One Team
The complexity of collaboration is one of the fundamental reasons teams in an agile organisation are kept small. O(n2) (read: order n squared) to be precise[1]. 7±2 is a commonly accepted size. Decision making is localised to reduce the lines of communication and subsequent delays incurred. However, don’t let the goal of collaboration impact your ability to be productive. Sitting in meetings and talking is not collaboration whereas sitting quietly in a room by yourself can be.
Critical to effective collaboration is transparency of information, decisions, and relationships by default to provide a solid grounding for trust & respect between customers, peers and leaders. All individuals have the ability to know what is going on so that they can make appropriate decisions. This doesn't mean that everyone knows everything but that individuals have the choice of knowing anything. And, of course, the ability to be opaque to the competition while being transparent internally is the real art of a Collaboration Mindset.
There are many tools and practices that you can adopt to improve how your teams collaborate. For example, social contracts, pair programming (or pair work outside IT), and visualisation tools (like Kanban Boards, Burndown Charts or Cumulative Flow Diagrams).
Collaboration with External Organisations
Collaboration is complex enough inside an organisation. Once you include external organisations with a completely separate culture it becomes significantly harder. Collaboration techniques like Agile Contracts can significantly help with this.=Insights=
Case Studies
- [email protected]: our journey to be more than a bank
- Giving Hope - For Stakeholders, Employees and Clients by Rob Roe
- Open Salaries - From employees to managing partners by Alexey Voronin
- The Age of the Self-Managed Organization
- Pair Trading - Collaboration in Finance
- Working with Purpose and Agile Mindset in Municipalities
- Project Management to Save the Planet
- Forming Self-Selected Teams - How to Create Happy, Empowered, and Effective Teams
- Changing the World of Work
- Sustaining Happiness Once You Have It
- The Yin and Yang of Speed and Control
Further Reading
- What is Business Agility?
- Everyone Is A Designer by Liam Hutchinson
- Marsha Z Shenk - Curiosity is Your Silver Bullet
- Business Agility Tastes Like Chocolate by Marsha Shenk
- Agile Contracts
- Fabiola Eyholzer - TalentSumerization The Employee Experience in Agile Enterprises
- Certain Uncertainty by Evan Leybourn
- The Hidden Variable
- Evan's Theory of Agile Constraints
- Diamonds on the Soles of Your Shoes by Gracie Koester
- Pia-Maria Thorén - There is only intrinsic motivation
- Agile Mindset by Yves Hanoulle
- Leading with and in tension by Olaf Lewitz
Books & Book Reviews
- The Confidence Code
- Reinventing Organisations
- Directing the Agile Organisation
- To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
- Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy
Interviews
Supporting Frameworks
References
Join the Mindset & Culture Community
If you'd like to continue the conversation with like minded individuals around Business Agility Culture, join the Business Agility slack community. Specifically the #culture-and-mindset channel.
Library Steward
This section is currently un-stewarded. If you have a passion for this space and would like to take ownership for the guidance and insights within, please contact Evan Leybourn. The stewards of the Business Agility Library are leaders in their field and we quite literally couldn't create such amazing content without their support. These people & organisations are leaders in the community and, through their actions and insights, continue to expand the horizon of business agility for us all.
