Blog Alexis Monville (en)

Tag: team

  • How to start when managers are stuck in uncertainty and fear

    How to start when managers are stuck in uncertainty and fear

    How to start when managers are stuck in uncertainty and fea? That was the question I asked to my peers that participate to the Happy Melly Coffee.

    This was the first day I was able to participate to the Happy Melly Coffee since when I moved to Boston.

    Uncertainty and Fear were the main questions.

    Unfortunately, I was forced to leave the building, and to loose the Internet access after a few minutes.

    The good thing is that my peers continue to discuss the topic, and the recording is available just above 😉 THANK YOU!

    This could inspire you to participate in a future coffee, the Trello Board with the questions is there.

    The previous recordings are there.

  • Let us code!

    Let us code!

    I started this article a long time ago. And that’s a comment from a person I work with that triggered the sense of urgency to contribute to solving this problem. He said:

    Stop interrupting us! Let us code!

    I became sensitive to interruptions when I discovered the Pomodoro method, subject that I covered in this article.

    I experimented that, when I was able to focus on one thing, I was extremely efficient. Though, I tried to influence people in teams I worked with to preserve periods of time without interruption.

    People easily identify others as interruption sources. It is usually something easy to cover with a team to find agreements to stop the interruption flows and halt the downside of them.

    It’s harder to admit that we are our source of disruption. We start something, get caught by notification, our mind wanders and takes us somewhere else… We need a strong commitment to resist to the multiple temptations to quit what we are doing for something else.

    The problems became major with a distributed team.

    With colocated teams, I experimented two strategies:

    • The first one is to adopt a sign on the desk meaning that the person wishes not to be interrupted (a funny puppet for example)
    • The second is to synchronize the team on the same schedule: 50 minutes of work without interruption, 10 minutes break, 15 minutes for interruptions, and so on, with a bigger break for lunch.

    Synchronization is the most efficient strategy, but it’s also the most demanding one for team members.

    With a distributed team, the connection flows through electronic communication means. You can observe some tacit agreement that you need to answer fast to solicitations by email, and more rapid to solicitations on chat rooms (IRC, jabber, slack or others).

    If you agree with that, you can spend your whole day jumping from one subject to another without actually accomplish something.

    LarryKim-MultitaskingThe illustration on the right is coming from Larry Kim’s article multitasking is killing your brain, and it explains quite well the situation.

    Our overall satisfaction will suffer from those constant context switch. Furthermore, each time we will try to go back to a task, it’s very likely that we will need a lot of time to regain the level of understanding of the problem we had when we left this work.

    MikeCohn-ContextSwitchingIn his book Succeeding With Agile, Mike Cohn quotes the study from Kim Clark and Steven Wheelwright on the impact of multitasking on productivity that as shown in the graphic above.

    In an organization where managers distribute the work and where the managers convey the pressure of instant response, the time wasted by permanent asks will paralyze the whole organization. This explains why some small teams of 10 can achieve more than teams of 300 letting bigger organizations questioning themselves.

    The phenomenon will be less important in an organization where the system distributes the work. An organization in which each team member knows what he/she needs to take after a completed task.

    group-chat

    Funny synchronicity, Jason Fried published an article on the same subject on Medium when I was writing this one. He suggests some ways to change the agreement on the use of communication tools that are important.

    My recommendation would be to invest some time with the team to refine:

    • The use of communication tools: what needs to be covered by email, by instant messaging, in a chat room, or what needs to be covered with share documents that will help to build a common position. In each case, we need to define what are the agreed reaction delay
    • the way to protect the individual from interruptions: by accepting unavailability period, by synchronizing the whole team on the same schedule (harder if you are in several time zones), by dedicating people for a period to handle interruptions that we cannot avoid
    • to play a game to understand the power of focus (like the name game)

    And about you, what are your strategies to let the people that are working with you to do their job?

     

    The header picture is from Ryan McGuire.

     

     

     

  • The Five Dysfunctions of A Team

    The Five Dysfunctions of A Team

    “If you can get all the people of an organization  rowing in the same direction you can dominate any industry on any market against any competition at any time.”

    When the author use this quote from a friend in front of executives, they are all nodding, not only to express their approbation, but to express their inability to make it happen.

    TheFiveDysfunctionsOfATeamSuccess comes to those who are able to overcome the human bias that undermine the teamwork.

    The five dysfunctions of a team is a book by Patrick Lencioni (not a new one, but it’s often useful to re-read some “classics”). This book use a novel at the beginning to make easier to understand the ideas that are further reexplain at the end.

    The five dysfunctions can’t be treated in isolation, the first one is the foundation of the next and so on.

    TheFiveDysfunctionsOfATeam-2The five dysfunctions are, according to the author:

    • Absence of trust: unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
    • Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
    • Lack of commitment: feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
    • Avoidance of accountability: ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
    • Inattention to results: focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

    The author suggest tools to resolve each of the five dysfunctions. It’s probably there that the age of the book is visible as some of the tools had been overpass by others more recent and more effective.

    Nevertheless, the model proposed by the book is useful to help a team understand what they will need to achieve to become an efficient team.

    A book to recommend to many 🙂

    You will also appreciate Rafael‘s review on goodreads (and all the others that will motivate you to read (or re-read) some books.

    Header picture is from Adam Przewoski.

  • The Chimp Paradox

    The Chimp Paradox

    The Chimp Paradox is a book from Steve Peters subtitled: The Science of Mind Management for Success in Business and in Life.

    I used the model proposed to represent how our brain is working during conferences I gave on the Search for Happiness, and I had some positive feedback.

    In this article, I would like to give you a little more and invite you to read Steve Peters’s book.

    TheChimpParadox

    This book is an exploration of a solar system. The sun is the place you wanted to be. The planets represent zones to explore like: yourself, others, communication, stress, success, happiness, trust, security.

    The first planet is divided. It represents our mind, our way of functioning, the battle between our human and our inner chimpanzee.

    The model proposed by Steve Peters is simple and is composed of three parts:

    • the human: us, in our frontal lobe,
    • the chimp: our emotional machine, in our limbic system,
    • the computer: the place where we store information and manage automatic responses.

    If we look at the way a responsible human being will deal with a situation. He will first look at himself, what he has done to generate this problem. Then, he will look at the circumstances and their impacts on the situation. And after, he will look at others and search for ways to help them change their behaviors.

    If we look at the way a chimpanzee will deal with a situation. It will be less rational and much more emotional, and it will work in the opposite direction. The chimp will first look at others and finger point at what others have done, then it will look at the circumstances and blame them, and in the end, it will look at himself with pity.

    A human being has to live with an inner chimp that will wake up fast (5 times more quickly) each time it feels danger and will take over the thinking with the 3 F: Fight, Flight or Freeze.

    The chimp is ours. It’s a part of ourselves given at birth. We cannot say: “Oops, sorry, it’s my chimp.” Like if it was our dog, we are responsible for it if the dog bites someone.

    The third part of the model is the computer. The computer, 20 times faster than the human, will take over to handle known situations. So, it will relieve us of a lot of thinking. That explains why, in some circumstances, we react and then think: “why did I say that?”.

    The problem is to whom we want to delegate computer programming: the human or the chimp?

    After introducing the model, the rest of the book studies ways to manage our inner chimp and to reprogram our computer with the human.

    The header picture is from Matthew Wiebe.

  • Black Box

    Black Box

    The black box in this article are those installed in planes. Those black box allows to analyze what happens during a more or less dramatic incident. Setting an organization where facts are analyzed to improve the system is a defining characteristic of airlines industry. A characteristic that enables an incredible improvement of security.

    Matthew Syed starts by showing this fundamental difference in his book: Black Box Thinking – Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes–But Some Do.

    Compared to the health-care system where the culture is to blame people that made mistakes. A culture that leads to the dissimulation of mistakes and to no improvement of the systems, causing 400,000 deaths per year in the US (third cause of mortality before traffic).

    Matthew explains the anthropological and psychological root causes that leads us to avoid recognition of mistakes, and then to incapacity to conduct improvements.

    One main aspect is the mindset in which we look at the development of our skills. As stated by Carol Dweck there’s two types of mindset: fixed mindset, where we think our skills depends of our gene, and growth mindset, where we think our skills depends on practices.

    The book presents transparency approach from people and organization that allows experimentation avoiding our natural biais.

    One approach is marginal gains, the fact to change small things to correct a small weakness, that will lead at the end to high performance.

    Another approach is to avoid closed loop thinking that leads to deny mistakes reallity, and then to reproduce those mistakes over and over again.

    As stated before, avoid the blame culture is necessary to create the conditions that allows people to reveal their mistakes.

    So we can try and try again a lot of times to finally succeed.

    A must read!