Children are Excellent Teachers

I recently had a discussion with my son's kindergarten teacher and she told me how my son's group has been teaming up very nicely. They play together and everyone has found their place. Some are carrying sticks, some build things from those while some of the others are more involved with the planning. When, inevitably, there's conflict, they say they are sorry and the situations resolve quickly. And when they do sports, everyone is rooting for the others like crazy!

If preschool children can do this, why is it so hard for us grownups?

When the organization is still going through the agile transformation, it's probably not uncommon that people only think about their own tasks. "I have done my part. It's not my fault if the others don't keep up." But in an cross-functional Agile team you are not merely accountable for your tasks. There are no "your tasks". The team has goals and the team members are ALL equally responsible for the results.

This will probably become clearer over time. But in a bigger organization, I'd like to reach the next level. I see an analogy between one team and a Sprint and between several teams and a Release. My personal vision of a larger organization is such that teams working on the same product pull one rope. If one team is struggling and the others have finished their commitments, they will help. No team is left behind! And maybe in a larger organization this would scale up still one level, but I have no first hand experience about that.

Great things are achieved through doing things together!

Solving Problems, Together

First of all, without too much advertising, I saw recently an interesting commercial with a powerful message. It was by a company called Wickes and it simply stated:

What more can you say? I think it says: craftsmanship. And it sets the expectation level on quality really high. If you create something and want to tell everyone about that with your back straight, I can imagine myself being interested in what ever you are offering. Hopefully they never have any quality problems. That would shoot them in the leg.

But I was actually going to write about different ways of conflict resolution. The examples that I refer to are from conflicts between parents and their children, but they sound very useful also in agile coaching.

Thomas Gordon's What Every Parent Should Know is a freely available pdf document that describes a conflict resolution where neither party loses. In a resolution to a conflict, if one of the parties needs to "lose", they most probably don't feel happy. They probably feel rather bad. And depending on the circumstances, this might inflict grudge. A historical example of this might be Germany after World War I.

If on the other the conflict can be resolved in a win-win manner, the resulting piece will probably last longer and the resolution process can strengthen the bond between participants. Very practical in parent-child relationships and also in team work.

Another interesting example came to me from my personal life. My son has sometimes difficulties in tolerating changes to plans (well, actually I also suffer from that from time to time.) He gets upset when he has to interrupt building LEGOs and come to dinner. I sympathize with him, but as a parent I also feel as my responsibility to keep the boundaries.

In his book, The Explosive Child, Dr. Ross W. Greene introduces a concept of Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). If I have understood correctly, it was originally developed for kids with problems in controlling their frustration. Actually, I also found a website that explains the method.

But shortly, there are three ways to solve conflict in CPS: plan A, plan B and plan C. A and C are the extremes. In plan A, the parent wins (and child loses). In plan C, the child wins (and parent gives up his/her plan). The main message of the book is plan B. That's where the parent and the child work together to find a resolution that they both can accept.

There are three steps in plan B:

1. Empathy
2. Problem definition
3. Invitation to negotiation

I can't yet tell anything about the effectiveness of this approach, but if it can offer a win-win resolution for both parties, I think it's worth checking out. 

So all in all, again, everything seems to come down respecting our children/co-workers/others and seeing them as human beings with hopes and dreams. Very common sense stuff that is usually taught already in kindergarten. But we grownups tend to forget...

Also this reminds me of  Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication. The main thing to understand here is that we all have needs and we live our lives trying to fulfill those needs. And if you can understand yours and other peoples needs and find a way to satisfy them all, there's no problem that you can't overcome.