Openness is about more than Transparency
Living the Scrum Values — Episode 1
One of the five values articulated in the Scrum Guide is Openness. When I first started researching this post, I found many posts that referred to Openness almost as something synonymous with Transparency. I don’t think that is the case, and I’d like to use this post to explain why I think the two ideas are mutually supportive, but ultimately different.
Transparency is about seeing things clearly, the first step towards inspecting and adapting, or changing things for the better. Openness supports transparency, but is more about the interactions between individuals. In other words, openness is more about how people interact.
The objective of this post is to describe some ways to help your team live the value of openness. I’d be delighted to hear your feedback on the topic.
Transparency is about Artifacts
“Scrum relies on transparency. Decisions to optimize value and control risk are made based on the perceived state of the artifacts.” — SG
We’re talking about Artifact Transparency here. It’s even a heading all on its own in the Scrum Guide. To remind, the 3 artifacts in Scrum are the Sprint Backlog, the Product Backlog and the Increment. Sjoerd Nijland has covered the topics of artifacts in this parish already, so I’m not going to :)
Transparency is a pillar of Empirical Process Control Theory, and it is an essential component of Scrum. The wonderful problem with transparency is that it helps us to see problems more clearly. The downside is that it might reveal pretty calamitous issues inside your team!
After transparency happens, the availability of options for next steps and the levels of progress that you can make with these will depend greatly on the openness with which your team can discuss issues together.
“A Scrum Master can detect incomplete transparency by inspecting the artifacts, sensing patterns, listening closely to what is being said, and detecting differences between expected and real results.” — SG
This paragraph in the guide is a little amusing to me. At first, the idea of ‘sensing patterns’ sounds musical or even quasi-mystical. Then, the Scrum Master sounds a little like a detective or a fault-finder, listening closely to the team, picking apart where reality differs from expectations. “Aha!”, the SM might say, “incorrect!”. It doesn’t really paint a pleasant picture of the Scrum Master’s interaction in a discussion…
“The Scrum Team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.” — SG
For me, this is a much clearer statement of intent. If a team agrees to be open, then there will be a more collaborative approach to inspection of the work and challenges in performing it. Collaboration means we might need to work on better interactions between individuals, and this sentence helps me better understand how the Scrum Master’s role fits into that.
The Scrum at Scale Guide, written by Jeff Sutherland, adds this line about openness which I believes helps us to distinguish it from transparency:
“Openness supports transparency into all of the work and processes, without which there is no ability to inspect them honestly and attempt to adapt them for the better.” — Scrum@Scale Guide
In my own experience, I have found that transparency can be a passive, external process. By contrast, openness is a more active, human process. Transparency alone does not mean a team will be capable of discussing issues and learning together. It requires something more.
Openness is about Individuals and Interactions
The agile manifesto places a very high value on individuals and interactions. Lets look at both parts of that. In order to really see our colleagues as individuals, we need to have working relationships with them that are more than simple role-based exchanges of services.
Schein and Schein describe the need for a teaming process called personisation (note: this is not a typo, it is different from personalisation) They believe leaders in particular can help create an environment where everybody feels safe reporting quality issues, asking questions, or more importantly, resolving misunderstandings. Without a basic relationship between team members, these processes cannot function well. The Scheins’ idea of personisation is closely related to openness.
Openness is “an active sharing, revealing, listening, understanding and responding process.” (Source: Schein & Schein, Humble Leadership)
Google recently researched how to create teams that form and perform quickly and effectively. They found that a critical factor in the success and ongoing performance of teams was something called ‘psychological safety’.
They recognised that psychological safety is a group process or culture that Harvard Business and Leadership Professor Amy C. Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ or ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ (Source: NY Times, Chales Duhigg)
Safety First
We are social animals, and we all like to feel like we belong. Dan Pink says motivation is about autonomy, mastery and purpose, but it starts with something more basic than that. As far back as 1943, Abraham Maslow identified that basic human needs such as safety should be addressed and managed before tackling higher order needs such as esteem, or the holy grail of self-actualisation.
Maslow argued that, if basic human needs such as safety were not yet satisfied, it would be futile to attempt to address the higher order needs.
This makes sense when you think about it in terms of threat, or conflict. When our safety is threatened, the limbic system in our brain engages to provide unconscious, fight-or-flight kinds of coping mechanisms, such as production of adrenaline, and quickening of the pulse. If we feel unsafe, then we will be in a more emotional state, and it will be difficult to engage cognition. As Manchester Metropolitan University Professor Damian Hughes puts it:
“When we come under pressure, our emotional brain engages in a contest with the rational part. The emotional brain is five times stronger and unless it is controlled, it takes over. The consequence of this is clear: We become erratic and unpredictable, forgetting the best laid plans.” (Source: Damian Hughes, The Independent)
Hughes tells the story of Manny Steward, a boxing coach from Detroit who looked after more than 40 world champions, without a day’s university education. When Hughes asked Steward how he did it, Steward was able to sum up his approach in three words.
Contain, then explain.
In other words, he recognised that it is important to address people’s emotional side first. Then, only when emotions are calmed, will they be more prepared to work.
Ok. Armed with this wisdom, how can we do this?
Harness the power of your team’s amygdala
The amygdala is a section of the brain thought to be responsible for the survival instinct, fear and aggression. Research undertaken by Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University, indicates that the amygdala isn’t just responsible for this kind of thing alone. It turns out that it “also plays a vital role in building social connections. […] when you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds.” (Source: Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code)
This would appear to reinforce Manny Steward’s approach to coaching, and in fact, we could potentially add two words to his approach.
Contain the amygdala, then explain.
Once the amygdala is no longer threatened, it gets to work bonding us with our surroundings. Coyle also refers to the idea of how the activities of high-performing teams tend to be more liberally seasoned with something called ‘belongingness cues’. These are social in nature, and people displaying these cues show 3 basic qualities:
- Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring
- Individualisation: They treat the person as unique and valued
- Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue.”
(Source: Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code)
These cues calm our amygdala, and therefore help us to contain it. If we feel treated like a whole person, if we are shown appropriate attention, and if we feel like there is a potential for us to continue with this relationship, then we’ll tend to feel a higher sense of belonging. In this situation, the amygdala is not just contained, it is working for us.
One Way to Harness the Amygdala — Core Protocols
Richard Kasperowski’s Core Protocols could be described as a set of ways to ensure that a team’s collective amygdala works on behalf of the team, rather than against it.
One such protocol, the check-in, can be used at the start of any group activity, and is designed to recognise the emotional state of all the participants before we begin to work on the agenda at hand.
“who can get their best work done when the room is full of everybody else’s elephants?” (Source, Core Protocols, Richard Kasperowski)
The check-in is a simple, yet powerful way to attempt to provide a belongingness cue for every team member at the start of a meeting. The rules are quite straight forward. Every participant enters the meeting by stating their name, then a statement of how they are feeling, followed by the statement “I’m in.” Other participants then say “Welcome!”
The statement of feeling can use a choice of up to four possible emotional states: glad, sad, bad or afraid. It probably makes more sense to show you how a typical check-in statement is structured:
“I’m Paddy, I’m glad that we’re talking about openness, because I feel it’s an important value and one that will help us really perform better if we improve at it. I’m afraid that we won’t take this ‘mushy stuff’ seriously as a group, but I’m glad to give it a try… I’m in”
I recently tried one of the core protocols as an experiment in a workshop, and it might have been coincidental, but the five minute exercise at the beginning of the workshop was followed by a very productive, harmonious activity. The best way to describe the atmosphere in the room might be… oddly productive. I’m very keen to continue experimenting with these core protocols, as I feel they generate the kind of openness and safe environment in which teams can thrive.
To close, openness is not the same thing as transparency, but it supports it, and is a solid support for empiricism and the behaviours that drive it. I believe that teams will be better able to inspect and adapt if they can be more comfortable being open with each other.
In order to be more open, teams can personise their relationships, and see each other more as whole people, rather than just roles. Like Manny Steward, we need to think about ways contain the fight-or-flight responses in a learning environment.
If we can manage to do that, then the team may be more confident to open up, raise issues, and take risks for each other. Core protocols are designed for this purpose and they could be one interesting experiment to help your team live the Scrum Value of Openness. Would your team be open to that idea?
