Disaster Recovery For “Agile” Teams: Anyone Can Score!
There I was stood, throat guard gently blowing in a soft breeze, sweat dripping down my face from my helmet, glove leather creaking as I tensed for the next incoming attack. BOOM! off my right kicker…the ball flew off to right field giving my team back possession. I had adapted. I read their plays and another ball was not getting passed me. The forwards on my hockey team were not so able to adapt to the blistering attack of the Dutch team we were playing, a problem highlighted by the opposing team’s goalie feeling comfortable enough to take off her kit to have a go at our goal (yikes!).
These tall, muscular, athletic (and a bit scary) Dutch girls destroyed us to the tune of about 15+ to 0; we who were County champions, undefeated until now. Ok, we were only about 15/16 years old, but the game was epic and very memorable. To say I had the most fun ever was an understatement; best goalie workout and learning experience I ever had in Hockey.
The one thing that strikes me now about this game was the actions of the opposing team’s goalie, ok, somewhat cocky and ungracious in this context as we were their guests, but it highlighted to me that anyone can shoot and score a goal. Anyone in a team can call out what they see and guide their team on the field. Positions just tell us where to stand at the start of the game, not necessarily how we are going to play it. We also know that players who go off injured or into the sin bin, do not stop play, even if it is the Captain.
On the Hockey field, you are focused, you know who you are coordinating with on plays, you’re listening and watching for signals from your teammates, you all can feed into the half time strategy and most of all, you are present of mind.
Team structures in companies look for the same level of engagement as on a playing field, and similarly any one of us can help steer our team towards the goal. The structure of “agile” teams is as such to have:
- Many minds make short work of problems;
- Decentralises power from one individual dictating what to do;
- De-risks ideas by testing mental models from different viewpoints;
- Provides flexibility into a system;
- Diversifies ideas and opens up creativity;
- Allows a level of individuality and supports and encourages everyone to be a leader at the right time.
The last point is key to understanding what makes the very best self-organising teams win.
I worked with a team (I liked to call “Team KFC Bargain Bucket”), who I fondly like to describe as an anarcho syndicalist commune. Rather than look for a singular leader, leadership transferred as the team felt fit; we never had a “team lead” and idea generation was not the sole domain of the Product Owner. If someone became unavailable for some reason, such as holiday or due to illness, the next person would step up. This did not mean that they started writing code where the last person left off, especially if they did not have that skill set (!), but at least ran the process that reviewed and communicated impacts and alternative plans. This behaviour was ingrained in all our activities together; everyone felt accountability and would do whatever needed to be done to “win the sprint/iteration” or “win the release”, regardless of their specific job title. We mobilised around the Martin Fowler type XP principle of “play to win”; these awesome folks were like a hockey team on the field; the team united and focused in hitting their goals, with the same vigour with which they attacked their fried chicken at lunch! It was something we evolved ourselves into.
So is there other evidence that proves this is a good idea?
Heavens to Murgatroyd! Or course! Half the answers are round us most of the time if we take a look; replicatable patterns can be seen from company vision right down into the lines of code written trying to support it. This time, let’s take some learnings from “under the hood” (technical processes/ways of working) and apply them to the driver’s seat:
Continuous Delivery works on the principle of what Jez Humble calls “bring the pain forward”, which he summaries as: increasing the cadence of high cost, low frequency events to drive down transaction costs. To make sure we have high availability of our services, we can use a method of redundancy, whereby if one system fails, there is another identical system ready to fire up in its place and so reduces/avoids any downtime to our customers, for example. The two systems here can be described as “active” (the one that is awake doing stuff) and “passive” (the one on standby).
Rather than relying on a passive/active production environment setups for disaster recovery, time and cost and risk efficiencies are made by switching from passive to active standby and rotating production between two near identical environments, so you get an active-active system relationship. I’m advocating the same set up in teams, where all team members are on active leadership standby (not even passive); we can make the same efficiencies with quicker transference of leadership within teams at all stages of a product’s/feature’s lifecycle. The similarity of configuration in active standby production servers is translated as the similarity of principles/behaviours in active standby leaders; leadership principles do not change. We are all potential leaders of a product/feature at the idea stage, at the place that affords people huge amounts of room for creativity and exploration of complexity given the problem in its rawest form; the fun stuff! So let’s bring the pleasure forward!
We can take another view and think about something Martin Fowler advises developers, when he encourages them to integrate their code regularly (to help catch issues earlier). Like joining a gym, at first it is frustrating and painful and human instinct kicks in to make you want to run away; he advocates Frequency Reducing Difficulty….we can apply this to team leadership activities too, the more you do it for your team the more comfortable you are doing it and you start to develop your leadership muscles!
Knowing you, dear reader, are NOW always a type of leader in your team (active/active standby) what might you do differently going forward?
- Do you have a vision of something and how do you ensure that it is clearly articulated to your team?
- What information and activities do you think it is important for your team to carry out to help complete your vision?
- Previously, if you were just expecting requirements to come to you and for you to work on them, what might you do differently now or ask for that you didn’t before?
- How might you behave differently in meetings to how you do presently?
If you have never thought about things from this leadership view or do not feel completely comfortable to lead, are you doing everything you can do to at least support the leader or leaders in relation to the points above? A similar level of leadership presence of mind and engagement is needed to support it, because just as anyone of us can score, anyone of us can help set up the winning play.
