thanks, Martin!
The name "One-Pager" stems from the fact that you can pin all your results to a single sheet of A3 or flipchart paper.

Play to get a job

At many companies, job interviews are limited to a pretty single-sided meeting of talking heads:
The candidate is interviewed by several people from the employer-to-be, and struggles to present himself in a good light.

At play4agile 2014, a conference aiming to introduce playfulness to the workspace, we challenged that premise, wondering how make these get-togethers more bilateral - and less talk.

The first thought came quickly: Represent strengths by picking one out of a number of super-heroes, represent your weakness by picking a super-villain to match. To spur imagination, the organizers could bring a set of collectible cards representing the individual characters, so the less-geeky have a chance to be part of the ensuing conversation.
We iterated over a number of ideas on that pattern, but stuck with the issue of one-sidedness:
It always felt like the candidate was up for inspection, with the company and managers kept their secrets to themselves.
With questions like "How will you possibly fail us?" and "Why did you quit your last job?" up for discussion, we felt like few candidates were trusting enough to answer honestly.

An ice-breaker was called for, and we found in the form of physical games:
Something like the Columbian Hypnotist will speed things along greatly, allowing both the candidate and the organizers to let go of their preconceptions and find harmony in synchronized movement.

Afterwards, we focused on meeting the candidate on equal footing, with the company or one particular manager giving something of himself for everything that the candidate is asked to give.
Exploring his possible weaknesses as a team member? Offer your weakness as a leader first, and tell him how you are addressing that weakness right now.
Exploring issues with his last job? Be plain about issues at your company and how you are improving things.
To keep the spirit of playfulness, we enjoyed the thought of building this dialogue in Lego, forming a physical interface for the candidate to connect to.

Innovation Games are a great source of inspiration as well, with the "Product Box" a particular favourite of ours:
Ask candidates to build a box representing them to the team or company, while you build one for the respective containers.
This one not only offers points to talk about and greases your thoughts in an entertaining way, it also gives you a physical artifact you could use for a bi-lateral review some months in - possibly to amend it, and review it again at later point.

At the end of either exercise, you can ask the candidate to present the result to a camera for later discussion, giving him the option to take something home with him for later improvement (while keeping your treasured bricks).
The product boxes of successful hires might also make a great gallery for a team room or website!

How do you like these techniques? What are your favorite thoughts for lightening up an interview?
Please leave a comment!