I was reading a blog post by Ester Derby, and the third myth is really interesting.
Myth #3: If the team isn’t struggling or working long hours they aren’t working hard. Teams that are working well together make the work look easy. They work at a purposeful, yet relaxed pace. They even look like they are having fun.
We hold seminars every month (you are welcome too!), and a few months back, we did a Lean simulation game. It gave people a chance to experience first-hand the benefits of small batches and pull. People got to try pull with small batches (Right Way), and push with big batches (Wrong Way). What I found extremely interesting is that when people were doing the Wrong Way, everyone was working at a hectic pace. They showed signs of stress and it was clear to us outside that they were working a lot harder than when they it the Right Way. Yet they produced a lot less. When doing the Lean way, people seemed almost bored, and had time to observe what was happening in other stations.
The hard part about the myths that Ester talks about is that they are not really myths - they are not stories passed on from manager to manager. Instead, they represent what our guts tell us. That makes them much harder to ignore. Most of the time, our gut feeling helps us make the right decisions - we are used to listening to our instincts, and rightly so. It’s just that the caveman survival instincts do not always apply to 21st century software development…