Years ago I played rugby. We had a great coach who was into mental training. So he had us watch lots of rugby games, and to try and imagine it was us on the television. Before a game, he encouraged us to spend time seeing ourself get to the ball first, making that tackle, having the energy the keep running, and so on. When the actual match came, I sometimes felt like I already played the match hundreds of times. It really helped me become a better player, and the team as well. We would watch the interaction of key players, and players who had lots of interaction would talk to each other over the game and we would figured out how to play together.
This mental preparation gave us a common vision. We never played as well as we imagined that we would, but I think that it made us into better rugby players.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that this is something that I would like to use on the teams I work on. Some teams that I’ve worked with seem to accept the bade state of things merely because they fail to envision something better. The team doesn’t have a shared vision of how they could work together, and so they don’t work towards a better way of collaborating.I think that the most important part of creating and maintaining a team vision on how things could be is regular retrospectives. Taking the time to reflect on how things are working, and talking about what could change is the key to build a common understanding. Not having this team vision is one of the biggest hurdles when I try to introduce new practices to a team that is set on their ways.
I’m curious to find out if you’ve worked actively on creating a team vision, and if you did, what steps did you take.
The company wich I work for (Connecta AB of sweden) puts all its emplyees through a 4 day program of combined Leadership and Team vision training, so far 500+ has gone through it and consumed over 22000 hours. The program is a simplified version of the Swedish UGL program wich was first developed for the Swedish National Defense Academy in 1981 and is based on “Experiential Learning” (learning by doing).
I think it is super and it certainly helps building a common vision and also helps retain employees and build strong networks within the company
More information is found here about UGL:
http://www.gallofsta.se/utbildning.asp?eduid=54&utid=4&topid=2&mainid=5&subid=0&secid=0
You may email me if you want to know more on this.
Left by Örjan on June 28th, 2007
From working in a semai-agile environment I found out that from shared code, pair programming, stand-ups and iteration meetings emerges maybe not ‘tema vision’ but ‘team concensus’ – not that everyone agrees, but that everyone agrees on certain important key architectural points; that is, everybody’s bumped into that architectural flaw or seen the need for a certain refactoring and/or feature, they’ve discussed it first in pairs, and after some time, when it emerges on a meeting, everyone’s strangely in agreement over the problem and what needs to be done.
Left by Stefan Andersson on June 29th, 2007
i’m all in favour of this kind of thinking, but most developers i’ve met are quite self-concious and so this kind of thing makes them feel uncomfortable – meaning that they’re likely to write the conversation off as “management mumbo-jumbo” or suchlike.
Left by JonR on July 17th, 2007
The program is a simplified version of the Swedish UGL program wich was first developed for the Swedish National Defense Academy in 1981 and is based on “Experiential Learning” (learning by doing).
Left by Stefan S. on September 5th, 2007
The program is a simplified version of the Swedish UGL program wich was first developed for the Swedish National Defense Academy in 1981 and is based on “Experiential Learning”.
Left by Stefan S. on September 5th, 2007