How to develop habits in an Agile environment to perform better with less energy

Blame in the retro? Threats when work is not finished? Complaints rather than acting? You might have developed some bad habits here.

Are stand-ups taking forever? Are team members not updating the story board? Are retrospective actions not followed up upon? You might want to develop some good habits here.

Habits are regularly repeated routines, most often done subconsciously. Developing (the right) habits is crucial for individuals and teams to minimize the energy needed to perform at a high level. By developing a habit, more effort can be spent on the actual work rather than on the support functions.

Developing habits is not about working harder, but smarter. Habits enable you to:

• get rid of bad behavior and establish good behavior
• save time during meetings
• boost reliability and, ultimately, trust

Research and new findings within the last years have shown enormous potential for habit development having a huge impact on personal and business behavior. Applying this to Agile seems very promising.

A mid-sized company tried Scrum once, failed, still thought it was a good idea, hired an Agile coach, and tried again. This is the story of .id’s (called “id”, without pronouncing the dot) 2nd Agile journey (ups and downs) and their experience with

• team structure for the whole organisation
• experiments to drive change
• enhanced communication
• relationship between business and teams

“Actually, we don’t think of ourselves as an IT company…” At .id, demographic data is transformed into knowledge to enable customers to make smart decisions. Where to open the next store. Where to build the next school. These things.

Not being a technology company by nature (most of their 45 employees are demographic data experts), this is a case study of Agile beyond IT.

Customer collaboration is essential to every Agile business. To create and collaborate to keep a customer is the purpose of an organisation. But still lots of companies try to make bad profits, i.e. profits earned at the expense of customer relationships. The Net Promoter System (NPS) is a renowned open-source system which addresses and measures customer collaboration. And did you know that you not only can use it to get feedback on your products and services, but also on your employees and your personal performance?

NPS is a perfect fit for Agile companies - and those who want to be. Most of the companies I worked with (Agile coaching, training, consulting) had not heard about it, and far less were actually using it. This really surprises me, since NPS integrates like a charm with Agile, e.g. within product development via Scrum.

In this session I'll explain the basics of NPS, i.e. promoters and detractors, satisfied and delighted customers, bad profits (how to deal with bad feedback?) and good profits, and why and how to measure these. Several stories from companies like Apple Retail, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and others will help to make my point. I’ll further show why NPS is a very good fit with Agile regarding products, employees, and personal performance. Dos and Don’ts regarding NPS (also from personal experience) will close this session. Related to the Don'ts, I also cover some of the negative critiques out there.

One of the most rewarding change opportunities for organization to create awesome workplaces exists by being innovative at the management level. Forget step-by-step explanations of management practices (you can’t copy culture!); the key to address the management level - i.e. to foster innovations at this level - is by inspirations. In order to get an awesome workplace, you have to see awesome workplaces. There are plenty of ways to inspire people, but this opportunity is often wasted during the introduction of Scrum and Kanban methods, or never reflected upon afterwards.

In this session, I will show you several aspects of awesome workplaces. A constantly growing container for inspiring management are the Agile Management Innovations (AMI). AMIs are practices for management which lead to democracy, fairness, decentralisation, dialogue, and lot of other positive effects. These effects lead to awesome workplaces, where people are truly motivated. The idea behind inspiration is to foster creativity and innovation through a changed environment. Management practices can't be just applied; 50% of management practices depend upon the organisation's culture. That's why we call them AMInnovations.

If you experiment with AMIs, you'll get from status quo to awesome (that is of course only when you're status quo is not already awesomeness).

I’ll introduce the concept of AMI as well as plenty of real world examples. The goal is to inspire you twofold: I will inspire you in this session to experiment with AMIs, and AMIs will inspire the people within your organisation to achieve a better workplace.