TL; DR: Resolving Team Conflict, Ikigai & Cynefin — Food for Agile Thought #252
Welcome to the 252nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,787 peers. This week, we analyze options for resolving team conflict; we learn more about our team’s reason for being, and we think about how we are complicit in change fatigue.
We then advocate the unlearning of user stories, and we learn how to rejuvenate user growth by focusing on unlikely user groups. Moreover, we discover another five ways to tackle churn and improve retention.
Lastly, we embrace another help to get a hold on uncertainty and complexity with the Cynefin framework.
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #251?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Resolving Team Conflict
: 5 Tools for Team Conflict Resolution
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Agile & Scrum
: Ikigai – a formula for successful agile team leadership
Jeff Gothelf suggests a practice to learn the answer to the question of your team’s reason for being.
: Let's Talk About Change Fatigue
Len Lagestee delves into how we contribute to our change fatigue and what we can do about it.
: cynefin
Harold Jarche runs a retrospective on how the Cynefin framework has influenced his work.
📅 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Professional Scrum Master Training PSM I — Online: August 25-28, 2020
This guaranteed Professional Scrum Master training is an official Scrum.org class that leads to and includes the industry-recognized PSM I certification. The training is designed as a live virtual class of 4 hours per day and will be offered in German.
Learn more: 📅 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Professional Scrum Master Live Virtual Class: August 25-28, 2020.
Product & Lean
: Stop writing stories, start validating working software
Matt Philip advocates the unlearning of user stories.
and : The Adjacent User Theory
Bangaly Kaba recalls how Instagram rejuvenated user growth by focusing on the Adjacent User Theory.
: Slaying Churn Monsters: 5 ways to reduce churn better than an exit survey
Jason Evanish shares five ways to tackle churn and improve retention.
📯 Scrum’s Nature: It Is a Tool; It Is Not About Love or Hate
Regularly, we find articles from developers detailing why ‘Agile’ in general and Scrum’s nature, in particular, deserve our collective disdain.
What has always struck me in this discussion is the fact that Scrum is a tool useful to accomplish one primary task: delivering value to customers of emergent products in complex environments while mitigating an organization’s exposure to risk at the same time. So, if Scrum is not working in an organization, maybe it is because Scrum is applied to the wrong cause in the first place. Or, that its application has been mechanical, driven by folks who don’t know what they are doing. (Seriously, how hard can Scrum be if the manual comprises of 18 pages, right?)
The question then is: Why would I “hate” a tool unsuited for the intended purpose or applied incompetently? Would I hate a hammer for not being capable of accurately driving a screw into a wooden beam? Probably not, as the hammer wasn’t designed for that purpose, and neither sheer will-power nor stamping with your feet will change the fact.
Read more: Scrum’s Nature: It Is a Tool; It Is Not About Love or Hate.
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- Scrum Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns.
- Scrum Master Anti-Patterns.
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