Notes from the InfoQ Teamwork Trends Report
The Teamwork Trends Report aims to help tech leaders and their teams find the practices, approaches, tools, techniques and frameworks that can help them get a better experience and better results at work.
Even though the report reflects trends in how software development teams work, there are many insights for non-tech leaders and their teams as well.
In line with our curatorial work, we’ve selected some quotes that resonated with us from the report and highlighted some key ideas. We hope these insights inspire you to adopt better ways of working in your organization.
Leadership skills
- Trend one: that leaders must now understand how to support the human community that they lead.
- To really be excellent as a leader now means understanding systems thinking, psychology, sociology, and anthropology and effectively starting a new career path that involves many years of learning.
- Trend two: the leaders must be actively creating aligned organizational structures and services.
Sensemaking & complexity
- At the practices level, Wardley Mapping is one of the few truly new ideas that have come into this space recently. Invented by Simon Wardley in 2005, they are gaining traction because they are truly a powerful tool for making sense of complexity.
- There is also a deepening appreciation of the impact that organizational complexity and cognitive load has on teams and their products, as covered in the recent book on Team Topologies.
- In an effort to understand and navigate complexity, only a few organizations are exploring sense-making and situational organizational practices such as value stream mapping, value chain mapping for strategic decision making (or Wardley Mapping), and customer journey mapping, in order to keep the focus on the value for the customers and end-users. These practices also aim at better analyzing internal organizations’ processes and at breaking down silos, inefficiencies, and decrease end-to-end lead time.
Culture & engagement
- The science is clear — organizational performance is directly related to organizational culture, as indicated in this diagram from Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim.
- Managers and teams are also exploring the psychology and biology of fear to create more sustainable and authentic safe workplaces.
- Product creation focuses more on the customer, team, and end-to-end flow of value. People can truly be engaged and incentivized to be their whole self at work.
Collaboration & communication
- Autonomous teams, self-selection, and dynamic reteaming are examples of how people are being empowered and organizations are getting measurable benefits from trusting their people.
- At the interpersonal level, remote teams are more and more the norm, and techniques like clean language and liberating structures have emerged to help remote team members communicate more effectively, overcoming the barrier that being remote often puts between people.
- Practices often used by facilitators are the core protocols, liberating structures, gamification, and self-selection.
- Tools and methods are going through the same evolution we went through in the physical world when discovering how to best use wall space and the available artifacts to reflect the context of teams.
- Inclusion is not just the responsibility of HR, it is owned by everyone at the workplace and teams are starting to understand the importance of inclusive collaboration.
- DevOps, although always known as a culture, is focusing on team culture of collaboration and cross-knowledge sharing across the organization to drive better outcomes between development and operations. DevOps upskilling and cross-skilling are becoming integral part of organizations’ digital strategy.
As OD advisors specialized in cross-functional teams, this report has overlapped a lot with our learning backlog and current expertise and experience. We discovered some new topics to explore as well.
Here are some starting points for the topics that we’re currently exploring:
- Liberating structures: overview of the 33 methods (link)
- Clean language: Agendashift’s 15 min FOTO — From Obstacles to Outcomes method (link)
- Sociocracy: guide for Sociocracy 3.0 (link)
- Wardley mapping: learning center (link), the book written by Simon Wardley on Medium (link) and the Map Camp community on Slack (link)
- Systemic coaching: the Global Team Coaching Institute is currently running their first global learning program. Lens: the team as the core system to support (link)
- Ethics: the Ethical OS Toolkit (link)
If you have any references that you find valuable about the topics highlighted in yellow and orange, we’re happy to study the resources and then discuss them with you.
Thanks for reading and let us know if there’s any insight that inspired you and your team.
