Trust in Teams Trust at Work Integrating Mindfulness into Agile Practices.

After years of separating my daily mindfulness meditation practice from my work with Agile software development teams, I realized that integrating mindfulness practices in the course of an agile development team actually makes sense. Why? Because mindfulness practices not only support the values underlying the Agile approach, they allow practitioners to embody Agile values.

This article will explore first how Agile and mindfulness practices overlap and then highlight a few simple suggestions on how you can integrate mindfulness practices in the flow of an Agile project.

How Agile and Mindfulness Practices Overlap

If you are familiar with Agile software development practices, you are familiar with the four core values enabling high-performing teams presented in the Agile Manifesto.

Agile values:

Individuals and their interactions over processes and tools

Delivering working softwareover comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

These core values are supported by twelve Agile principles, which you can find at the following Web site:Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The overlap between Agile and mindfulness practices is concentrated in two of the core Agile values, specifically:

Individuals and their interactions; and

Responding to change

Key Agile Values and Mindfulness

1. Individuals and interactions

Jeff Sutherland, one of the main authors of the Agile Manifesto, describes the first Agile core value, as follows:

Truth Seeking and Truth Telling are essential to software development process

Requirement Gathering, Business Analysis, Specification Development, Coding and Testing are steps in a process of distilling human language into small nuggets of truth. So much so, that the objective of traceability software tools and of Formal Development Methods is to validate that every work-product created from UML design to code specifications actually meets each requirement it attempts to satisfy: thus validating the truth of the product requirements.

In this respect, truth telling and truth seeking are as close to a spiritual practice as they are to a business process.

How do mindfulness practices support Agile?

The main obstacle to truth telling, trust between team members, and commitment to project goals is fear. In order to increase safety, you need to increase trust between team members and decrease or even eliminate fear at work. (I chose not to emphasize transparency here, as it is a direct consequence of trust and truth telling.) Mindfulness practices directly support these key Agile values. Here is how:

Mindfulness meditation enhances a practitioners experience of what is rather than his or her thoughts and beliefs about what is. This in turn yields a growing understanding of how a practitioner interprets and judges their experiences. Gaining this clarity on judgment helps remove blame and improve communication. Judgments and blame both support a fear-based environment rather than one based on trust.

Through mindfulness practice, team members make themselves vulnerable. That moment of vulnerability is what contributes to building trust among team members.

The mindfulness practice is a transition from whatever activity a team member was doing before the meeting and the meeting itself. It is a tool to help team member be present in the moment and therefore be open to changes.

Mindfulness practice tunes the team together. That helps aligning the team on shared goals and that in turn helps the team engage in positive conflict that foster the productive behaviors identified by Jeff Sutherland in Agile Principles and Values, such as:

Innovation that occurs with the free interchange of conflicting ideas.

Resolution of conflicting agendas occurs when teams align around common goals.

Commitment to work together happens only when people agree on common goals

Thus, mindfulness practices support the Scrum Master whose role in this paradigm is to move the project along by keeping the team and the project integrity while maintaining a collaborative and trusting atmosphere.

2. Responding to Change

On Responding to Change, Jeff Sutherland says,

Responding to change implies the ability to let go of attachment to how you want things to be and live in the moment, which, for software developers who spend their life in their mind, can be quite challenging. Focus and creativity are also essential qualities software developers need to cultivate. Programming is magical: something is created out of nothing. In this way, programming is really an art form, similar in many ways to creative writing or music composition. Programming simultaneously requires a strong analytical mind, a high level of attention to details, and creativity. As there are multiple ways to open a bottle, a software application can be designed and coded in multiple ways. It is up to the software developer to design solutions and build code that is practical and efficient, and creative power is needed to address these qualities effectively.

These essential qualities for software development -- living in the moment, letting go of attachment, focus and creativity -- are directly cultivated through regular mindfulness practices. A number of West Coast corporations have realized the value of offering mindfulness programs to their employees. The Walt Disney Company, for example, has noticed a dramatic increase in creativity after employees meditated on innovative solutions. Researchers at the Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition of Leiden University in the Netherlands found a tremendous impact of focused-attention (mindfulness) and open-monitoring meditation (observing without judging) on creativity. See this Huffington Post article for more information on how meditation improves creativity and innovation.

How can you use mindfulness practices as part of the flow of an Agile team?

The essential building blocks of mindfulness practice and their benefits are in line with Agile management values and have the potential to significantly improve team performance and project outcome. So how can you use mindfulness practices to enhance the outcome of your Agile team? I suggest that you integrate short duration mindfulness practices at the beginning of 4 out of 5 daily stand-up meetings of the typical workweek. The goal of these short practices is to get people out of their heads and get the blood moving. Start your meeting with a short exercise such as:

Find your Feet on the Floor. Find your butt on the chair. Focus on the sensations of your hands. Followed by taking 5 deep breaths.

The three-minute bodyscan: see this video for more details

A short yoga sequence such as a series of five Sun Salutations.

A brief Qi Gong exercise such as Wuji Wan Qifa (Bringing good energy inside.).

Once a week, start your Stand-up meeting or Sprint Planning meeting with a longer mindfulness exercise. For this, I would suggest a seven to ten minutes long meditation.For more details please read the Mindfulness for Dummies Cheat Sheet, in particular the paragraph entitled Trying a Short Mindfulness Meditation.

Follow the meditation with the usual three questions of a standup meeting:

1. What tasks have the team member completed since the last team meeting?

2. Has the team member encountered any obstacles?

3. What task does each team member commit to accomplishing by the next team meeting?

Once a week, I suggest you add an individual check-in of each team member -- in other words, how each person is feeling emotionally and physically. This ensures that member no major life event of any team members go unnoticed. The individual check-in can be followed by an occasion to look at any negative emotions existing between team members that would get in the way of the teams progress.

Here are some additional things to keep in mind as you do your weekly check-in:

The one speaker at a time rule ensures that each individual is heard and has a chance to speak his/her truth.

Remind the teams you work with, that trust requires accountability both ways.

Keep the team meeting on task. I have noticed that software developers love to dig and dwell into the nitty-gritty of a particularly complex design issue and totally forget that the objective of the Team Checkpoint meeting is to discuss PROCESS and not content.

None of these suggestions are expensive or complex to implement.

Conclusion

In the 12th Agile Principle, the authors of the Agile Manifesto make clear that at regular intervals the project teamreflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. This principle is an invitation for Agile practitioners to experiment and tweak the Agile approach to improve their team efficiency while staying true to the core Agile values. As outlined above, mindfulness practices are coherent and supportive of Agiles Core Values. I invite you to introduce a few short mindfulness practices in the flow of your Agile Team, and please do track before and after key metrics and report back your observations. It is a low risk and minor change to the team routine with substantial potential benefits for the team and the project.

Jacques Sapriel

PMP, MBA

I can be reached at jayma.19@gmail.com

Individuals and interactions are essential to high-performing teams. Studies of communication saturation during one project showed that when no communication problems exist, teams can perform 50 times better than the industry average. To facilitate communication, agile methodologies rely on frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles. These cycles can range from every few minutes with pair programming, to every few hours with continuous integration, to every day with a daily standup meeting, to every iteration with a review and retrospective.

Just increasing the frequency of feedback and communication, however, is not enough to eliminate communication problems. These inspect-and-adapt cycles work well only when team members exhibit several key behaviors:

respect for the worth of every person

truth in every communication

transparency of all data, actions, and decisions

trust that each person will support the team

commitment to the team and to the teams goals

For teams to achieve these types of behavior is more difficult than it might appear. Most teams avoid truth, transparency, and trust because of cultural norms or past negative experiences from conflict that was generated by honest communications. To combat these tendencies, leadership and team members must facilitate positive conflict. When teams engage in positive conflict, they not only foster more productive behavior, but also work to achieve several other benefits

Extract from Jeff Sutherland HYPERLINK "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997578.aspx" Agile Principles and Values

For teams to create products that will please customers and provide business value, teams must respond to change. Industry data shows that over 60 percent of product or project requirements change during the development of software. Even when traditional projects finish on time, on budget, with all features in the plan, customers are often unhappy because what they find is not exactly what they wanted. "Humphreys Law" says that customers never know what they want until they see working software. If customers do not see working software until the end of a project, it is too late to incorporate their feedback. Agile methodologies are based on the knowledge that, in order to succeed, they must plan to change. That is why they have established processes, such as reviews and retrospectives, that are specifically designed to shift priorities regularly based on customer feedback and business value.

Extract from Jeff Sutherland HYPERLINK "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997578.aspx" Agile Principles and Values

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/10/05/how-mindfulness-can-help-your-creativity/

PAGE

1