The 4 biggest discoveries about high performing teams (thread) #productmanagement #agile #management #teams #coachingsystems
1: Team performance has almost nothing to do with its leader. 60% of team success can be attributed to the design and constraints, none of which the team typically has access to. Based on Richard Hackman's work.
2: Behaviors are a function of the personality and the environment b=f(p+e). How much the personality actually matters differs who you talk to ranging from 5% to about 30%. Based on Kurt Lewin's work. And still, companies try to maximize the value they get from that 5-30 %.
3: The best teams in the world get it right ~30% of the time. Even though the Standish survey was about an internal app, @jeffpatton talks about this in so many of his talks. And honestly, think about how many startups fail, or how many of Netflix's features you actually use?!
4: The misconstruction of complicated and complex problems. Thanks to @snowded work we can now start understanding the difference and that we need to treat them differently, yet all management structures are still designed to deal with simple (and sometimes) complicated problems.
We're spending all this time on bringing in agile coaches, management consultants, trainers, etc. But none of these people, including myself, have the answers. It's just not possible to enter an organization and "Fix it" (meaning increase enps, nps, bottom line).
But many coaches and organizations spend significant amounts of money on coaches. 1 coach per team. Really? Why not look at what you'd have to change in order to not need 1 coach per team.
And we're burning people out. The first thing we need to admit to ourselves is that we have no idea what our patterns look like or even how to tackle them, then we can start exploring how we even discover how to discover.
But this is culturally really not-acceptable (not having the answers). So we're in this management crisis. Management sets constraints and sees bad outcomes as a sign of poor staffing, and good outcomes as a sign of their competence.
I'm not thinking about one specific company here, this is something I've seen across industries and companies and read about for the past 14 years. (Yes, I'm considerably new)
What frustrates me more is all this new literature that comes out that creates new meta-models and that's based on mechanistic thinking and not grounded in research. We need to be much more careful with which truths we accept.
But these 4 big discoveries. They're not really new, they're easily accessible but it's like we really don't want to accept them to be true (Or even vaguely right).
