At the Salt Lake Agile Roundtable yesterday, I brought up the topic of Self-Awareness. This was inspired from a catch-phrase that Alistair Cockburn had been talking about (as have the regulars at the Roundtable). You can read where this catch-phrase comes from here. (Note, there is a bit of an inside joke--which I don't entirely get because I wasn't there from the beginning--of how this catch-phrase is rapidly transforming into industry lore, and I inadvertently helped this joke along by referring to this catch-phrase as if everyone present at the meeting had already known about it).
I had most recently had a discussion with Alistair while he was visiting Overstock.com (where I work) to train us on Agile, Crystal, and Scrum. We were talking at lunch about Crystal when he brought this catch-phrase up. I had heard it repeated at the Roundtable before and thought it was an interesting quote, but really didn't understand enough about Crystal to understand what was meant by "Crystal is about self-awareness." As Alistair was describing what you might find that is different on a team that practices Crystal, he gave a hypothetical story about how a team is aware of everyone's mood, and even aware of the mood of people outside the team who may be crucial to the project's success. I interrupted him saying "wait, isn't that awareness of other people, not self-awareness". I don't recall his exact response, but I believe it was somewhere along the lines of "Exactly." This was an immediate, and powerful "Aha" moment for me, and it conjured up memories as when I've read various texts from the Dalai Lama on Compassion, and other texts on eastern mysticism and in this instance I just began getting this very strong connection between these texts and software development.
I told this same story at the Roundtable, and I could literally feel that some members of the Roundtable had felt this same type of "Aha" moment before (we have them all of the time at the Roundtable), but I think everyone got a rise out of the fact that they could literally visualize Alistair making such a simple remark, and how it would lead to such a powerful "Aha" moment.
So the "real" topic here was some of the exploration that I wanted to do with "Self-Awareness". Everything up to this point was merely context to get the group onto the same plane as me. So I had spent the last day or so thinking about some simple questions about "Self-Awareness". The type of questions that I already had some notion of an answer, but I thought it would be great for exploring other people's ideas at a forum such as the Roundtable.
My first question that I wanted to explore was whether or not there were mechanical approaches to getting this type of awareness from the group (say like McCarthy's check in protocol), or if it was a matter of tuning your methodology to have the properties found on Crystal teams.
Now pause for a second. If you take the fluff out of my question, the answer seems really obvious. It's basically, "How do you find out about other people's feelings?" You'd think that there were a million simple answers (there are) but you have to remember that we are dealing with technical people doing technical stuff, and things like emotion and awareness suddenly seem like foreign matter.
So the answers that the members of the Roundtable started out as straightforward as you might expect once you distill the question, but are received as revelation given the way that we have trained ourselves to remove emotion from our craft. Some suggested approaches from the group included simply asking the team members how they felt, or gathering various hints in the types of things your peers are saying or not saying (in their body language). Someone else suggested that you really needed to have good soft skills to be able to extract these this type of data. Other suggestions were to use the "Fist-to-Five consensus" to see where people's emotions are at on a particular decision. Also suggested was a ternary alternative using: thumbs up, thumbs to the side, or thumbs down.
The more interesting question that I had was basically, what advantage (or value) does having Self-Awareness give you while working on software projects. Jonathan House had a perfect answer in saying that Self-Awareness is your early warning system (my #1 Aha for the day). He told a story that I won't repeat because I'll probably mess it up completely. This was again a very natural answer, but I find it humorous that we sometimes have to remind ourselves of these situations where our technical expertise, and thirst for empirical data, sometimes prevent us from having plain common sense. I think if you apply this to Scrum, you can see how this empowers the team to remove quite a few impediments on their own, which certainly is going to lead to some productivity gains.
I've continued to think about this some more, and I do think that the property of Crystal "Personal Safety (the freedom to speak out without fear of reprisal)" certainly makes it easier to get higher fidelity meter readings on the team's morale, but the more subtle techniques (body language, reading between the lines) are also useful as the team works on gaining personal safety. In fact, I'd wager that it can be helpful to try to validate or question these subtle hints every once in a while to see how accurate you are (and especially in the case where the weather report isn't looking too great). This in turn points to the power of co-locating your team so that you can pick up these signals more quickly.
In conclusion, I had a lot of fun with this topic, and the members of the Roundtable were able to come up with some very profound answers which also led to a lot of "Ahas" at the end of the Roundtable.
