Along my path of exploration on leadership and teams, I attended this awesome talk by Heidi Helmand at the San Diego Scrum Gathering in 2017. These are raw notes. My collaborator at this conference, Dana Pylaveva, taught me a tremendous amount about presenting and showing up to be part of the team. She attended this talk and brought the lessons back to the company she was at at the time where they rolled out this technique of allowing employees to assign themselves to work as an workshop and exercise. The exercise pointed out challenges in management and leadership and incredible strengths and generosity amongst team members and workers.
Notes:
People misinterpret keep your teams stable with keep your teams the same. This is about dealing with the reality if changing teams.
Told her story. Was doing interaction design. Was pulled off and put on an innovation in isolation team. Worked on gotomeeting as a result.
Innovation by isolation pattern.
Team put off to side, disrupt status quo.
Examples of Citrix and grasshopper. Secure docs.
Reteaming brings freedom (from process).
Does research, watches for patterns.
This is about PEOPLE. Issue she had with keynote was the human side. This is our lives. Don’t want to be a feature factory.
Stagnation is real. So bringing in new people can stop that. Always learn new, feel reenergized.
@ppfolio – had a cake baked for them by customers. Building right values continuously.
Read the emotional feed, but don’t avoid conflict.
Geek joy – if you see this pattern, don’t break it up.
How companies form teams and how people get on teams. Interesting when teams self-select.
Book: Creating Great Teams (Sandy Mamoli ET)
Spotify: infrastructure tribe, some missions of teams were overlapping, so using self-selection, re-org’d
Put boards up and could put your avatar on team you wanted.
Unruly (company in London) does it with a survey.
Retrospectives are key.
Hunter, where mob programming invented. Team members negotiate change.
Mobbing is working on one computer and coding as a group.
Companies having Disappearances of team members because of re-prioritization done on management level.
“A leaders job is to drive fear and ambiguity out of the room.” — Denning
Not just about velocity.
Trademe, a NZ company.
Reteaming for sustainability.
Reteaming to combat knowledge silos. (me: Joy, inc. talks a lot abt this)
Cloud Foundry does a lot of deliberate reteaming to create empathy, sustainability, outsmarts mythical man month.
Question is not “How can he get 2 times faster work. It’s about the team and how can you share knowledge.
At Menlo get to re-roll and change. High-tech anthropologists.
Procore Tech: changing roles in team.
Geek Joy, Mike Hill, but sometimes get sick of teammates.
“Reteaming is inevitable. Might as well get good at it.”
She used to be the pair police, but not any more. Use often, but be open to mob or other forms.
Book: Great Business Teams
Making team contracts. Use Alyssa Adkins Journey Lines with teams to get to know each other.
Equalize local and remote. Get to know each other! Use video for non-collocated teams.
Work Different 