Awesome Team Learning
Summary
Our best leaders in technology role model and champion this willingness to experiment rapidly, learn, and even make friends with failure and risk by fighting for safe workplaces. And I’m tempted to address each of the variations in objections that I commonly hear when I propose this notion that any improvement in our team process must be predicated on nobody needing to become a better person for it to work. Instead of addressing objections to it, I simply want to double down and underscore the proposition: by making this a premise, you are protectively locked into a systems-eye-view of the team and reap the enormous insights gained from dwelling at that altitude. Obviously anything approaching truly dangerous behavior such as criminality, harassment, racism, sexism, and the like are appropriate for law enforcement or HR to resolve, not team members. But you’ll notice right away that, on technology teams, the most effective information radiators often have index cards tacked up with pins or magnets, kanban boards often have taped lanes delineating the different stages of work.