In this post, I intend to share various ways I have used Heart of Agile with the teams I work with as a coach.
First, a bit of background :)
Heart of Agile is a radical simplification of all things agile/Agile in four words — Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, and Improve.
It’s simple, yet very powerful!
These four words cover the complexities of any modern development environment. Heart Of Agile (HoA) is not based on a framework or a methodology (we already have enough, don’t we?), rather it focuses on the Agile Mindset. People from any area of the business, irrespective of their knowledge and/or experience with a specific framework, can relate to these words.
It would not be justified if I don’t mention Alistair Cockburn’s thought process which led to the name Heart of Agile!
Let’s start with Shu-Ha-Ri:
Shu-Ha-Ri is a Japanese martial art concept which defines the various stages of learning. For any learning, one goes through these three stages
Shu - Obey/Follow,
Ha - Digress, and
Ri -Separate.
This can be applied to any discipline and is a popular concept in the Agile world as well.
You can read more about it in the context of Agile on Martin Fowler’s blog here.
Now, where does your learning journey take you after these three stages of Shu-Ha-Ri? Well, the answer is ‘Mastering the Basics’ or focussing on the very essence of something. And enters another Japanese word ‘Kokoro’ which refers to the embodiment of mind, body, soul, and spirit of something altogether. For this very reason, Heart of Agile is an apt name for the approach as the four words encapsulate the true spirit of agile!
If this is your first time reading about Heart of Agile, I would recommend having a quick look at their website here. The HoA Technical Report is another great read!
Before we look at some practical ways to use it, let’s look at the newest additions to the Heart Of Agile in the below image:
Humanity in the heart refers to, caring about people — in the team, users, customers, and Openness & Dialog are paramount to an impactful conversation. More details around these changes will be available on the official HoA website soon! (Needless to say, I was super excited to see these changes before they are even up on the website!)
And now, without any further ado, here are some ideas to apply the Heart Of Agile Model:
(1) Heart of Agile to assess a team
Heart of Agile is a very good start when it comes to observing and assessing a team as a Coach. When I start working with a team, all I have to ask myself some questions based on the four focus areas like:
- Collaborate — How does this team collaborate?
- Deliver — How would I rate what they are delivering? Is it of value to the user? Is it on-time? Are the processes sustainable? Is it viable and feasible?
- Reflect — Does this team pause to reflect? What do they do to reflect on their processes? At what levels do and can they reflect? How do they take the learnings from reflection forward?
- Improve — What does the team do to make things better? Do they challenge the status quo? Do they seek, give, and receive feedback?
I have also tried to retrofit common team challenges and observed that pretty much all of them fall under one of these imperatives. Pretty interesting, aye! So, Heart Of Agile promises to be a solid guideline for assessing criteria!
Moreover, I have applied it to a conventional software delivery team, a non-software delivery team, or even a group of people/leaders working towards a common goal! And it always serves the purpose!
(2) Heart of Agile inspired Team Health Check / Self Assessment
Spotify popularised the Team Health Checks to a great extent. Heart Of Agile can be used as a simpler alternative! The four Heart Of Agile imperatives can be used to trigger great conversations for a team and look for areas of improvement.
(3) Spice up the next Retrospective with Heart of Agile
Every coach encounters a situation where they feel they have used every possible retro format available out there! We have all been there, lol!
If you are bored with the standard ‘What worked well?’, ‘What dint work well?’ format, try using questions inspired by HoA! You can simply use the four words as topics for the retro or craft some questions around each! After all, a good coach knows which questions to ask!!
If you want to gently nudge a team to think in a specific direction, HoA provides a good way to do so!
It works great not only for team retros but also for Project Retros as well as other broader sessions like quarterly reflections!
(4) Ways of Working Workshop based on Heart of Agile
This workshop that I facilitated recently inspired me to finally write this post!
Focussed questions around each of the four words: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect & Improve work really well to spark conversations and help a team co-create their Ways of Working. Some teams refer to it as Working Agreements.
It’s important to call out here that it was a non-software delivery team and I worked closely with the Team Lead to tailor the questions to suit their context.
Here are some questions that we used:
Collaborate
(a) The Nature of Collaboration
- What does it mean — generally and in the context of your team,
- Why is it essential for your team,
- How do you rate (1: Very Little, 5: It is awesome) it for your team,
(b) What, according to you, can help improve your collaboration rating for this team? For e.g. More listening? Breaking down silos? Etc. (Add examples if the attendees need to be prompted or remove if not required)
(c)Taking it to the next level — Think about how can everyone in the team collaborate to
- Lift Others — help others upskill, recognition
- Get Results (this ties in to Deliver quadrant as well)
- Increase safety
- Add Energy — energy that you bring to the team
(d) What is your motivation for collaboration — intrinsic? extrinsic?
Note: ‘Taking it to the Next Level’ questions are inspired by Alistair Cockburn’s presentation here
Deliver
(a) What does ‘deliver/delivery’ means in the context of this team?
(b) What are your thoughts on delivery (the work that you do) across projects and teams?
(c)What works well in other similar teams that you would like to bring to this team?
(d) How can the team measure delivery? And why?
(e) What can the team do to learn from delivery — how can the teammates educate and empower each other about our work?
(f) How can teammates hold each other accountable?
(g) How can the team share their progress?
(h) How can the team make sharing and solving problems more effective?
Reflect
(a) What should the team reflect on and how could the team benefit from this more often?
(b) How often and when should the team reflect on their work? How can that be done?
(c)How can you use reflection to catalyze change? In yourself and in your team?
(d) How do the team and individuals seek, receive, and give feedback?
Improve
(a) What are the ways the team can work together to challenge the status quo and continuously improve?
(b) What’s one small thing that you could improve for yourself which will add value to this team?
(c)What’s one thing that can be done to make this team more effective?
(d) Do we feel safe to fail? Do we feel safe to take risks?
Feel free to tweak the language and add/remove questions to suit a particular team’s needs. You might need to do it every time you use this approach!
If you look at the below expansion of the HoA, it will guide you to draft more questions:
If you can think of any more questions or ideas, please add them in the comments!
A workshop similar to this can be very beneficial for a team in the ‘Forming’ stage as well!
To conclude, here is my ‘radically simplified’ reason for why you should give it a try and why does it work:
The beauty of using HoA as a foundation for any of the above ideas or beyond is that:
Every team needs to Collaborate,
Every team Delivers some outcome,
Every team needs to Reflect, and
Every team should make efforts to Improve
Irrespective of the Industry, Business Area, and the Framework/Methodology that they use!
If you have used it with your teams, I would love to hear about your experience! If you can think of any other ways to use Heart Of Agile, please do share in the comments!
And I’ll leave you with this powerful quote from Leonardo Da Vinci:
