The Science Behind Scrum

Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross functional and are self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, 4 weeks or less. By the end of a sprint the code must be functional, tested and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control, which is based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. A defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact. 

Instead of planning out your software design months in advance and guessing at what will work, like traditional software development, scrum encourages experimentation via transparency, observation and adaptation. The saying “fail early and often” comes to mind. With scrum one is constantly learning; improving skills, efficiency and quality. Scrum is conducive to creating flow states which leads to mastery. A scrum is a self-organizing team or rather a team without a manager, a team that picks what work it will do and how it will do the work. Whether its creators know it or not scrum has a lot of self-determination theory going on.  Scrum is in many ways intrinsic motivation in sheep’s clothing.

I am floored that I just figured this out. I had heard of agile development and scrum but I had never read anything about it nor have I come across it in any of my research. Scrum is rife with positive psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience.

None of this is mentioned in any of the literature I have read and by this point I’ve read quite a bit. What is the benefit of using scrums to develop software? Scrum teams develop software up to 15 times faster than traditional project management processes. Holy performance increase batman! Granted a very small number of teams ever get to that level. Gains of 400% are achievable by any team willing to do the work. Not only is the work done quicker but that the end of a development iteration or sprint, the code developed is ready to ship and it generally has less bugs than traditional methods.

I watched a Google Tech Talk: Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team by one of scrum’s creators: Jeff Sutherland. He talked about how having people co-located creates a social bond. The idea is that if people work closely together they will care about each other and will be a better team and do better work. This comes out of behavioral economics, which tells us that we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships and transactional relationships. Social relationships build trust and result in win-win situations. Transactional relationships build rewards and result in win-lose situations.

30% of all development is being done by agile development teams. Though my research for this post indicates that only 50% of teams that call themselves agile are fully agile and only 10% of scrums are actually scrums. Most teams implement some kind of less successful variant. This kills me! My guess is to truly implement agile or scrum means that management has to change too much, or give up too much power to fully adopt these practices, that or teams are resistant to change. At the end of the day, what matters is speed and quality, not how compliant you are to a framework.

The sacred protector of the team and scrum theory is the scrum master. Part leader, part servant, his job is to ensure the team is fully enabled to succeed and remove any impediment to their success. She does this by being an expert on the framework, genuinely caring about the team and focusing on doing whatever it takes to make the team successful and keep them focused. It certainly would not hurt if the scrum master had a basic understanding of SDT, positive psychology and behavior economics. Though I think all leaders should.

I’m ecstatic to find evidence based practices worming their way into the workplace! As a side benefit it gives me something new to research and write about. Hug your local agile programmer; she is making the world a better place.

The Science of Optimism

There is a 50% difference in the chance of having heart disease between optimists and pessimists, according to a 10 year long study don’t in the 1980’s. Research done in the fields of psychology and neuroscience have proven what many people and cultures have believed for thousands of years. There is a big advantage to being an Optimist. 

Optimists live longer, up to 20 years longer and they have less health problems. They have more meaningful and deeper personal relationships. They make better workers. According to many studies done on optimism and heart disease, there is a strong correlation between optimism and cardiovascular health. 

Being an optimist is very important for health and longevity. It’s just as important as diet or exercise. I’d work on optimism before diet and exercise. Optimists are more likely to follow through on things that are good for them. They are more likely to generate virtuous circles.

We know from research done in neuroscience that the feeling we describe as happiness comes from dopamine being released in the brain. There are many circumstances that result in a dopamine release. When we feel like things are constantly getting just a little better, when we maintain a glass-half-full attitude, even when the evidence says different, we get a steady release of dopamine. We also release dopamine when we manage our expectations. If we set out expectations too high and we fail, it crashes our dopamine, if we set them too low, it’s ok and doesn’t interfere. If we exceed our expectations we’ll get a strong release of dopamine.  

That is the virtuous cycle. Do something that we feel good about and our brain rewards us with a warm fuzzy. If we build optimism before we start forming other beneficial habits, we will reinforce and take advantage of your optimism pathways. When we feel good about ourselves and our achievements, we are more likely to go on to further achievements. We are more likely to take on new challenges. We are more likely to succeed.  

It turns out that another bit of folk wisdom has been proven by neuroscience research: Like attracts like. When we focus on what is going right, we see more of what’s going right. If we focus on the problems we will see more of what is wrong. We will also get more of what we focus on. If you have ever driven a motorcycle at night, then you know you can’t look to the edge of the road when going around a corner. If you do, your bike will start moving that way, if you don’t adjust your view, you might drive right off the road. 

I’ve been an optimist for most of my life. I’ve always believed that it was the best option for me. I’m very happy to have studies from different disciplines to back me up. All of these ideas work at home, at work, at school or in personal development. If you are a pessimist, I hope you’ll try to make the transition to being an optimist. It’s not something we’re born with. It’s a choice. You can and should choose to be an optimist! If you’d like to know more about how to do this I suggest reading Flourishing by Martin Seligman or Your Brain at Work, by David Rock.

Do You Have Vendors or Partners?

How do you treat your vendors? Are they partners that are interested and engaged in your success or just a resource you use as needed? Many companies are too focused on having the upper hand and squeezing every last dollar out of vendor relationships. Both customers and vendors are guilty of this. When a relationship is focused on money and status, the rules change. If vendors gave their best price on the first quote and companies didn’t try to squeeze them, they could get money out of the way and focus on results. 

People as well as companies have relationships with two general focuses, social and financial. Social relationships display the social rules of the culture they are in, financial relationships exhibit a more self centered, win or loose focus. We know from empirical research done in the fields of Psychology and Behavioral Economics that the further a financial transaction is from a social one, the more likely that social rules will apply. 

It’s better for companies and vendors to have social relationships so that both parties are interested and engaged in each others success. Many companies don’t trust their vendors and vice versa. Why would anyone do business with a vendor or company they don’t trust? There are situations when a company or vendor is the only game in town and if that’s the case and they’re not trustworthy, then you can put them in the financial relationship category. Other than that it doesn’t make sense to do business with people you don’t trust. 

If companies and vendors form social relationships, it’s more likely that both companies will be more successful. Look at Zappos and Semco, they treat their vendors like partners, they invite them to company meetings and outings and are interested in mutual success. In times of economic downturn Semco has helped employees that they needed to layoff to start their own businesses that supply Semco or any other company they want to do business with. Talk about building loyalty!

 

Engagement, loyalty and satisfactions are not just good metrics for employees and customers, they are important in all your companies relationships. 

I Heart Zappos!

I just spent 4 hours watching a Zappos All Hands meeting. They started streaming these meetings last quarter and there were over 1500 total views with a steady participation of 165 people. What does it say about a company that 1500 non employees would tune in to watch a business meeting?

I’ve worked in the Fortune 100, the military, state and federal government as well as educational institutions and small businesses. This was without question the best all hands meeting I’ve seen. No surprise really, but still impressive as hell. 

They opened with an ad-libbed 1 minute “tour” of Zappos, followed by a couple of great musical performances, then financials.  Then updates on various projects.  This was followed by a great questions and answers session. They brought in two outside speakers that were inspirational and completely unrealated to Zappos. Let’s not forget the wacky and original Zapponian entertainment! And so it went and went and stayed engaging.

The most impressive thing is there was none of the bullshit content that is typical in such meetings. The signal to noise ration was all signal.  All the content was relevant or engaging. If your business has All Hands meetings, then you need to watch the way Zappos does it. Luckily they started recording the meetings in the second quarter and you can find them at www.ustream.tv/zapposinsights .  It’s all part of Zappos Insights, which helps companies find their culture and deliver outstanding customer service. The Zappos HR slogan: “Wellness is hot, benefits are cool.”

Parkinson's Law and ROWE in Government

I was recently turned on to Parkinson’s Law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion.” So I got on Amazon and bought a used copy of the book since it’s out of print. It was written in 1957 and is largely about the problems with government administration. Nothing much has changed since then. Parkinson talks about how bloated the British Admiralty became between 1914 and 1928. Ships in service decreased by 67.74%, men in the service decreased by 31.5% and dockyard officials increased by 40.28% while Admiralty officials rose by 78.45%. He says there are two reasons for this. “An official want to increase subordinates not rivals” and “Officials make work for each other.” 

Dharavi Slum in Mumbai, IndiaLet’s look at San Francisco, in 2008 we had a population of 809,000 and we had 27,844 employees. In San Jose, we had a population of 974,000 with 6992 employees. Though in SF both city and county employees are counted. Does that seem ever so bloated to you? Hell yes! In SF that’s about 1 government employee per 30 residents! Are the services in SF 4 times better than in SJ? I think not. Have you tried to get anything done in San Francisco? How about a building permit or inspection? I have some friends who ended up in building inspector/inspection hell last year while trying to open a new restaurant. They were trying to bring money and jobs to the city and in times of financial strife, you’d think the city would want that sort of thing. Not so much.

If cities like San Francisco were to move to a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), not only would we end up with the correct number of employees, but they’d be doing a better job and be delivering better services. One of the hallmarks of a ROWE is that you very quickly find out who’s doing the work and who’s just punching the clock because employees are judged on results and not solely on the hours worked. ROWE employees work when they want, with who they want in the way they want. The only caveat is that the work gets done. ROWE employees are happier, more engaged and have a much lower voluntary turn over.

Your thinking, “That could never work in government!” The folks in Hennepin County Minnisotta and at the Office of Personell Management in Washinton DC would beg to differ. That’s right we have a state and a federal agency doing it now.

It's All About Trust

In many businesses trust is hard to find. Do time cards, lengthy HR manuals, top down management and lack of transparency lend themselves to an environment of trust? Not so much. Organizations that have great cultures are based on values and trust. A healthy corporate culture is rife with trust at all levels, including vendors, customer and consultants. From executives to front line employees and everyone in between. At this juncture in corporate history trust is starting to make it’s way into our cultures and has been for 30 years of so, though it’s still the exception and not the rule. Too many executives are doing things the way we did them 100 years ago by holding on to controlling behaviors and focusing on short term profits.

Street Art from NOLA Gorilla Art

Certainly it’s easier to build trust into a companies DNA from the start than to add it in later. Companies like Zappos, Joi De Vivre and Atlassian are values based and built around trust. We can look to them as models of how to start new companies. The first company I know of that transformed itself from the old model to one based on trust and values is Semco in Brazil. It started as a traditional top down manufacturing company with a single division and a handful of products. The transformation started about 30 years ago and took 3 years initially but it’s an ongoing process. The book Good to Great has some good examples of companies that have made this transformation. Who do you trust? Do you trust your boss, your coworkers, your team, the executives, your customers? From the field of neuroscience and neurobiology we know that trust is essental to social interaction and that we are primarily social beings. For example, our brains can’t tell the difference between physical and social pain. Most organizations can’t do much work without social interaction. In order to use higher brain functions that result in things like creativity you need trust. Without it, your brain sinks down into fight of flight mode and the lizard brain takes over. When your spending time worried about what is fair or what your status is, your lizard brain is at work. Moving from a top down, carrots and sticks model to one based on trust and values is difficult. It’s also necessary if your organization wants to stay competitive and viable for the long term. Ask yourself whether you’d rather follow the orders from on top or help be the change you’d like to see in the world? If your answer is the later, then you need to find ways to bring more trust into your life.

The Resistance...

What a long strange trip it’s been. The Resistance has been kicking my ass for the last several months. I’ve found many and various excuses to stop writing and researching and now I’ve got the Resistance back under control and I’ve started writing again. I was on the verge of joining the USA Leadership Corps. they provide training and help people get pro bono consulting gigs. Then I saw a job that I thought I’d be great for and I let it throw me off course. I started writing less and getting stressed out and a little obsessed about the job search a little at a time until there was no more room for writing or researching. 

Balloon Sculpture, Jason Hackenwerth - World Creativity ForumA couple of weeks ago I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art again and his newest non fiction book, Do The Work, review coming soon. Both of them are helping me to focus. I’ll be setting up an interview this coming week with USA Leadership Corps, so I can get some consulting experience and I’ll be concentrating on writing and researching. It’s hard to express how much better I feel, just getting the Resistance to takes it’s foot off my neck. Writing this short post feels like a walk on fresh cut grass on a warm summers day! 

The Coming Customer Service Renaissance

In the next 5-10 years we’re going to see customer service increase across most industries. We are going to see good customer satisfaction being valued and pursued as a differentiator in business. This is going to lead to a customer service renaissance. With company after company trying to stand out and win loyal customers. When a company goes from zero to a billion dollars a year, in ten years, people pay attention. 

That’s what Zappos did and they did it while maintaining their core values during the great recession. There are many other companies following this trend, companies like Atlassian, Salesforce and Joi de Vivre Hotels. What do all of these companies have in common? What is their secret? They are all best places to work. They genuinely care about their employee’s. In fact, the more engaged a companies workers are, the higher the customer satisfaction. According to a study by Quantum Workplace high levels of employee engagement accurately predict an increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

This trend is great for everyone. Customer service is seen more as a marketing cost, than an operating expense. Companies are realizing that in order to keep customers sustainably happy, they have to care about their employees and that customer service has to be everyone’s job, not just a few people who answer the phones.  Happy, loyal customers result in more profit. It’s a virtuous cycle.