Linda Rising - Teams and Rituals

Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of Agile Way podcast where we explore challenges organizations face on their agile journey. How to become great Scrum Master, how to change your leadership style, or how to embrace agility at the organizational level. I'm Suzie Shikova, Agile coach, certified Scrum trainer, and author of the Great Scrum Master book and Agile Leader Book, and I am your host for this podcast. I'm passionate about business agility, organizational culture, and agile leadership. And that was the reason why I decided to start this podcast to share with you my experiences and stories from my agile journey. So, hello, everyone. Welcome, uh, Linda Rising here today. She's my dear friend. She's been speaking in Prague several times and helping me with, uh, some, uh, classes on leadership, uh, over the years. And I'm really super happy to have Linda here on this podcast. Linda, what are you currently passionate about in Agile space?

Speaker B: Well, I think in the Agile space, I would have to say I'm really, really interested in how we can make group activ activities, and that would include teams or larger groups. What's the science that tells us there's a better way? What can we do as team members? What can we do as managers setting up teams? What can we do with work with teams? What's the evidence for a better way?

Speaker A: Themes are part of my passion as well. I really like this dynamics, this energy coming from it. So tell us more about this, uh, research or what do you find out about it?

Speaker B: Well, there are so many different areas. One that's kind of interesting and a little unusual has to do with rituals. So ritual in English means an activity that seems on the outside perhaps to be meaningless, but to the team or the group that has the ritual, it's very meaningful. In fact, that's the definition. It's a ritual if it means something to the team. And I don't think I would have paid any attention to this research except it was something done at Harvard Business Review. And in reading the article, I thought, wow, Harvard Business, it's very conservative publication and they're talking about rituals. Wow, I better read this. I better see what's going on. And it was very interesting and I think it applies directly to agile teams.

Speaker A: So rituals, example of that for us. Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so I think maybe most the best example for rituals on teams comes from sports, that if we follow soccer or basketball or football, we all know some sports star that does something strange. Perhaps the person puts his socks on inside out or maybe wears his shirt backwards or puts his hat on at an angle, or maybe the team has A, uh, uh, dance that they do before they start playing some activity, something that they do, and they always do it. So the group at Harvard actually interviewed a lot of sports stars and they said, what would happen if you didn't do that? What would happen if you didn't put your socks on backwards or if you didn't do this dance before you started playing, what would happen? And they all said the same thing, which is we would never, we would never not do it. So Michael Norton, who was the lead researcher at Harvard, said, I wonder if this has applications for business and I wonder if we could do some science experiments, studies, could we show whether this is real, whether it does have a real impact. So they brought in MBA students into the lab and they made up experiments. They had them do different kinds of rituals and they were able to show scientifically that it does make a difference, it does have impact, it does affect performance. If you believe, if you believe the ritual has meaning, it does improve your activities. So the, the research that he was looking at tended to imply to, you know, business in general. But of course I thought of agile and we have a lot of things that could be considered rituals. And I wondered, you can talk to different teams who do the same thing. They all have daily standups or they do retrospectives or they pair or they mob. They have, well, you could call it a ritual, but for some teams it doesn't mean anything and they don't have success with it. They say it doesn't work. Whereas for other teams they believe that they must do the ritual a certain way. I can remember talking to a team once about their daily standup and I said, well, you could change some things about the daily stand. I said, oh no, oh no, no, no. We always do the stand up at a certain time every day. And they would do it every day and they said, we couldn't, we couldn't stop. We couldn't do it, say every other day. No, no. So for those teams that had this activity as a ritual, that means it means something to them, it does impact their performance. You could. This is a word I don't know that I ever see in an agile setting, but the word they use is called sacred. It's sacred. Whereas for those teams that don't believe in it, for which it has no meaning, they're just doing it, it's a habit. They just do it because there's a list of things they have to do. Okay, check, we did that. Check, we did that check. It's a checklist. And we have to do everything on the checklist but it has no meaning. They don't really care about it. And what we see is that both sets of teams are right. If you believe in it, if it has meaning, it will help. If you don't believe, if it doesn't mean anything, then it doesn't help. They don't see any benefit. It does not increase performance, it has no impact on productivity or quality. It's not a ritual.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Do you think that's really strange?

Speaker A: I think it's strange because I start thinking about what it takes to shift the habit into becoming a ritual because you know we are doing a lot of things which we don't think about, we don't feel anything special about. It's regular so it's not the irregularity. And um, so what it needs to take to shift into ritual, I think

Speaker B: what, what I've been telling teams is that if you're doing something and it doesn't mean anything, then you have to make it your own, um, your personal. It doesn't matter what the standard agile practice is. That doesn't mean anything for you. If you don't care about it, then it's not going to help. So sometimes it's just a small thing. So one team in particular said, well, we just don't like the daily stand up, we don't want to meet every day. And I said, well, don't meet every day. You decide something as simple as saying to the team, it's okay, it's okay for you to decide how you're going to do this. It doesn't even have to be a major upheaval. Uh, it's just the team walks away with feeling that okay, this is ours, this is the way we do it, this means something to us. And uh, one team started having an animal. They had a stuffed animal and when they did the stand up they threw the animal around. So who's going to talk next? And they threw it. So simple. But they came up with it. It's like a joke. It's like a joke within the team. Nobody understands what they're doing or why they're doing it, but they to do it. And now the whole experience becomes a ritual. It's what they do. They made it special.

Speaker A: So what do you say that good teams always have rituals?

Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know because the, the, the research hasn't been around that long and I don't know whether uh, the folks at Harvard have an answer for that. But certainly there are sports examples of individuals I think of Agassiz, uh, the tennis player. He's a champion tennis player, and he always goes through the same. And he would never not do any of that. It means something to him. I know musicians that handle their instruments a certain way before performance. It does make a difference. It's part of the way they perform the music or play the sport or. So if you have something that you believe makes you better, then I'll bet if we looked, we'd have to do a big meta study and ask a lot of teams and say, oh, well, where are the teams? And sometimes they don't even know they have it. They haven't even thought about it. They just say, oh, we always do this. Sometimes you don't know about it unless you ask them to change it. And then when you ask them to change it and they say, oh, no, no, no, no, this is the way we do it. This is, you know, this is our way. We always wear our T shirts this way, or we always come into the room this way, or we always sit or stand or move or whatever they do. And maybe they don't even realize it themselves. So, m. Certainly you might have something like that that you do. You know, you're a writer, you're a speaker. I wonder if you have rituals about the way you approach your work, about the way you start a project, about the way you deal with. Every year, here comes the conference. There are certain things you go through, certain ways you do things. I'll bet you have some rituals.

Speaker A: Yeah. Everybody would, right?

Speaker B: I would think so, yeah.

Speaker A: Now, the question which is oscillating, uh, in my mind, because you said they don't want to change it. Right? So sometimes our habits, sometimes something which was working for us really good, and we try to keep it, is actually blocking us from improving and changing and challenging ourselves. So are the rituals really that good?

Speaker B: Yeah. So a ritual is different from a habit because a habit is just the way we do things. Like, I. I brush my teeth a certain way, and I've always done it that way. And my dentist said, no, this is not good. You need to change this. And I. I said, well, that will be hard because I'm in the habit, but I don't care about it. I have no, um, attachment to using my toothbrush a certain way. It's just the way I do it. So it doesn't mean anything. For a ritual. There has to be a sense that, oh, no, this is almost an extension of me. I do it this way. And if you ask me to change that I m might get upset for some reason or another, but a habit is. Well, it would be hard to change. But it has no. It's not sacred. It has no special meaning for me. I guess the best example of that is, are things that I have done with my family. Uh, we get together, uh, for Christmas and we always decorate our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving and have done it that way forever. And if somebody said, oh, no, you can't this year, we can't. Oh, wait, no, we have to decorate, I think I would be very upset. And there's no reason for that. It's just, you know, the way we've always done it.

Speaker A: Oh, very interesting. Yeah. I think, uh, the emotions behind it would be pretty much leading towards that.

Speaker B: Yes. And of course we don't talk about that in the agile space because I think this research is pretty new. And maybe even if we had talked about rituals, people might have thought, oh, it sounds a little like religion or something that we don't want to bring up here. But yeah, I think there are rituals everywhere. We just don't have a way of, um, looking at it or thinking about it or talking about it. But certainly the research is pretty clear that it can help you feel better. We know we're going through a lot of upheaval right now in the United States. We are struggling with the current, uh, administration. And some of us have started talking about that. Could we do something that would help us feel better, A kind of a ritual, if you will, that we would get together and we would, um, do something to help us? Certainly in times of extreme stress during war, for instance, there are so many examples of people who have done strange things that just help them feel better. In fact, Michael Norton, who is the leader of the Harvard research, started with a book about rituals from the Civil War, which in the United States was around the mid-1800s. And there were families who had sons, one fighting for the north, one fighting for the South. And they developed a whole host of, uh, very strange. They would put empty chairs at the table, an empty chair for one son over here, an empty chair for another son over here. And they would talk to those chairs as though their sons were still there. I mean, there were a, ah, lot of documented rituals that people did just because it was so stressful and it helped people survive. And do you know, people who were powerless, who had no way of preventing their sons from going off to war, they had to live with that. So now what?

Speaker A: Rituals helping in difficult times. And yes, uh, about it, because that could be super powerful for also like individuals struggling, etc. Thank you for sharing. Um, I have another question. I like to look into people's past a little bit. So if you look back to your overall journey, what was your biggest aha moment?

Speaker B: Well, I think, um, before I, I went back to school as an older graduate student and I was, uh, working in industry on um, a large ADA project. And in those days, uh, you had to print everything on special paper and it was like, uh, you know, it extended in many directions and the only way to deal with it was to sit on the floor. So I can remember sitting on the floor once with a huge, huge listing, spreading and, you know, in different directions. And as I was going through it, I thought, oh, this is going to be very difficult because it was so huge and I didn't know how to deal with it. And as I read it, I thought, I can understand this. It makes sense to me. I'm able to start at almost any point in it and say, ah, I, uh, understand what this, this was ada. Uh, so this is a package, Ah, uh, I see what this package is doing and how it interacts with that package. And the aha moment at that time was why, why is it that I can understand this program? It's so big. I've worked with other pieces of software where I had no hope I could spend an enormous amount of time. This program has something. What is it? So that I feel. I borrowed a term. I didn't know Richard Gabriel at the time, but when I talked to him about this experience later, he said, you felt at home. You felt at home there, like you knew where to go to find the answer to a question. You knew how to look through the program to understand flow of control. You felt at home there. I said, I know that someday I want to go back and finish my PhD and I want to answer that question. And I did.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Uh, congratulations.

Speaker A: A very nice story. Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, that's so nice.

Speaker A: Well, um, our time is, uh, slowly going to the end of this wonderful conversation, but I would like to invite everybody to continue with, uh, listening to your stories and talking to you at Agile Prague, 9-15-16. And you have a keynote there. So can you tell us like one thing, why people should attend your keynote?

Speaker B: Well, I have given a version of this earlier, but it keeps changing because I keep stumbling across more research. But it has to do with groups. It has to do why some groups do a better job. Um, I called it group intelligence. The question is, could a group have intelligence like people, Individuals have intelligence? Would it be possible to measure that, to say this group is more intelligent than that group. Could you do that? And how would you do it, and what would it mean? And we know that individual intelligence is pretty much fixed. You cannot change that. What about groups? Can group intelligence, if we could measure it, could it be improved? Could we make a team, a group? Could we make it better? Could we make it more intelligent? So there's a lot of research around that, and that's why the talk keeps changing, is that there's more and more information. Um, but the answer is yes, there is group intelligence. Yes, you can identify it. Yes, it can be improved, which I think is a very helpful thing.

Speaker A: Thank you very much and I'm looking forward to see you again in Prague in September. Thank you for coming.

Speaker B: I am so looking forward. I feel like I haven't been to Prague in ages, so this will be wonderful. I'm so looking forward to it.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Way podcast hosted by Zuzi Shakovan, uh, author of the Great Scrum Master Book and Agile Leader Book. If you love listening to this podcast, please leave us a review. If there is any topic you are particularly interested in and would like to hear another episode on it, let me know. For more information about me and my agile classes, Visit our website, Sohova.com S O uh, C H-O V A.com thank you for listening.