Be the eagle!
Continuous improvement and continuous learning aren’t just buzz words — they’re hugely important for both team and personal development. There are some real-life stories below that will help show why everyone should embrace the eagle within.
Here at ASOS, we take learning and development to a whole new level. In June 2018 we started an eight-week ‘Being ASOS’ campaign around our ASOS Behaviours. These are behaviours that ASOS-ers believe in, that in turn will help us develop ourselves and others. Some examples of these behaviours are:
- Lead to create leaders
- Turn left when others turn right
- Look through the customer’s eyes
…and many more. During each of the weeks of the campaign there were a number of thought-provoking talks and events.
I found the ‘Lead To create leaders’ week really inspirational and I came away from both of the sessions I attended feeling pretty awesome! There were a few powerful stories that fitted nicely into our current continuous improvement movement (which we’ve gamified and called Quality Quests…look out for a blog post on it soon).
The first session I attended was a masterclass with Jon White. He’s an ex-Royal Marine who stepped on an IED whilst in Iraq and lost both his legs and one arm. He told us some of his life stories about dedication, perseverance, passion and working in a team of leaders.
In one example, Jon remembered how he’d once done something wrong and had to tell his gruff, battle-hardened commander that he’d made a mistake. He thought he was in for a right telling off, but the commander said, ‘Has anyone died? No. Is anyone going to die? No. Well, it’s not that bad then is it, so tell me the problem and let’s sort it’. What a great way to handle the situation. No finger-pointing, no anger, only help and guidance. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced finger pointing here at ASOS, but I have worked in companies where a manager’s first response is to find out who is responsible, even before allowing teams to rectify the situation.
The second session I attended was ‘Leadership, Fellowship, Followership’ by Isabel Evans. Isabel’s talk focused on types of leaders and how teams reacted to them. She used similes from the animal kingdom to make her point.
Isabel told a similar story to Jon. She visited Tibet and watched as monks created sand art — even a small piece can take up to five hours to complete. She explained that during one of these sessions, the sleeve of one of the monk’s wiped through a section of the sand art. No one moaned or got angry. The monk who made the mistake didn’t even register annoyance at himself. Instead he calmly got a brush, cleared the smudged section away and started filling it in with sand again. Mistakes happen but throwing toys out of the pram rarely helps. It’s always faster and more productive to just crack on with fixing the situation. Also, we should keep in mind that how we react to situations can define us. Nobody wants to be ‘that angry person’!
I think that we can further extend the learning from these two stories and make them more applicable to our agile working lives by the addition of a feedback loop. It’s fine to make a mistake once (and react to the mistake in a calm manner), but to make the same mistake again is bad form. This is echoed in ASOS’s Engineering Quality Values — ‘It’s OK to crash…once’. This value is just one of a set of 10 values to promote a consistent and collaborative team approach to quality.
There are many ways to handle the feedback loop for mistakes. One of my favourites is the Blameless Retro. Teams should always seek to continually improve by learning from their mistakes and implementing preventative solutions.
Isabel also told a fable about an eagle who thought he was a chicken:
A baby eagle became orphaned when something happened to his parents. He glided down to the ground from his nest but was not yet able to fly. The farmer took the baby eagle and placed it with his chickens.The baby eagle learned to imitate the chickens. He could scratch the ground for grubs and worms too. He grew up thinking he was a chicken.Then one day an eagle flew over the barnyard. The eagle looked up and wondered, 'What kind of animal is that? How graceful, powerful, and free it is.' Then he asked another chicken, 'What is that?'. The chicken replied, 'Oh, that is an eagle. But don’t worry yourself about that. You will never be able to fly like that.'And the eagle went back to scratching the ground. He continued to behave like the chicken he thought he was.
It’s not only teams that should look to continually improve; individuals should too. Why can’t you write automated tests? Why can’t you organise cross team exploratory testing sessions? Why can’t you learn to code? Or run performance tests? If we don’t strive to continually improve and stretch ourselves, we’ll remain chickens and will never become the eagle within!
Ben has been a tester since his very first job back in 2003. Since then he’s worked mainly in the web domain but has also tested desktop applications, mobile apps, CDs, emails and even did a bit of systems admin at one point. A large part of his career has been spent in leadership/management positions. His most recent passion has been as an advocate for continuous testing, continuous improvement and to help teams adjust to the positive change that DevOps has brought about.
Outside of work he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, doing sport of any kind and drinking beer. There’s an undisclosed order of priority to these, which shall remain undisclosed.
