What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
What’s getting in your way?
Three questions commonly asked at Daily Scrum meetings imply expending effort is the purpose of work. Rarely have I encountered organizations where the following answers were acceptable:
Yesterday I read a book at work.
Today I intend to start no new work and make myself available to help others learn.
Being too busy is getting in my way and I need some slack.
The above may seem exaggerated but aren’t; each one is an example of a behavior someone engaged in that helped deliver value to the customer. Slack, learning and play enhance our ability to deliver business and customer value.
A key principle in the Agile Manifesto is that of a sustainable pace; having space in our backlogs for learning actually grows our ability to deliver while improving our job satisfaction.
Come join Adam Yuret to have a discussion about how excessive on effort (resource efficiency) impedes flow (flow efficiency) while creating mountains of failure demand (rework, defects, technical debt) and fracturing our organization into competing silos. Also learn some ideas about humanistic ways to mitigate these issues and bring flow back to our organizations.
