Breaking the Silence: Sparking Engagement in Agile Teams 🚀
Hello, Agile champions! Today, we delve into a critical yet often overlooked herald of the agile apocalypse: Silence. This eerie quietude, especially prevalent during sprint reviews, signals a deeper issue within our agile transformations. It’s not just about stakeholders skipping meetings or the tumbleweed moments when feedback is solicited; it’s about the profound impact of silence on the effectiveness and direction of our projects. Let’s explore how we can shatter this cone of silence and foster vibrant, engaged agile environments. 🌟
The Silence Dilemma in Agile Reviews 🤐
The scene is all too familiar: a sprint review with minimal stakeholder turnout, and when questions are asked, the response is deafening silence. This scenario isn’t just disappointing; it’s a red flag indicating a lack of engagement, fear of invalidation, or concern about stepping on more senior toes. It’s a manifestation of a deeper problem—poor product ownership and an absence of well-communicated goals.
Trust, Autonomy, and Alignment: The Missing Pieces 🧩
At the heart of this issue lies a critical balance between trust, autonomy, and alignment. Many organizations, in their quest for alignment, impose rigid structures that ironically breed chaos when agile methodologies advocate for their removal. Without clear, communicated goals, teams are left adrift, unsure of the direction and priorities of their work.
Vision, Value, and Validation: Crafting Strategic Direction 🚀
To combat chaos and silence, we must pivot to a model that emphasizes vision, value, and validation. This approach involves setting a strategic objective (our North Star), intermediate goals, and tactical actions that connect daily work to the overarching vision of the project.
Breaking the Silence: Engaging Stakeholders 🗣️
The key to breaking the silence lies in building something stakeholders care about and inviting them to offer their insights. But it goes beyond just getting them in the room. It’s about changing the dynamics of the sprint review to ensure a diverse range of voices is heard.
Strategies for Sparking Engagement:
Invite Diverse Feedback: Encourage all stakeholders to share their thoughts, not just the most vocal ones.
Foster an Inclusive Environment: Create a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing, devoid of fear of judgment or reprisal.
Utilize Breakout Rooms: In larger gatherings, use breakout rooms or liberating structures to facilitate small group discussions, ensuring more voices are heard.
Highlight Strategic Objectives: Continuously communicate the strategic objectives, tactical goals, and the connection to daily work to reinforce alignment and purpose.
Product Owners: The Catalysts for Change 🔥
Product owners, you wield the power to transform silence into symphony. Your role is pivotal in fostering an environment where feedback is not just solicited but celebrated. Embrace this accountability by:
Building What Matters: Ensure the team’s efforts align with stakeholder interests and the business’s strategic direction.
Discouraging Side Conversations: While some discussions will occur offstage, strive to bring critical debates into the open, where collective wisdom can prevail.
Promoting Transparency: Discuss budgets, release schedules, and strategic decisions openly to empower the team with the context needed for informed decision-making.
Conclusion: From Silence to Symphony 🎶
The agile apocalypse need not be heralded by silence. By embracing strategies that promote open communication, stakeholder engagement, and strategic clarity, we can turn our sprint reviews (and our agile practice at large) into forums buzzing with energy, ideas, and collaboration.
Remember, breaking the silence starts with us—product owners, scrum masters, and team members alike. Let’s commit to fostering environments where every voice is valued, and every idea has the potential to propel us toward our North Star.
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One of the signs of the agile apocalypse is silence. Quite often, this manifests in your Sprint reviews when you’re trying to get engagement from stakeholders. Perhaps you can’t even get your stakeholders to turn up. When they do turn up, you ask them for any feedback, and a tumbleweed floats past, and that’s all the feedback you get. Perhaps when you ask for feedback, you already know before you ask that which person—the usually the loudest and most outgoing person—you know they’re the one that’s going to answer that question, and nobody else’s feedback is going to be offered because they don’t want to. Sometimes there’s a little fear; if you’re in a room with a lot of other people, your feedback is going to be invalid. There’s fear that somebody else in the room might have a different idea than your idea, and they might be more senior, and you don’t want to step on their toes by offering feedback that perhaps goes in the wrong direction.
So, it’s very difficult to get that feedback, break the silence, and get people to actually talk about your products, talk about the direction of your products, talk about more than just the features that you’ve built. Even what are the things that the stakeholders that you have in the room understand about the business and the business choices that have happened since your last Sprint review? What do the stakeholders understand that we maybe don’t understand about the market opportunities that are presenting themselves since the last time we had a Sprint review or that have been manifesting over a period of time, and suddenly they become important? This is all part of that North Star, that direction, as well as trying to break that cone of silence so we have good communication.
Quite often, another way that silence manifests is all of the stakeholders that do turn up know they can go have a private chat with the product owner later and get their agenda heard. They can beat that product owner into doing things differently than they know other people in the room want to do things, or other people in the room know that some other direction is more important to the business, so they want to go browbeat that product owner privately so that they can get their agenda rather than the whole organisational agenda because that makes them look good, not the other people in the organisation. We don’t care about them, right?
So how do you create, break that silence and get that engagement from people? You need to stop building the wrong thing. If you’re building the wrong thing, stakeholders aren’t going to turn up. I was working with a team in Norway, and the product owner didn’t even turn up for the Sprint reviews. How do you think the team felt about the work that they were doing and the value that it provided to the business? So what did they pick at their Sprint planning? Whatever they felt like and they thought was cool to work on because nobody cares, so we may as well come up and care about the cool things we’re working on, right? Rather than working on the right things, working on the things that they thought were cool. That’s not who should be making those decisions. Those decisions should be informed decisions.
They’re still making the decision about what it is they work on, but what bounds, what context are they making that decision? Making it based on what’s cool for them to work on or what’s right for the business and supporting the customers and the overall strategic direction of the product? So that silence has created that lack of engagement, lack of care in the product. If you do get people, stakeholders to turn up, build something they care about. That’s how you get them in there. Ask them to come to offer advice. Stop having those side conversations. Right, product? You’re going to have side conversations, but you product owners know the conversations that I’m talking about—those side conversations where you know you’re going to get browbeaten, where somebody’s just going to be spouting their agenda, not the organisational agenda.
Instead of having those meetings in private, bring those discussions, bring those topics into the Sprint review where you’ve got more voices to be heard. The gestalt can look critically on that idea of let’s serve this one part of the business at the detriment of the rest, and they can say, “No, that’s not a good idea because it’s going to have this impact,” and have that work for you rather than against you. So build up those ideas, have those conversations during the Sprint review. Break big groups down into small groups. I was recently at a Sprint review, and 60 people turned up. Right, there were 60 people at the Sprint review. Lots—it was quite a big team, right? Lots of teams working on the same product, so a lot of them were team members. But when they asked for feedback, there were maybe two people that spoke out of the 60 people in the room. Why would you bother having 60 people in the room if you didn’t want to hear from 60 people in the room? That you didn’t want a collaborative experience with 60 people in the room?
So do breakout rooms, use liberating structures, send people out to do small parts of that story. Perhaps take some stuff off the product backlog that you think might not be right and give little assignments out to smaller groups to go figure out what we could do better and what we could do next, and then bring it back and make it into a more cohesive story. There are all sorts of things you can do to break that cone of silence around value, around direction, around what we’re actually doing. Discuss budgets and release schedules. Everybody on the team, everybody working on the product, everybody working with the product should understand those things because they will impact on the decisions that we make. We want people to make the best decisions possible, not be making decisions within that cone of silence. We’re not going to talk about anything.
So make sure that you don’t have silence on your teams, that you engage with people. Product owners, this is your accountability. Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else agile, scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
