Competitive bowling is an interesting game. Each player throws a ball the same distance to 10 identical pins. A player becomes a professional by knocking over all 10 pins consistently. This level playing field makes bowling one of the few sports where winning is screwing up less. Watching some back episodes of the Amazing Race, …
Category Archives: Teams
How to Stifle Teamwork – Part 2
“Rating and ranking engender competition, not collaboration” – Esther Derby, An Alternative to the Yearly Performance Review I always felt annual performance reviews existed for disconnected management to reinforce hierarchy. To know that their prime purpose (in employees’ minds) of securing an individual salary increase actually incents people to not collaborate is doubly disheartening. Compare …
Yes, and – not But
Improvisational comedy, like all team sports is about effective, high-energy, spontaneous collaboration. One of the seven major tenets of Improv is building off each person’s comment and suggestion with “Yes, and…” rather than dismissing it with a “but…”. “Yes, and…” extends, explores, and enhances the previous suggestion – building trust among all the team members, …
Want Better Collaboration – Improvise
The earlier collaboration techniques post (Stop Asking Questions) was based a key to successful improvisation. This post digs further into the relationship between improv and collaboration. Good improvisational comedy teams believe a group of individuals working together can start with nothing and quickly create something engaging, desireable, useful, and valuable. From this perspective, the keys …
Want Better Collaboration – Stop Asking Questions
The first step to a collaborative environment is to banish questions. Yes, banish the question mark from all conversation. Questions reinforce heirarchial relationships rather than build the peer-to-peer relationships necessary for innovative, effective collaboration. Step #1. Everyone is smart and everyone’s knowledge is of equal value. A question forces someone else to make something for …
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Only Pigs Can Talk
I’m reviewing an excellent presentation [pdf] on the agile software development landscape when two bullet points on Scrum’s daily meetings stopped me: Chickens and Pigs are invited. Only Pigs can talk. It took Googling to decipher the metaphor. Though it goes against my earlier stifling team work post, identifying who’s involved and who’s committed is …
A French Hour Sprint
Your new project is scary – though isolated and contained, the timeline ridiculous, the deadline immediate. The team is understandably nervous. What’s the easiest way to success? Institute French Hours – or what we’ve (until now) called a Sprint. Here are the 4 rules of French Hours: You can’t do it all the time. Every …
Usability Not Usable? – Part 2
“People are usually not receptive to a newcomer waltzing in and telling them they’ve been doing their jobs wrong.” Usability departments exist in a number of our client organizations. Unfortunately, their organizational structural frequently instills an adversarial relationship between the project teams and usability group. The usability group is considered an outside agency – ony …
How to Stifle Teamwork
As an appetizer for an upcoming Work Better article on collaboration techniques, I’m pleased to present these team work worst practices from Ester Derby’s Software Managemet Process Improvement weblog: A clear strategy to stifle teamwork Establish two classes of membership on the team [WP NOTE: i.e. developers and testers, employees and contractors, or people with …