Lesson 10: Take the time to make sure everyone understands before starting

Background

Quite a few years ago, I was a consultant helping a client with a SQL Server upgrade and HA/DR implementation (that’s High Availability / Disaster Recovery). The client had already chosen to leverage SQL Server Always On (which was relatively new at the time) along with virtual machines to replicate the data to redundant servers.

Outcomes

My job was to help guide the implementation, and one of the client’s staff members was going to be building out the virtual machines we needed for the hosting. Every time I checked back with the employee, the work wasn’t done. Days passed, and the VM work stayed in an incomplete status which means we couldn’t move forward with the SQL Server work.

Mistakes

I fell for the ISWAYU blunder: I Said Words And You Understood. ISWAYU is the mistaken belief that just because we said something (or wrote it down) that it was necessarily understood by others. Communication is not about spouting information or opinions at others (that’s notification). Communication is about creating shared meaning between two or more people. I knew what we needed to do, but I failed to ensure that we had shared meaning, and that was on me.

Lessons

It’s so critical to spend a little extra time during planning conversations to really dive into each person’s part in the overall plan to make sure we all truly understand everything together, not individually. Often, we can fall for the trap of asking questions which don’t test our collective understanding, such as “does that make sense?” Instead, we should try to get people to explain things in their own words to verify if we are all truly on the same page.

Agile Reinforcement

The Agile Manifesto has a principle that is important in this lesson: “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” There is a key word in this principle that is often misinterpreted, and that is emerge. I’ve met so many people that think that emerge in this context means that somehow, the architectures, requirements, and design magically appear out of nowhere.

Lyssa Adkins in her book Coaching Agile Teams offers a definition of emergence from Jurgen Appelo: “When a property of a system cannot be traced back to any of the individual parts in the system, it is called an emergent property.” In this context, emergent means that the architectures, requirements, and designs cannot be traced back to individual team members. Instead, the architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from the collaborative discussions that occur among the team members. This is the ideal for which we’re looking in self-organizing teams!

SAFe Reinforcement

From the Scaled Agile Framework, we can apply to this lesson the principle “apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning.” SAFe recognizes that organizations don’t always have everyone needed to solve a problem on the same team because companies and problems are often complex. So, SAFe encourages us to ensure that our planning across teams or departments is occurring on a cadence. This cadence gives those involved a virtual metronome that reminds us to check if we are still A) on the same page with each other and B) making the progress we expected to be making.

I hope my struggles and failures can help teach you this important lesson: Take the time to make sure everyone understands before starting.