How to increase your team resilience?

What weakens your development team?

Centralized architecture and knowledge decisions, together with the communication with the client could be your weaknesses, decreasing your team resilience given the complexity of unpredictable events that impact your flow of value delivery, innovation at your organization and finally the team’s motivation.

I’m going to tell you about the pillars which can help us increase our resilience on the software development area at Taller, with a lean and 100% remote team. Being one of those pillars: Unified Flow, ways of sharing knowledge, Kaizen cadences, pair programing, core time, collaborative hiring process and distributed leadership.

Stories of when resilience was lacking

• “We need the architect!! He is the only one who can help us decide what to do!”
• “Oh! he is on vacation and he is the only one who knows how this thing works, I think we should wait for him to return to work.”
• “She was relocated to another project, and she’ll be back in two weeks.”
• Client: “What’s going on? Quality has been decreasing for months”
• Our lead time increased a lot!! what’s happening??!!
  Oh! I see, we just hired two more people for the team.
• “She is going to leave the company!!!! and she is the only one who has worked on that project. Besides, nobody even knows how to setup the local environment.”
• Developer: “Hey! I have a question about the scope, let’s go ask the PO”
  - Day one: “He can’t talk right now, he’s busy.”
  - Day two: “He is going to spend the day on meetings.”
  - Day three: “Shut! I forgot to talk to the PO today.”
  - …
  - Day six: “Hey! The PO said that task no longer needs to be done. There’s another priority now!”

In case you had a situation in which you depend on a specific person of the team who is the “only one who knows how to do”, it’s definitively a sign of weakness and probably you need to increase your team’s resilience.

What is resilience, after all?

It’s the ability to deal with problems and adapt positively to unexpected problems.

For example, a palm tree bends down when the wind blows very hard, so it adapts itself by bending in order not to break, and as the storm passes it returns to its original state.

And, why is it important?

We are in the same universe where all companies (organizations or systems) are at the mercy of complexity, where unexpected events occur without any kind of notice.

Being aware that unexpected events can occur at any time helps us to encourage the team to be prepared for adverse scenarios and this can be the difference between success and failure.

Everyone wants to innovate, but is your team prepared for that? Because innovation is where the unknown and the unexplored lives, needing high adaptability to change over time in order to survive.

Adaptability is something so important that for some it is a sign of intelligence:

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
– Stephen Hawking.

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
– Albert Einstein.

So what can we do? That’s exactly the question which will lead your team to think on ways on how to increase your resilience.

At Taller, we believe that agility is precisely the ability to change something quickly, rather than deliver something quickly. So, based on this and on XP (Extreme Programming), some pillars have emerged organically, which led us to change our status quo and increase our resilience.

Pillars that have increased our resilience

Self-organization and decentralized decisions.

Your team must have the freedom to change course or react quickly to adapt to unexpected circumstances.

Trustworthiness and empathy.

Confidence between peers of your team encourages autonomy and empathy which reduces judgment without context in case of error. The fear of making a mistake makes the team static where the nature of what we do is complex and requires adaptability.

Constant improvement towards a shared goal.

To improve we need to change. Smaller changes tend to have less impact on productivity and can get feedback in less time. But be warned that any change has an impact.

Constant feedback and visualization of good and bad impacts.

The assertiveness of your team heavily depends on constant feedback. That can come from your own colleagues or in the form of value delivery flow metrics.

System thinking, we are together.

The operation of a system depends on the interaction between its parts. Be aware that your actions impact (for better or for worse) the rest of the organization.

Multidisciplinary and collective skills. Fewer extreme specialists.

Extreme specialization converts talented people into your team greatest weaknesses, and reduces the capacity of the team. Try to dilute the skills collectively with the goal of depending less on people and diminishing the burden on someone’s shoulders.

Encourage acts of leadership rather than positions.

Everyone can act thinking about the good of the group and that makes them leaders. Relating positions (or position) to leadership creates a climate where people become passive and apathetic when they need adaptation.

If you’re already thinking “right, but how do I apply this to my organization?”. Well, that’s exactly the right question, your team must decide and adapt by creating new practices which could be aligned to some of the pillars mentioned above.

On the next post, I’ll write about weaknesses vs. practices that we apply at Taller to increase our resilience which could inspire new practices that can apply to your context.

See you soon!

Reference: Portuguese version.