Team Habits for Reliable Results

Last week, the Humanizing Work Meetup session was about “Habits &
Strategies of Successful Agile Teams.” We discussed how habits work at the
organization, team, and individual level. We looked at how you can build
strategies out of multiple habits that reinforce each other to create a larger
outcome. And we had interesting deep dives into topics like estimating and
metrics on Agile teams. It was lively and interactive.

Habits
Habits have three parts:

1. A cue or trigger
2. A behavior or routine that happens in response to the trigger
3. A reward that reinforces the association between the trigger and
behavior

If you want to adopt a new habit, it’s important to identify a natural trigger for
it that already happens as well as a good reward to make the habit sticky.
Let’s look at an example…

Suppose your team wants to adopt slicing big work items into small
increments of value (e.g., user stories). Perhaps you’ve downloaded our story
splitting flowchart and even done a little practice with the story splitting
patterns. But it hasn’t yet become a habit for your team.

The first move is to identify a trigger for the new habit. What’s the thing that
already happens in the life of your team that would come right before the
behavior of pulling out the story splitting poster and having a conversation
about splitting a work item?

Maybe it’s an estimate of a certain size. Perhaps it’s just a sense that a
conversation about the size or contents of the item is taking too long. Agree
on the trigger and what you’re going to do the next time it happens.

Next, look at the reward side of the habit loop. In this case, it’s probably a
feeling of confidence and ease around refinement, planning, and execution.

As you get started with a new habit, it won’t be automatic. When the trigger
occurs, you’ll have to choose to do the behavior. And then after doing the
behavior, you may need to deliberately take note of the reward. But after
several repetitions, it’ll become a choice you make every time without even
realizing you’ve made a choice.

What’s a habit you’d like to establish on your team?

Join the Conversation

To make it easy for people to engage freely in the live discussion, we’ve
decided not to record these sessions. So, we can’t point you to a recording of
this one. But you can join the conversation at a future meetup. Sign up here.

Last updated January 23, 2024