The infinite loop
Alignment and the seeds of a maturing process
I’m glad of what happened last week in the team and I’m happy that I was able to seize the opportunity to introduce a seed of a little bit of Kanban methodologies in a very soft way.
Takeaways (TL:DR)
There’s a continuous tension in teams collaborating between spending time on alignment and focusing on more operative tasks to get things done. While moving through this infinite loop though we can seize opportunities to refine processes and experiment with our way of working. In this way, by changing perspective, we can see that even while looping back and forth we are also moving forward in the third dimension while maturing into better forms of collaboration.
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Weekly retrospective
Some years ago, as I just began my journey as a professional UX Designer, I was working in an amazing team, collaborating with a larger team composed of teams from different companies.
The team kept growing along the project and we were very disciplined in the application of scrum methodologies, doing frequent and regular retrospectives in order to improve our processes and the way we engage each other through synchronous rituals and asynchronous documentation. It was great, and we really ended up building an incredible set of rules and tools to work together as a byproduct of following the project needs.
The infinite loop
During one of these retrospective I clearly remember the CEO of our partner, starting to draw live in screen sharing on his tablet something very similar to the following scheme.
Basically he was tired of listening to us venting during retrospectives and keep spending time making changes and he wanted to show us that we were organically stuck on a loop oscillating between the need of alignment and need to have enough focus time to keep track of all the work to do. I actually think, and this is the reason why it got stuck in my memory, that this diagram is the perfect medicine to remove frustration from this continuous improvement process. Once you acknowledge that you are in this loop and that is natural to keep oscillating through this opposite needs you understand that there is no static point of equilibrium and no perfect process to balance the two but rather that — as for riding a bike — the equilibrium is achieved by keeping yourself in motion along the loop.
Ascend into the third dimension
I’ll disturb great philosophers from their grave, hoping anyone gets mad at me. Starting from the diagram above, a bi-dimensional loop of infinite struggle, we can get inspiration from the story of Flatland and elevate ourselves to begin to perceive also the third dimension of this space. In this way in a process of evolution similar to the Hegelian dialectic compared to classic dialectic we can start to see that while moving back and forth trough the loop, we are also moving forwards in another direction as a whole. You refine the processes, you get your mature, you know the result of your previous experiments, you have a set of tools to adapt to specific situations and maybe, exactly like a pendulum does, your movement start to get less wide, and you tend to a more stable point of equilibrium, spiraling asymptotically towards perfection, and growing so much through the process as a team, as professionals and as individuals.
Planting a seed
This week I personally seen the second shift of side in my team since I joined the team in March. When I first arrived, the team was making daily stand up, that we still do today, but was also doing a weekly planning of activities and using a task manager (Toggl Plan) to track their involvement in different projects. While the tool supported a structure based on Clients, Projects and Tasks with Gantt and Kanban views, the team was using Projects for tracking Clients, and Tasks for tracking entire projects. At my question to which was the granularity of tasks and if I could be tracking smaller tasks of the project I will be involved I got the following answer “…if we do more will spend more time tracking work than actual doing work”. This was part of the movement towards focus, and wasn’t yet at its peak.
In fact in the middle of may, with summer frenzy approaching, the reaction to a possible increment in the effort needed to follow all clients resulted in “let’s reduce alignments and planning, anybody as their own things to do, we know what we have to do and we save as much time as possible to do it”.
Fast forward to last week, the end of June, when the whole team felt in complete confusion, nobody had clarity on wether they could ask help to whom if they struggled, which were their priorities and how much work is on the horizon. We begged for a planning as a team. We ended up spending two entire hours of the full team in order to get back on track and be able to talk about what’s going on in every projects.
Ok, at this point, we found time to discuss and align on the situation, but people still needed a support to have visibility of all this organisation and to keep this knowledge synchronised and relevant on a day to day basis. I saw this as the huge opportunity to plant a seed, start to demonstrate the value of a more structured process.
I didn’t want to get into conflict to go back to Toggl nor other tools I also use for myself, we already deactivated the billing of the tool as a first point, but most of all, even if digital tools make it so much easier to keep information updated, they tend to be forgotten when they are not part of a consolidated process or they solve a need that is strongly felt from the team. But I thought that I have not big demands, and the team at this points only needs a bit of education on agile process and something easy to approach and impossible to forget rather than a strong and powerful tool to optimise their productivity.
I decided to leverage one of the few advantages that the physical space of the office offers when you work in presence as a team and built a simple Kanban board on the wall…with post-its.
I used the space and the colour of the post-it to map some metadata, made this little rules and information explicit and after organising a column for each of the members we filled out the board with all the things we said during the long alignment. The team was really happy, it’s impossible to forget about it. It is there, on the wall, as big as a person, always present, easy to scan. You can update it when you get up to go the bathroom or to do a small break.
It is a piece of simple and poor technology, but I hope it will help me to deliver a bit more organisation in the team and share some education on agile process and principles to improve collaboration overall, while we continue to move towards a new phase of the loop.
What do you think of the Alignment/Focus loop? In which quadrant do you think your team is moving at the moment? Share a comment if you’d like to discuss more.
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia