Developing people and teams: Facilitation

• Facilitate: Scrum events, decision-making, conflict resolution, collaboration, and other critical discussions
• Facilitation is needed to ensure that the group works cooperatively and effectively
• Tips
  • Ensure that everyone participating in the discussion understands its purpose: set the context at the beginning and may have to reiterate once in a while if discussions are digressing from the context
  • Working agreement at the beginning: E.g., mobile/ electronics usage, punctuality, participant expectations, etc. Listing the Scrum values, especially if you are going to deal with conflict resolution
  • If the event/meeting is not interactive, take some time to find the Root Cause
  • Create a safe environment by ensuring that people focus on task at hand rather than pointing fingers. Immediately interject if there are any personal attacks
  • Use Timeboxing to ensure that discussions are productive
  • Balance the discussions so that introverts feel included in the discussions
  • read the mood in the room to take breaks to keep the energy level high for productive discussion
  • Be neutral and do not take sides (beware of your implicit bias during heated discussions)
• Building Consensus
  • Benefits
    • Better decision-making: as discussions help uncover things that individuals may not have thought of
    • Assist in better implementation of solution since everyone cooperates as it is a team decision
    • Maintains team’s working relationship healthy by making everyone feel included
  • Tips
    • using Root Cause Analysis in one-to-one conversations to uncover any personality conflicts between the participants
  • Steps
    • 1. Have everyone understand the meaning of giving consent
    • 2. Clearly articulate what needs to be decided and why the issue is being raised
    • 3. Before pitching for a lengthy discussion, do a quick poll to check if there is consensus. If the majority agrees to a solution, listen to the concerns of dissenters. Adapt the popular solution to get their points addressed so we have a win-win solution
    • 4. If there is a disagreement amongst team members, allow everyone to voice their concerns so their ideas can be included. It would be a good idea to list them to ensure these get addressed
    • 5. List Scrum Values and ask people the follow them throughout the discussion
    • 6. Leverage Timeboxing to ensure that you curtail lengthy discussions
    • 7. For the final decision, do another poll to see if the majority of the team agrees. A Dissenter (if any), is a critical evaluator. This may help spot issues before the rest of the team can see it
    • 8. Ensure that the team decision is communicated at the end of the meeting
• A powerful technique to improve your Scrum events
• Liberating Structures: are 33 microstructures that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group
  • 1-2-4-ALL
    • 1. Start with 1 minute of silent self-reflection by individuals on a shared challenge, framed as a question
    • 2. Take 2 minutes to generate ideas in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection
    • 3. Create groups of four and use 4 minutes to share and develop ideas you’ve discussed within your pair. Notice similarities and differences
    • 4. Take 5 minutes to share insights, ideas, and takeaways by asking “What is one idea that stood out in your conversation?”. Each group shares one important idea. Repeat the cycle as needed
  • The 5 whys
    • It is a critical component of problem-solving training
    • Purpose
      • Root Cause Analysis during Sprint Retrospectives
      • Identifying impediments
    • Description
      • Discuss with team members to look at the issue and ask “Why?” up to five times to get beyond habitual thinking
      • It is imperative to distinguish causes from symptoms and pay attention to the logic of cause-and-effect relationships to identify the root cause. Be empirical in the investigation by leveraging the facts for decision-making
    • Example
      • An issue identified is “poor Sprint Planning”. Let’s find the root cause for this problem