Radicalize your Sprints: Liberating Structures for Engineering Teams
Don’t let conventional microstructures stifle the smart, awesome people on your team and their ability to innovate.
Make sure to vote for Stephen‘s Liberating Structures presentation at SXSW 2020! Follow the link below to SXSW’s PanelPicker to vote for his submission, “Liberating Structures for Engineering Teams.”
Working alongside the talented design and UX teams at Handsome has exposed me to so many of the ‘magic’ elements that go into how we build products.
In my previous engineering roles as an individual contributor, I was always handed mockups and specifications. However, seeing and participating in the processes and frameworks that lead up to that point proved to be fascinating once I started at Handsome, and I think involving more engineers in those steps is a win for both products and the teams (check out this article from Alex Zub, Technology Partner here at Handsome if you’re interested in reading more).
One particular item that deeply resonated with me is the concept of Liberating Structures. If you’ve never encountered this concept before, let’s start with the premise of microstructures:
Microstructures are the frameworks that we use to interact with one another in group settings. The majority of all interactions we have in our day-to-day work fit into the following microstructures: presentations, open discussions, managed discussions, status reports, and brainstorming sessions.
It’s pretty straightforward to map these microstructures to the activities and rituals that surround product development. Standups are a status report, sprint demos are presentations, backlog grooming is a managed (or sometimes open) discussion.
If you’ve ever felt, during one of these activities, that there were unmet opportunities for everyone on the team to be engaged and project outcomes were affected as a result, you’re in the right place. The reason you and so many other teams experience this is not because the members of your team aren’t smart, awesome people with great ideas. Rather, it’s because conventional microstructures are stifling your team’s ability to innovate!
How?
- Presentations and status reports give all control to the speaker and severely constrain the ability for other team members to engage.
- Brainstorms engage a few, usually outspoken, people without constraints on content or ideas.
- Open discussions lack any controls for content or participation, while managed discussions give one person control over both of those elements.
This brings us to the magic of Liberating Structures — a growing collection of 33+ alternative microstructures that will unlock your development teams’ full potential to innovate. Liberating Structures, by design, accommodate groups of any size and configuration, support fully engaging all participants, and efficiently surface the most important insights that your team members have.
The authors behind Liberating Structures, Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, identify five elements that make up the design of any microstructure. We use these five elements as the ‘Minimum Specifications’ or guidelines for how to approach any Liberating Structure. They are:
- A structuring invitation (how participants are brought into the environment)
- How space is arranged and what materials needed (seating, whiteboards, post-its, etc.)
- How participation is distributed (time and opportunities to contribute)
- How groups are configured (one large group, many groups of 2–4 people, individual)
- A sequence of events and time allocation (step-by-step, who does what, do we restructure groups, for how long)
These five elements will be used to describe specific structures that your team can use in different scenarios. One of my favorite aspects of LS is that it’s free, open-source, and requires no certification. Anyone, on any team, in any role can learn about and start using these today. If you want to learn more about Liberating Structures in general, the introduction on the LS website is a good place to start.
Each of the following scenarios are situations many teams, particularly engineering ones, encounter on a regular basis. I’ll link to and describe a few structures and how they might be used in each of these. Give them a try with your team, experiment, take notes, and watch how powerfully LS can transform a group!
Scenario: Project Kickoff
Kickoff is a huge milestone for teams. You’ve secured the resources to start work in earnest, and it’s time to work together to understand the problems you’re solving as well as the people you’re solving with. These structures help get groups to the root of those understandings:
- What I Need from You: Team members are grouped in functional ‘clusters’ and practice asking for specific needs from others. This is a great activity for breaking down silos and helping groups realize how they can be helpful and effective.
- Wicked Questions: Confront and engage with paradox! This one is a great fit for projects that feel ‘messy’ from the start. By thinking critically about failure in the beginning, avoid the trap of reactive effort down the road.
- Purpose-To-Practice: This is a complex structure that can combine a string of many simpler ones. It starts with the identification of a shared purpose, and moves towards defining the complementary elements of principles, participants, structure, and practices.
Scenario: Sprint Planning
Whatever cadence your sprints are on, the moment where you pick and commit to work can make or break your velocity. These structures help groups expose and share understanding on complexity:
- Min Specs: Helpful for getting from a ‘sprint goal’ to achievable action items. ‘Min Specs’ lets a team break down the ‘must dos’ and ‘must not dos’ for a project (or in this case, a sprint) to succeed.
- Wise Crowds: If you’re estimating items in a backlog, there are a lot of tools and frameworks to drive divergent thinking and discussion around complexity. ‘Wise Crowds’ is an especially good fit for estimating ‘extra large’ tasks, giving space for deep conversation led by experts.
Scenario: Backlog Grooming
Backlog grooming might look like more immediate prioritization or triage of tasks, or seek to organize and add depth to a greater project roadmap. These structures are great for understanding and sorting priority:
- Agreement-Certainty Matrix: Collectively reach understanding of where your backlog items sit on a spectrum of simple-complicated-complex-chaotic. This can help teams understand what their ‘most achievable’ goals might be, and which ones need a more careful long-term approach.
- 15% Solutions: When looking at big challenges, ‘15% solutions’ helps identify immediate steps to make progress and begin the course change a challenge can require. This can also be a fantastic structure to use in retrospectives when a needed change is identified.
Scenario: Sprint Retrospective
Retrospectives are an important opportunity for teams to both regularly celebrate success and mitigate risks. These structures help groups identify problems and changes needed to solve them:
- Impromptu Networking: Team members form repeated pairs to discuss a challenge. In the context of a retrospective, this could be ‘why did we succeed and why did we fail this week?’ This is a great ‘warm-up’ activity that gets the group engaging with one another.
- What, So What, Now What?: Reflect on progress, come to a consensus on adjustments, and understand different perspectives in the group. This starts with grounded, salient facts, and moves to highlight both individual and collective action.
This is far from an exhaustive perspective on LS, and only reflects some of the things I’ve found most personally helpful. I hope you and your team can take some value from these concepts!
If you’d like to talk more, I’d love to hear from you.
