An excellent article by Lyssa Adkins discusses learning to live with and accept conflict within Agile teams.
In Unsolvable Conflict on Agile Teams Lyssa explains why it is wise to accept conflict as a natural and normal facet of a close and growing relationship by contrasting that of an Agile team with that of a marriage (although perhaps less expensive should a successful team split!). Lyssa also explores some linguistic and conceptual tools she has found useful is dealing with active and passive dispute resolution.
Understanding and management of conflict is paramount to the ongoing well-being and as a knock on, the productivity of any team. Letting small things go unsaid is to let the creep of discontent and distrust into a team; where those two bed brothers lead, reduced productivity of the individual and Agile team soon follow.
In my experience conflict in teams can be divided as follows:-
- Lack of respect
- Inability to effectively communicate
The former can obviously be attributed to many things. Despite your best efforts as a coach it may be that in some rare cases you really do have an individual or two that are incapable of working towards a common goal. In these rare examples it may be that in order to protect the team you have to follow Ken Schwaber’s advice to the letter and either move them to another team or fire them. Now that’s easier done in the US than in the EU and I personally think should be a last resort but action is always better than apathy and sometimes you have to make such choices.
It is my experience that in a ‘normal’ office environment it’s almost always an inability to effectively communicate that cripples teams. It is a lack of effective communication (as opposed to lack of communication) that is more often than not the most overlooked impediment to Agile working by both coaches and practitioners. With time and willing, almost all issues can be resolved through considered communication.
Agile processes are purposely simple but to maintain that simplicity requires a level of communication and interaction that to many will be at best ‘new’ and at worst totally alien.
For instance Scrum, which as a process is brilliantly trivial, is an entirely a non-trivial affair to effectively implement. It requires teams of around eight people to operate in a manner not dissimilar to to a family. How many dysfunctional families do you know!? — it takes constant work.
As Scrum master you are not so much like mum or dad, as you are the family counsellor — you have no real power to change anything, all you can do is suggest, coach and provide tools to better aide communication. It is vital that you learn to listen with all your senses to the team. Don’t just listen to what they say, but endeavour to assess both their verbal and non-verbal communications and to really understand what they mean. You must tread a delicate path of both being in the team and being outside it. Only by doing this will you be able to effectively help them see the wood for the trees.
I mentioned earlier that it is lack of effective communication as opposed to lack of communication that is more often than not the core problem faced by Agile teams. It is not so much what we say but how we say it and how it is (mis)interpreted. Understanding how we each process information is vital to our ability to communicate with others.
I will touch further on how we all process and store information in a later post. I will cover Neuro Linguistic Programming, how it can be applied to Agile teams and will detail some tools that you can use to improve the fidelity of your team’s communication.
But for now, have you ever you been asked if something looks good but it just didn’t feel right to you, or have you asked how your partner felt about an issue but it just didn’t sound good to them?
We do not all think or process information in the same manner. Appreciation of this is the first step towards higher fidelity communication and understanding.
