Shared understanding on an agile team is paramount. A team must have a highly communicative (ideally face-to-face) environment in order to engender collaboration and high performance. I have served as a scrum master and coach for many teams, and worked to cultivate this shared understanding—between the team and PO, team the customer, or even among and between team members. My experiences in the Army fostered an elevated importance of shared understanding. The Army defines several principles of mission command, and two among them are to create shared understanding and to build cohesive teams through mutual trust (US Army, ADRP 6-0). I have years of experience creating this level of team shared understanding to generate high performance.

A few techniques to help teams improve involve careful questioning while coaching. Questions like: “Can you clarify that?”, “Does this make sense to everyone?,” or “How does everyone feel about that?” are only a few examples. It is also important to create a safe space for team interaction. Team members develop and nurture relationships with each other, and have a high level of trust. I try to get people to know one another, sit by each other, and share experiences and information every day. Another technique that I find helpful is to measure and discuss team happiness or motivation. There are several tools for this, but a simple survey usually works well. As Stephen Denning writes, the goal is to help teams find meaning at work and meaning in work.

I also think it helps to take a systems thinking approach to team dynamics. After all, a group of people working together is a system—with input, output and a feedback cycle. The goal is to exchange individual knowing for group knowing and to create new knowledge from collective contributions. My role is to help teams rely on the collective intelligence of the system, as I stated before.

Until the next iteration . . .

Jason