The Importance of Collaboration & Autonomy to the Speed of Adapting
I recently blogged about the Future of Learning, it’s riddled with references and examples about our reaction to the lock downs of Covid-19, it’s unavoidable and if you’re a Victorian like me, it’s in your face every day as we try work hard at staying home for the 2nd and worse wave of infections.
The lockdowns and necessity of remote working and remote schooling have given us a unique opportunity to reflect on how we handle massive and unavoidable change in our organisations and way of life.
What systems and models that were current pre-Covid are now seeming out of date and strange?
Learning contained to a physical University campus where you sit close together in large lecture theatres?
Going to a medical waiting room where people have a higher chance of being infectious when you have compromised health?
Travelling in mass containerised transport where the air is cycled around that container?
Shaking hands? Sharing gym equipment?
Crowded venues with live audiences where food and drink passing is abundant?
Mosh pits?
All of these very normal human endeavours from the before times will never be looked at the same way again.
The organisations and services that can pivot the quickest to non-physical transactions, or safe physical transactions without adding to their cost base will be able to get their products out in front of the pack quicker.
In March, we saw some panic and backlash from workplaces that had previously reinforced the importance of having people physically present in offices. How would managers know workers were working? If you could move away from this premise quickly and focus instead on the outcomes teams were generating, you probably lost less time in the initial post lock-down panic. I remember hearing, and believing that Agile coaches could never do their work remotely and yet we’ve never been busier. The dogma of coaches drumming in co-location can be replaced by alignment, discipline in communication and the right technology tools.
“I remember hearing and believing that Agile coaches could never do their work remotely and yet we’ve never been busier.”
How quickly did your company move from being physically present to transferring work items to digital equivalents? How many hours were lost in video calls with participants talking in circles rather than collaborating around a shared view of the work? Did your company struggle to address keeping workers safe and productive during that time, or was your workplace freely swapping information in chat tools amongst themselves because you were well networked and proficient at those systems of sharing and swapping information?
If your company stalled, have they now accelerated past their obstacles and adapted or does everything still seem harder than before? Victoria has had the situation of believing the darkest days were over only to be hit with the double whammy of Lock-down 2.0, or as I like to call it "The Tandemic” - this time it’s personal. The companies I’ve been working closely with lately have proven themselves to be resilient and have adapted to using new tools for communication very quickly and as a result lost very little, if any, time in the initial shock. Time is absolutely of the essence in adapting, and how your company communicates is a factor.
The norms of who holds and disseminates information could be the differentiator. A company that is set up to practice autonomous and decentralised decision making can move faster. A team that collaborates and overlaps on producing their work product is more resilient than a team of specialists that are vulnerable to bottlenecking of information. As the work product moves from one specialist to the other the wait times increase, the work slows.
Overlapping of work can be seen in the following ways in small autonomous Agile teams I have the fortune to work with:
Daily Stand Ups - daily shared accountability to team goals, the team doesn’t wait for a central decision maker to pursue their goal
Pairing - work that is paired on, is less likely to stop and wait if one of the pair is distracted or removed
Focusing on the Work Not the Worker - If we are all aligned to the shared team outcome, the outcome can be achieved. If we are watching individuals the work may stall and the workers will also feel less engaged
T-Shaped People - more team members can address the highest priority work
Whole Team Collaboration - on events like Planning, Refinement and Showcases means the team can exist and move ahead without having to wait for instructions from managers, Product Owners or Scrum Masters
Transparency - like shared plans, goals and views of the work mean that information is surfaced and available for other teams to self serve.
We have witnessed an accelerant to many ways of behaving that companies should be looking to build on as routine. Collaboration and autonomy are essential to overlapping work, and overlapping work is essential to speed of communication and decision making. This virtuous circle of organisational behaviour has proven itself and will continue to prove a factor in the speed at which companies are able to adapt to unavoidable and radical change like a Pandemic.