Psychological Safety & Agile

Agile

It seems like the word “Agile” gets thrown about a lot. Sometimes it refers to a more flexible approach to working hours and locations, sometimes it refers to Scrum practices, and sometimes it means taking an iterative, incremental project management style over a more traditional “waterfall” or “big bang” approach. Agile, in reality, can include all or none of these. The first “official” use of the term in the context that we’re now familiar with was back in 2001 at Snowbird resort in Utah, where 17 software developers came together to try to create a new way of managing projects. They were frustrated with traditional heavyweight project management methodologies, which were slow and stifling the development of new technology. At the time, industry experts estimated that the time between a validated business need and an actual application in production was around 3 years! As a result, there was a real desire to find ways to deliver value from technology, faster. These 17 (including Jeff Sutherland, creator of the Scrum methodology) came up with this, the Agile Manifesto.

The Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto is:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

It’s worth noting that these ideas weren’t necessarily new: Weinberg, Brooks, DeMarco & Lister in technology, and others such as Mary Parker Follett, Deming, Goldratt and Senge in the business world, amongst many others, had previously described similar approaches. But this was the first time such an approach had been codified in such an accessible way, specifically for technology teams. 

Whilst the Agile Manifesto was written by software developers trying to improve the world of software development, the core principles of Agile are useful far beyond technology teams. I work with teams in finance, marketing, healthcare, manufacturing and heavy industry who have either adopted or are in the process of adopting Agile methodologies that fit their context. There are some cases where Agile approaches might not neatly fit, for instance in construction, where we create detailed specifications, build it, and walk away, or manufacturing, where we’re making the same thing over and over again to tight tolerances. But for most aspects of work (and indeed many aspects of construction or manufacturing too), Agile is a useful approach. 

Check out the Psychological Safety Practice Playbook for Technology Teams

Among other things, the Agile Manifesto essentially helps us to prioritise: for example, whilst documentation is valuable, it is more important to the business that the software actually works. But what is maybe most well-known about Agile is the last line – the emphasis on change. Agile recognises that projects and work exist in the real world, and in the real world, things outside our control change. Even the most detailed project plan (such as a Gannt chart or Prince2 plan, and maybe controversially, aSAFe Release Train?) cannot negate the likelihood of real-world change affecting the project. It would be unrealistic to expect that specifications created at the start of a project will remain 100% accurate and true throughout the lifetime of the project. Thus, responding well to change is one of the ways that Agile teams can obtain a competitive edge over teams that adopt more traditional approaches.

Agile is about responding to change

The Agile Manifesto highlights the need to acknowledge and respond to change. But how do we do that in practice? Agile deals with this by releasing bits of value in smaller chunks, which means not only can we deliver some value earlier than traditional waterfall approaches (where all the value is released at the end) but we can more easily deal with changing needs whilst we’re working. By releasing something early, we can see how successful it is – we’re conducting constant small experiments and feeding that learning back in so that we can change what we’re doing.

One of the lesser recognised tenets of Agile is that we cannot increase our scope (what we’re doing) without increasing either the time or resources required to do it. Importantly, it’s the job of the people doing the work to estimate how long it will take and what resources are required – not a manager or project coordinator. These planning activities require trust, candour, expertise, capability and psychological safety in the delivery team.

The first and third lines of the Agile Manifesto also show a key change in approach from the traditional project management approach: away from technical plans that treat humans as resources to be spent and used up (i.e. Gannt charts), towards a more humanistic approach that considers people, interactions, and collaboration to be the core of everything we do. Indeed, the Agile “Prime Directive”, which is used in retrospectives, explicitly calls for all involved to adopt a systemic, psychologically safe, blameless stance. This encourages and enables people to admit fault, raise concerns, & suggest ideas and improvements without fear of retribution:

The Agile Prime Directive

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

Based upon the Local Rationality Principle, it is this aspect of Agile that shows us how interdependent an Agile mindset and a culture of psychological safety are. We cannot respond to change if we do not feel psychologically safe enough to raise concerns about the changing world, or suggest improvements, and we cannot be truly Agile if we cannot admit our mistakes and learn from them.

I spoke to Jonny Williams, author of “Delivery Management: Enabling Teams to Deliver Value” about Agile and here’s what he had to say:

Agile could challenge Fleetwood Mac when it comes to rumours. There are countless Agile myths that you might have heard. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to debunk many of them.

A common fallacy is that Agile means having no plans. In reality, it involves more planning than most approaches. The difference is that planning happens in shorter, more frequent cycles; daily, weekly, and monthly. However, Agile does prioritise responding to change, so plans should be flexible.

Many people consider Agile to be exclusive to development. While the original manifesto was aligned with software, the principles it espoused and the movement it sparked are relevant to numerous fields. I have personally enabled marketing and HR teams to adopt agile approaches and increase their effectiveness.

Sometimes people talk about a singular Agile methodology, but it actually involves a mix of values, principles, and practices that underpin a variety of approaches. The most simple implementation is a collaborative people focussed approach, where you take the smallest possible action in order to discover what you should do next. No frameworks required.

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organizations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organizations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy Edmondson is considered by many to be essential reading on the topic of psychological safety. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, has put together some key takeaways from the book.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely has set up the “Human Capital Factor” (HCF) – a metric that reflects employees views of the companies they work for. It includes survey data as well as data from Glassdoor and similar resources. To its credit, it takes into account equity in satisfaction too – so if senior execs are happy, but frontline workers aren’t, or men are happier than women, the HCF is impacted. Tech companies are well represented in the HCF index (a list of organisations that score highly), whilst energy and utility firms are not. This correlates with anecdotal evidence and the general perception that tech companies are good places to work.

As proponents of psychological safety and safety culture, we sometimes bang the psychological safety drum by arguing that it improves team and organisational performance (as shown by Project Aristotle, the State of DevOps Reports and others). Now, Ariely has shown that companies with a higher HCF tend to demonstrate stronger financial and share price performance over those with low scores. Whilst turning happiness and culture into a financial performance indicator gives me Campbell’s Law anxiety, I do think this is a potentially useful piece of evidence to have in our toolkits. Indeed, there are now traded funds that comprise US companies with high HCF scores, so you can invest in “happier” businesses. 
 

I believe that a team is only as safe as the least safe person on the team. Some team members may feel less safe than others because they’re new to the team, they’re junior, they’ve experienced psychological danger previously, they feel different to others on the team, or they experience other more systemic challenges that speak to intersectionality and privilege. This is a great report by August on Equitable Psychological Safety and worth a read. The image above shows how different factors can impact the degree of psychological safety felt by individuals on the team, from co-location to gender. This is great work by the folks at August and I reckon it’s worth providing your email address in order to access it 🙂 

Things to do and try:

I love this practice from Liberating Structures – the “Wise Crowd”. Essentially, the idea is that everyone in the group acts as a group of “consultants” whilst, taken in turn, people get the opportunity to act as a “client” and present a challenge to the consultants for help.

More instructions are over at liberatingstructures.com, but it’s a really simple practice, which provides people with an opportunity to get a lot of help to solve a problem. The consultants also get practice in asking inquisitive questions aimed at discovering the most useful information. Each consultation taps the expertise and inventiveness of everyone in the group, and at the same time provides a scene for coalescing and bonding as a group.

This week’s poem:

No Man Is An Island by John Donne


No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were:

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.



From the 17th devotion in “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes” a work of prose by Church of England Cleric John Donne, written in 1624.