Emboldened Autonomy
According to Daniel Pink, author of the book, Drive, autonomy is the desire to direct your own life. Pink argues that allowing employees autonomy runs counter to the traditional view of management, which wants employees to comply with what is required of them. However, if managers want employees to be more engaged in what they are doing (and they should, as tasks become more complicated), allowing employees autonomy (self-direction) is better. Here what Gerald has to say further about the importance of autonomous teams and how Hummingbird Agile is leaning into this highly valued principle and practice.
“We Committed Candor Today”
How many of us can recall when a leader performs a cursory scan of a typical set of agile metrics and incorrectly concludes that the team was to blame. Agile coaches are summoned to call up the scrum master and develop a remediation plan on how to ‘fix’ the team. Approached incorrectly, this can further lead to distrust and low transparency among the team, and who can blame them? However, that doesn’t mean that teams are faultless when it comes transparency and self-motivation. Click HERE to see what Gerald has to say about encouraging teams to trade in their slight-of-hand tactics to deflect attention for the kind of gutsy transparency that leads to even greater levels of trust and productivity.
The Free-Floating Anxiety of Scrum
There is little doubt the industry sees scrum as a rigorous light framework. It’s not easy to become a predictable, high-performing, cross-functional agile team who stays together over a long period of time. Furthermore, rolling scrum out as a one-size-fits-all approach for all layers of the technology stack even further dilutes the intent, effectiveness and understanding of scrum. In this blog, we are asking the question of just how effective scrum really is? Must an organization remain stifled until all the conditions are perfect and all the stars are aligned in order to receive the prescribed and touted advantages of scrum? Click HERE to get a light-hearted satire of scrum, bringing a little humor to what ultimately has become a very serious issue.
