Often when I’m facilitating a team’s activities, I find myself thinking that they have gone far afield and I need to bring the team back to the original purpose. Nagging works: “Hey guys, let’s get back on track.” Posing a somewhat-open question works: “Is it time to come back to the original intention?” Both feel contrived, though, because both make it sound as if I know what’s best for them. And, I know I don’t. Their side-road conversation may be exactly what’s best, it’s just not what I imagined was best.
So what’s better? Jean Tabaka, in Collaboration Explained, suggests writing the agenda items for a work session as questions. I have found this to be a great way to do agendas, for all the reasons Jean lists in her book, but also for this reason: it’s a fantastic structure you can use to reflect back to the team when it *seems* they have gone off topic. Since these are questions, rather than topic bullets, they are self-explanatory and specific. Using the questions as a structure, I can now say: “Where are we in this list of questions? Are these the right questions now?” Using the agenda questions this way, rather than leading with my judgment that they are off topic, clearly lets them know that I am their servant leader.
Try it and let me know what happens
June 19, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I wish I could remember where I read it, but just in the last few days I read a blog post by someone who suggested using TDD to run meetings.
The meeting starts with the questions (tests) that need to be answered to have a successful meeting. Any tangent that is required to answer one of these questions is followed, any tangent that doesn’t is “parked”. You keep people on point by staying focused on the “tests”. The meeting is done when the questions have been answered.
Many concepts in Scrum are being leveraged outside of tech, but this is an interesting expansion of an XP practice outside of tech.
June 19, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Kevin – Very cool. Great addition to the post.
June 20, 2008 at 12:17 am
A few weeks ago we brought in Michele Sliger to facilitate our Sprint planning and here were a few of her agenda items:
Do we have team working agreements? Do we need to review them?
Do we remember the release plan and the product roadmap? Have they changed? Should we revisit either?
What are our sprint start and end dates? Holidays?
Do we know what our velocity is for this sprint?
Do we know what stories we should do for this sprint? What is our theme?
Do we have enough information about the stories to be able to define tasks?
Do we know what “done” means?
July 1, 2008 at 3:32 pm
This is a 2 edged sword. The thing is most of the team members (in a particular project) are not Project Managers, and thus, they tend to think and discuss and divert the conversation to what they love. I’m not saying that they don’t have good ideas, but their ideas, quite often, are not in harmony and do not server the purpose of the project.
July 1, 2008 at 5:59 pm
PM Hut:
Thanks for writing. It’s good to see your perspective. I haven’t have the same experiences that you are talking about. In my experience (with Agile teams, at least), the team members are quite adept at knowing what to talk about when. This is probably because they have the pressure of a timeboxed sprint and the clarity of the critical few stories to achieve. I’m curious about the environment in which you have had your experiences and welcome you to give some more insight into that.
July 14, 2008 at 9:55 am
Lyssa,
No doubt that this technique could be very powerful. I haven’t tried it yet, but will do that.
But do you need it to tackle the problem you raised: how to be sure if the team is deviating or not? And also your second question: is this “deviation” a deviation? I am personally always reluctant when trying to resolve such hard questions with simple techniques. Aren’t we working around the real problem we really face?
Have you considered to ask at such moment (not necessarily referring to the agenda): “What question are we trying to answer now?” In a second stage, and if still needed, you may then ask secondary questions like “How does this relate to the core problem we want to solve?” or/and “Is this a priority question now?”
PS I love your contributions – mainly your YouTube is really great. Hope to meet one day!
July 14, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Peter -
I love your approach to detecting whether the deviation is really a deviation or just the right place for the team to go, in the moment, in service of their goals. You have hit the nail on the head – powerful questions. This is a good technique to use when shining light on what looks to be a deviation. See my earlier post on Powerful Questions (April 2008) for more on this.
As you imagined, an advanced move one can use is “calling the team forth” (another co-achive coaching technique). This is when you intuit the team is skirting the real problem.
Thanks for adding your wisdom to this post. And thanks for the compliments.