 Thanks for everybody for getting here and for organising this. It has been a really good collaboration across the meetup groups, the Agile Nottingham, the Agile Northeast, Agile York and New Bray Agile Group. Seemed like a great opportunity to really cross some boundaries, really. So it's great to be here talking about what I've been working on for, well, well over the last year. On the one hand, I feel a little bit guilty talking about a book on teamwork as if everything's normal in the world. But on the other hand, there's a big part of me that thinks actually great teamwork is going to be more important than ever right now and for the foreseeable future. So I'm grateful, actually, that we managed to get the book out. First of all, there was there was a lot of trouble getting it out with people not being able to get into the printing facilities and things. But we've got it there and being able to organise this. So tonight, I just want to share with you a little bit about what the book's about. An idea of sort of my thought processes behind it and how you might be able to use some of the ideas in it and a little bit about this might sound a little bit more grand than it actually is, but my sort of vision for a community aspect that I'm kind of hoping to spark as a result of this. We're going to take some questions at the end and there's going to be the Slido code is at the bottom of each of the slides that I've got here. So feel free to dip out and add a question or go to question as soon as I start sending you to sleep, just dip out and ask a question, get your attention back. So we've got about about half an hour of me, give or take and some questions. So that's that's pretty much what you're in for. I want to I want to take you back a little bit. I don't know whether you can remember and what you might refer to as the good old days when we used to be able to meet up in person if we wanted to. Well, one team I was working with a long time ago. They were in a backlog refinement meeting. Some of them were there in person. Some of them were on a video call and they were looking at some of the upcoming stories, as you'd expect, and what they might be working on and possibly planning in the next planning session. One of the people they were talking to was was a relatively new business sales lead, I think I think her title was. And for the purposes of this of this meetup, we'll call her Karen, OK? And Karen was getting pretty excited because, like I said, she was quite new and she'd she'd been brought in to to get some new clients. And she she was she was pretty close to landing a few. And these were potentially some pretty prestigious clients. So you'd think it was kind of it would be kind of exciting. But as a as a coach with this team, I was relatively new with the team. But you could sort of sense that there was a little bit of tension there. Nothing. There was no arguments or anything. But just something wasn't quite right about the atmosphere within the team. And when the session had finished, one of the development team said to the rest of the development team, Karen had gone, one of the development teams said to the others, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Now, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, they didn't actually say that. But for the purposes of political correctness, we'll say that's what they said. They had a code phrase is all you need to know. And so one team member said, you think of what I'm thinking. And then they all without nobody answered the question. Instead, what they did, they all sort of peeled off one by one and they left the building and I followed them and they all decamped to to what we used to refer to in the old world as a coffee shop and these coffee shops, they were places where you'd go and you'd meet up with people, you know, sometimes people you didn't know and you'd share a drink. And clearly this team had done this before. OK, so then they all knew they didn't go together, but they all ended up at the same place. They didn't need to say, let's go to the coffee shop. They just they just knew and they just went and whoever arrived first bought the drinks and everybody knew what each other was going to have to drink. So there was a cappuccino for Ashley and there was a soy latte for Rashmi and a black Americano for me and they get their usual table near the back. And even even the people who were joining on video call to the refinement session, they were there because someone had brought a device and they were they were on the device and so they were part of this coffee shop breakout, if you like. And there was this general air of unease amongst the whole team. And they sat down and started having their drinks and Wally, which wasn't her real name, but I'll come back to that later on. Wally starts and she's she's off on one straight away. Right, she's angry, she's frustrated. You can tell she's really emotional. She's passionate. She's standing out pointing her finger. Karen's not there, but she's she's really, you know, I knew this was going to happen and other statements. She's showing her true colors now. You know, you know, the kind of thing where doomed that kind of passionate despondency but with with lots of emotion. And then another teammate who was in the room said, hold on, Miss Purple. She called her Miss Purple. Could we get a yellow perspective, please, she said. And this meant nothing to me. But Wally, who was still quite emotional, she knew what they were, she knew what her teammate was saying. And she took it in good humor and said, OK, fine. And basically gave the floor to Lindsay, who apparently was was going to give us a yellow perspective. So then Lindsay, who was one of the people on the on the video call, said. Well, I don't know Karen very well, she said, but she's new. And she probably wants to make a good impression. She probably wants to add some value quickly. She's probably feeling under pressure. And, you know, she's I assume she's seeing all these opportunities to not just land some prestigious clients, but also if we do get these prestigious clients, then we'll have more, you know, sort of cash in the bank return and investment. We might be able to build more features. So I can imagine she's got a lot of ideas as to where this could go. She's probably really excited. And that was. An interesting alternative perspective to Karen's that, sorry, to to Wally's view of Karen, which is that she's out to screw us over. She's probably made made promises that we can't deliver, you know, without us knowing about it. And what they've done, so it turned out I was really interested in what's going. What they've done is a few weeks ago, they've done a sort of personality characteristic questionnaire and my point here is not to not to tell you that this is this is what you should go away and do with your team. OK, I'm not even going to tell you which one it is, because that's not the point. They they did this questionnaire. What would it do is they found by doing answering these questions and sharing a little bit about themselves, it came up with a colour that they were. OK, so Lindsay was a yellow and Wally was a purple and so on. The point that they laughed about it when they did it because it was quite sort of childish in a way. It was very oversimplified, OK, as most questionnaires, personality questionnaires are. But as well as laughing about how oversimplified it was, they also found quite a bit of value in terms of how into some degrees it matched quite a lot of their their characteristics, their traits. And by sharing that with their teammates, they found actually they were better able to understand where each other was coming from. They could utilise people's perspectives more for a more rounded team view. They they took less offense at one another. They could invite people into the conversation at different points. And so I'm just going to give you a quick run through of a couple of of these different characteristics, because. Most of all of the best teams that I've seen have have an element of diversity. We're all we're all different. And yeah, we can probably pigeon house, pigeonhole ourselves in a number of different ways. But we are all we are all different. And the more that we can understand the value that our differences bring, the generally the better the team we have. So again, I'm not going to explain the model or the or the questionnaire, but just to give you a taste of the differences that this team had. So the reds, OK, so these people, they're they're known for their drive. They're really keen to get stuff done. Early starters, finishers, they like they like taking control of making stuff happen, getting getting getting getting in there, getting their hands dirty, making decisions. They can be quite competitive, not just with other people, but with themselves. And they're really happy to and they're quite well known for speaking their minds. OK, so there are a couple of people in the team that came out as as red in this. Lindsay and other people in the in the yellow category, they were generally seen as more optimistic, glass half full. You know, when they don't see the problems necessarily, they see the opportunities. Very talkative, very cheerful. You like to be around them. You like to have them on your team, sort of infectious positivity, that sort of thing. And then we have the blues. Now, interestingly about the blues, the blues were typically described themselves as realistic. But other people might describe them as pessimistic. Because blues see yellows as naive and just seeing all the good stuff that can happen. Whereas the blues are pretty analytical. They really look at the detail they think things through. They're not as talkative as the yellows because they're doing a lot of thinking, they're doing a lot of processing. And so they're really good at finding out where things might go wrong, the risks that we might be facing and so on. So that's that's the blues. And then we have the greens who are known for being very, very calm and think things through, rational, easy going. Try and try and keep things on an even keel. Make sure people aren't getting upset. Keep the harmony. Make sure there's lots of tolerant behaviour going on that we're all one team, that kind of person. And there's this mixture within the team. Now, Wally, we called her, she was called Miss Purple because she sort of straddled the red and the blue. And I think what you find is that in certain circumstances, you may come out as a red. And in other circumstances, you may be more of a yellow. At work, you may be one one colour predominantly. And at home, you may be another. Or when you're in one team, you might find yourself taking on more of the yellow personality. And another team might find yourself playing more of the blue hat. And this is all absolutely fine. It's normal. It's quite fluid. But just knowing that about themselves was really quite interesting. So we're going to get a little bit, a little bit interactive, not massively interactive, because there's a lot of us. But I am interested in the demographics that we've got right now. So bear in mind, this is a very oversimplified model. And you may well find yourself straddling lines and depending on the context, you might think of yourself as green, you might think of yourself as yellow, but just don't overthink it. Could somebody, one of my co-hosts, put my poll up on the screen for me, please? Well, maybe I can do it. Oh, maybe I can do it. Re-launch poll one. So can you see this on your screens? So which colour do you most identify with is the question? Now, there's no right. There's no wrong answer. There's no good. There's no bad. It takes all sorts to make a healthy constructive balance team. And these results are flying in. Gives me an opportunity to have a little sip. Well, 80% voted already. 87, 88, five more seconds. We will see the results. So a pretty mixed spread. So 28, 23, 25, 25, very spread. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean anything good or bad because we're not working as a team. But it's it's it's quite interesting to know. I did a couple of years ago. I did I did a Bear Grylls course. Now, I don't know if anybody outside of the UK knows who Bear Grylls is, but he's one of these adventurers, you know, likes living outdoors and camping and things. And he does some TV shows where you sort of live rough for a while. And I went on a week, a week long survival thing course where you had to sleep outside, catch your own food and stuff with with complete strangers. Completely outside of my comfort zone. I had no idea how to make a fire or cook anything alone, catch it. So it was it was interesting, shall we say. And one of the most interesting things that usually stuck on an island with with eight other people that you don't know. I think it was eight or nine people that you don't know. Never met before. And you're all probably going to go hungry. You're all going to be sleep deprived because you sleep outside and you're probably not very good at making a shelter. But you've got to you've got to work together. You're thrown together as a team. You didn't have any sort of team building event or anything like that. No HR there to help you through. So we one of the things we had a first conversation about that first night was if there's one thing that really, really bugs you, what is it? And if I can not do that, I may never be the perfect campmate, but if I can just do that one thing that you really don't like, then I'll try and do that. And just having this awareness of who was what color, what their preferences were, what their defaults were, just made it a little bit easier to at best, at worst, just annoy each other a little bit less. But at best, we can take those things into account and start acting differently and treating other people differently and acting as a different team. Now, this team in particular, going back to that story, they actually even incorporated this, not just at things like planning sessions and retrospectives and so on, but even in their daily sessions. Stop this now, don't close that. So even in their daily stand-ups, they were sharing what they've been working on, but also sharing their daily state of mind. So I think you pronounce this ochre, ochre, sort of a mixture of yellow and red. Again, they got quite creative in where they were sitting on this spectrum rather than just staying within the boundaries. Now, as well as this sort of really overly simplified personality questionnaire, another thing this team did was they got to know more detail about each other over time. So they started sharing a little bit more about their personal traits, their personal journey, their personal successes, achievements, their careers. And they used a few different techniques. One of my favorite techniques for this is from Lisa Adkins' book, Journey Lines is the Exercise, Coaching Agile Teams is the book. And that's my journey line on the screen there. Some of you would have seen that before. And just sharing your highs and your lows, they got a little bit, they got to know about you as a person rather than just you as a colleague. And they got to know what drives you, what characteristics you have that drive your successes, where you, when you're motivated and when you're not motivated and things like that. And they did things like market of skills. And they also did something that I hadn't seen before. So I've seen Journey Lines, it's been a fantastic tool for many, many years. Another one that I wasn't really aware of until I started working with this team was what they called the user manuals. Now again, some of you may well be overly familiar with a user manual and there are different formats for it. I've taken much more of a sort of pictorial visual format here. But the idea behind the user manual is like it sounds. What is Jeff's user manual? How do you use Jeff effectively? And if Jeff's not working properly, how do you troubleshoot Jeff? What warnings are there? What should you never do? Put Jeff in water after midnight type thing. So what skills does Jeff have? Maybe some listening skills, some creativity skills. What are your warnings? He doesn't really like it when people are, there's a sense of unfairness or injustice in there. And when people are late, he gets a little bit bothered. If you're looking for some small talk with Jeff, then you can look up in the top corner and I think sport and music. Yeah, he gets nosebleeds now and again and he's got some dodgy knees. And the operating instructions. Well, Jeff tends to try and avoid working on weekends. So don't do that. He's an early riser, he'll start early. So seven o'clock in the morning, but he probably finished a little bit early as well. When it comes to tech, takes a little while to catch on. He used to be, but when he was a bit younger, he used to be a bit better. Now he needs a bit of prodding and handholding when it comes to new technology. And then some troubleshooting. Jeff's email says, Jeff, he's mad at me. Why might that be? Well, he probably rushed it. Jeff looks upset. Why might that be? Well, he probably feels something he has done, hasn't been appreciated or recognized. And so this team had already some time ago done these user manuals and shared them with each other. So they knew how to handle each other and how to get the best out of each other. But they hadn't done it with Karen. So one of the things that I found with teams is I was brought up with this, what I've come to, I didn't realize it was called the golden rule, but I was brought up with treat people as you would like to be treated. Do unto others as you'd like to be done to you, that kind of thing. And it's so, I think it's served me quite well. I think it's a pretty good thing. It's something that tends to span cultures as well. Different countries, different cultures have a similar kind of attitude. It's a good human trait to treat people as if you'd like to be treated that way yourself. But one thing I found with the great teams is that they actually go a little bit further than that. And rather than think, oh, this is how I'd like to be treated. So this is how I'm gonna act. They really take the time to think, no, no, no. What do I know about them that tells me how they would like to be treated? So they treat people as they would like to be treated. Not as I would like to be treated. And it's a subtle difference. But without that knowledge, without that sharing of experience and insight into their perspective and their character, it's quite hard to do. So what they did was they took, they took Lindsay's yellow perspective on board and they said, okay, there's probably some positive meaning behind what's going on here. But equally, there's some frustration here. So I think maybe we need to have it quite an open conversation with us. So they invited her to what you might call a get to know us session. And before the session, they shared with her all of their user manuals. So they sent them through to us so she could read about them. And when she turned up, they also told her a little bit about their personal journeys and their journey as a team, their successes and their frustrations and the things that they'd come through and so on. And she wasn't put on the spot. She didn't have to do anything. It wasn't mandatory for her to reciprocate, but she felt kind of obligated to. She felt that she'd been invited into their world. She'd been entrusted with not necessarily personal secrets, but just a little bit about their inner self, their mindset. And so she reciprocated. She created her own user manual and shared it with the team. I was talking to them after this session and they used the phrase a rite of passage. Now I don't know how well that translates to other cultures, but that sense of she was now really accepted as one of the team because she'd gone through the same kind of process that the rest of the team had gone through. She'd made herself as vulnerable as everybody else had made themselves vulnerable. She wasn't expected to do it. It wasn't mandatory. They didn't ask her to do that, but it felt like something important as a team. They were on the same level as each other now. And I think for me, my personal view here is that in great teams, people are there because they want to be, not because they have to be, or because they've been told to be. And what I mean by that is emotionally there because you can be physically part of a team and not emotionally part of a team. I can be there in body, but not in spirit. And while you can force me to be part of a team physically, you can't force me to be part of a team emotionally. And so in the great teams, everyone has opted in. They've made a conscious choice to say, yes, I will be part of this team's culture, their rituals, their agreements, their codes, their language. And the great teams that I've seen have all developed their own unique practices and their own unique expectations of one another. And they grow over time. Even their language grows over time. Now I said to you, I'd come back to the fact that Wally wasn't her real name. Her real name was actually Eve, but there was already an Eva on the team. And so rather than have an Eve and an Eva, Eve decided to share with the team her nickname, which was Wally. And why she had that nickname, because she absolutely loved Pixar films. And in one of the Pixar films, Wally, there was a character Eve. And so she picked that now. Again, I don't know how this translates across different cultures, but in English, the word Wally is kind of an informal and slightly nicer way of saying idiot. And so this was quite a, they might sound silly, but it's quite a brave step for somebody to take, saying, call me idiot. And she was sharing that with the rest of the team. She was giving up her name, if you like. And that's another thing. I was warned by quite a few people when writing this book to be really, really careful. In fact, I was advised a few times just not to talk about it because it's quite risky and it's quite dangerous, but this sense of banter, I really did think about it because it is quite risky. There's a fine line between banter and bullying and all sorts of things, but it is something that I've seen in every great team that I've been part of. People have teased each other. They've teased themselves in a fun, caring, almost loving way. And that self-deprecating banter that Wally had, call me idiot, call me Wally, was something that sort of stuck out there as well. And it gave everybody else permission to just be a little bit more informal with each other. So, great teams develop their own lexicon, their own vocabulary, okay? And the reason we do that is so that we know what each other is saying. And that means all the acronyms that you use, all the jargon that you use, that's part of your work and your environment, but also your own little code words. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, for example? Or little inside jokes that we have. It's a massive part of feeling belonging. And this sense of being part of the inside group is something that makes, contributes to the feeling of team that I've seen in all the great teams. What I've seen set those teams apart is when they don't just know what each other is saying, but they also know what each other is thinking. And that could be when you start, you probably start noticing when you can start finishing each other's sentences, or you can just have a little look, facial gesture, and it means that the words are unnecessary. They're irrelevant because we all know what that facial gesture means. And it used to freak my wife out because we'd be driving along, again, another pastime from days gone by. And I would say something, and she was genuinely swear at me, and say, how did you know that's what I was thinking? Are you in my head? Get out of my head, Jeff. And obviously I wasn't in her head. I don't have mind reading abilities. It's simply a case of patterns and repetition. You know, we've been together so long and we're creatures of habit. I've only got so many jokes and so many comments in my toolbox. So the chances are I've said them before and the same with my wife. So we start to unconsciously share those patterns the longer we've been together. When I used to work at BT, we used to use the phrase osmotic communication, mainly because Paul got up, I had a degree in science and he used fancy words. But that sense of sharing information through osmosis, it just sort of seeps through the barriers. You didn't have to have an explicit conversation, but you were just picking up stuff that's going on around you and picking up terms and words and phrases. And the longer you stay together as a team, the more you can actually work almost in silence because you just know what's going on. You know what people are thinking, you know what people are doing. It takes time. And another phrase that I was introduced to. So Tony, one of my lovely co-hosts and one of the organizers of Agile York introduced me to a Japanese phrase, as you can tell from the kanji on the screen there. Ishin Denshin. And like I said, I hadn't heard of it before. I was talking to Tony about this idea of I was telling him the story of me and my wife in the car and how I was freaking her out. And he said, it sounds a little bit like ishin denshin. And so I Googled it and I found that ishin denshin apparently is a Japanese phrase that refers to unspoken mutual understanding. What the mind thinks the heart transmits. And it can feel a little bit like telepathy. So basically what I'm saying there is it's not just something that me and my wife have going on when we're in the car, it's a thing, all right? And it's in Japanese, so it must be real and it must be profound is what I'm saying there. So in summary, all great teams in my experience find some way to develop their own language. Something that means something to them, but it's respectful, it's safe and it's still fun. They learn over time how each other's minds work and that's not to manipulate one another, it's to be more effective, to be more in some cases efficient and they just tune into each other. They tend to end up knowing without needing to be told. We all understand where and how everyone contributes to the team and we also appreciate the fact that people get value from being able to contribute. So we know when somebody can contribute, we know it gives them joy, we bring them in and give them the opportunity to contribute. And overall great teams do tend to put the team's goals above their individual goals. So that was just a little introduction to one of the stories that I tell. The other part to my book that I just wanted to touch on here is at the back of the book, I've introduced a number of milestone cards. So I often get asked questions about sort of team maturity models and team development models and things like that, so Tuckman and Katzenbach and all these other ones. And I love all of them, they're all great. But for me, teams are a lot more fluid and a lot more unique than the models that were out there were sort of allowing them to be. And so what I found was that no two teams went through the same growth process but they all had a number of things in common. They may well have focused on different things at different times, but they all had the hallmarks of being very, very hot on self-improvement, getting better, taking quality and how they do things really seriously. They stuck together, they were brave and they always found a way to deliver. And within those five areas of team greatness, if you like, they tended to hit a number of what I ended up calling milestones, things that when it happened, they looked back and thought, something happened then, something significant happened. We changed as a team at that point in time. And they look back and think, yeah, that was an important part of our development as a team. Whether it's they hit bug zero or they beat their previous best or they shared some appreciations, whatever it was, it was something that, do you know what, that was a milestone. And so the cards that I've included, I rushed through that first story. I didn't really go into a lot of detail on it. So you might not have picked up. I might not have even covered some of these milestones that that particular team came through, but they learned how to appreciate one another. They learned how to verbalize and get across their appreciation of one another. They developed their own language, their code, their terminology. They found a way of making work enjoyable, not just about getting stuff done. Another milestone that the team had. They put their own individual objectives to one side and focused on making sure that the team was as effective as it could be. And then one I just wanna touch on a little bit more is they found out something really important. So they found out about each other's preferences, their color, if you like, their history, their troubleshooting, their warnings, their user manual, what works for them. And as it says on this card here, they knew it was important and they knew it already really, but it became obvious at a certain point in time. And they incorporated it into their team values. And there's no particular order that these teams go through and say, okay, we've achieved that milestone, now we go on to this one. It's just a case of at that point in time for that particular team, that's an important milestone for them. And they just log it, they celebrate it, and they bank it. And then they'll move on to something else. So I just wanna talk very, very briefly through these because as well as the really cool illustrations that I can take absolutely zero credit for, on the back of the cards, there's, oh, I've gone backwards rather than forwards, apologies about that. Now we have to go through these animations again, but it won't take long. On the back of the cards, there's some information about those milestone cards. So there's in four different categories. So there's risks, because whenever we do anything new, whenever we try something, there's always a risk associated with it. And I think if you're looking to help a team take a step outside of their current status, outside of their current comfort zone, then knowing what could go wrong, knowing what people might be worried about, I think is quite important. So you might see that actually if you're looking about finding out stuff about people, that sense of sharing information about me, people might feel a little bit vulnerable about that, feel a little bit worried about letting people into their minds, into their persona, into their character. And often these things, these moments happen when something's gone wrong and there's a big risk then that that becomes personal, that it becomes about that particular personal, that particular thing that went wrong. But there are always some rewards, there are always some benefits that you can expect to get as a team by hitting one of these milestones. So we learn to look for the silver lining. Okay, we can become more resilient, we can become more resilient as individuals and as a team, if we find stuff out about each other, we know how people think, we don't second guess things, we think what can we learn from these situations? And we increase our sense of bond, we increase our sense of team, we'll go the extra mile for one another. The third section on the back of the car is around rituals. So specific things that you can put in place and do often on a regular basis that increase your chances of hitting that milestone or increase your chances of getting more out of the milestone. So with regards to finding something out, just getting into the habit of asking, what have we learned recently? What have we found out as a result of doing something? You either live or you learn, you either win on your own, that kind of thing. And so gratitude journal, so just taking some time out and reflecting as a team and what have we found out, what are we grateful for learning as a team recently? And the final section here, you can see a QR code because that links to a webpage. And I hinted at this in the introduction, which is that trying to create a sense of community here, this sort of share, global sharing of resources because there's so much stuff already out there. The internet is massive and the experience is collectively massive. So if you followed that QR code, if you got to this milestone and followed that QR code, you'd find a few videos, you'd find a few articles, blog posts or something that you could use and either find out more about this milestone or put it into practice or practice it. And so what I wanted to do, and Wilson hinted at this interactivity, is I want to test that theory that we can crowdsource a huge amount of resources in a very short amount of time that can be available to everybody. So if anybody, any team out there is looking to find out how they can get better at finding stuff out about their colleagues or finding stuff out about their projects or their products, they can go to this page and find so many resources that are all free. So that's what we're going to ask you to do now. And I'm going to hand over to someone who is more technically capable than me, who's going to put you in some breakout rooms to just have a quick discussion. Who are we getting to do that? I'm doing that. Chris. So if you're just checking the chat, I'll broadcast it anyway, but there's a link to Menti with a code where we're going to fill in some info. So Jeff, if you just let them know what we want people to do and then we'll get into the breakout room. Okay, so when you end up in your breakout room, what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to just have a quick discussion about the importance of finding stuff out, about the people you're working with and the place that you're working, basically finding stuff out, learning. And what resources are you aware of? They could be a video, it could be a book, it could be an article, it could be a blog post, it could be a community, anything that you could point somebody towards and say, do you know what, if you want to get better at finding stuff out about people, about your team, about your organization, this is a resource that could be useful to you in your efforts at doing that. And then when you found something, stick that on the Menti board. Everyone back, we've stabilized on a number. Okay, all the rest of them will come back in shortly anyway. So over, you've proved me correct, which is great, well over 100 resources in just five minutes, just sharing that collective wisdom, collective experience are just the people on this call. So that's ranging from team building activities to tools like disk, to sharing smarties with people, complete range and breadth of ideas for how to learn and find out stuff about people and about teams, purpose, organization, projects. And that's fantastic. So thank you to everybody for joining in and sharing that. I will, I'll ask a question without waiting for a response from Tony, my Menti mentor, who will probably be able to know whether we can actually share this output with everybody. It's done. It's done already, done, wow, there we go. So, cool, right. I'm aware that you guys were told that you would be freed at eight o'clock, but I'm gonna carry on for a little bit longer. You can obviously, you're free to leave whenever you like. And I've developed a very thick skin of people walking out of my sessions over the years. So I don't take any offense to people leaving, but people have been putting in some questions and voting them up. So we will take a few until, well, we'll see, we'll see how it goes until a few of you leave or I get bored or whatever. So, I believe you can still see my screen, which has the questions on. And the first one, which is interestingly from anonymous, is the most popular question, but they don't want to be identified. What should you do when a team member is very disruptive and has their own agenda? I can see why you wanna be anonymous now. Even after training and mentoring and coaching for over a year, nothing changes. Well, for one thing that I've found is that sometimes chemistry trumps everything. And that person may be an absolute ass in your team, but might be an absolute fantastic team player somewhere else. And that may well be in part down to other members of the team. It may well be that we've just got too many reds in the team. So, when I'm generally looking at this from the perspective of a team coach rather than a member of the team myself. And so, when I'm looking at the member from this perspective, I'm thinking about things like the CDE model. So, what containers are going on? What are the differences? Do we have enough differences? Too many differences? The environmental, perhaps the abide model or something like that. And if I've tried everything else, I think it's really to some degree inhumane to expect everybody to carry on in that situation because probably nobody's happy and nobody's really productive. So, I would be looking at seeing if there was a way that we could change something for everybody's benefit. There are a number of things that you can try beforehand, but given the way that you've worded the question, suggest that a lot has already been tried. And to some degree, I think it's just an element of cut your losses. Life's too short to keep pushing it something like that. I did have a, in my book Scrum Mastery, it's one of my, still, yeah, I think it probably still is my favorite quote. You know, I'd rather have a hole in my team than an asshole in my team. That's it, I've become a little bit more tolerant, I think, over the years and thinking actually quite often, if I see an asshole, that's there's often an element of me seeing the mirror there as well because I'm at least partly responsible for the behavior and attitude of people who interact with me. So, that sense of, well, I'd rather look at how I can change myself and the environment first. I should probably have the chat open here as well, in case there's something else. Okay, will the session be recorded and provided afterwards? Yes, it will be recorded. I'm planning to put it up on my YouTube channel. It may well require some editing and things. Tony's volunteered to record it and between us we'll edit it and put it up somewhere. Matt, when you have such a tight group, it can be quite intimidating to others joining it. You're absolutely right. How do you add people who don't have the experience of each other? The best story slash analogy I have for this one is from my friend, Paul Goddard, actually. So, when he wrote his book, Improving Agile Teams, he spent a lot of time looking at improv teams and one team in particular, the comedy store players. And they have, so they are a regular group. There's kind of a squad, so maybe 10 people. They'll have five on any one night and every week or every night, it's a different five. But also every night, again, they will consciously invite guests to take part. And so while those 10 have been working together for 25 years, they really know each other. They've got their routines, they've got their pattern, they've got their banter, they've got everything that they need to be a really close team, but they deliberately and consciously invite guests into their team. A, to keep them fresh and to stop them becoming complacent. But also, when they do invite those guests in, they don't expect the guest to accommodate and sign up to their working practices and their working agreements. What they do is they say that they will accommodate the guest. So the guest sets the rules, the guest sets the precedents, the guest leads and the established people follow. I think that's a really good way of stopping things becoming creaky. And just with the banter, they said there was a fine line there. Equally, that sense of in-group, that sense of identity as a team can go too far because we become too close-knit. We don't think outside. We don't value people's opinions from outside of our little group. And that's where things become too insular and the team starts to degrade. And I found myself as a coach in a few situations where teams have actually slipped from being great because they haven't been keeping themselves fresh. And so I think making sure that there is a certain element of, if not churn, then open-mindedness and almost guest appearances. And with Matt, does that make sense? And whether you got access to the chat there, did that cover your questions or I need to scroll down? Okay, okay. Cool. By using these colors, it exposes people's vulnerabilities. How do you coach people that are exposing these vulnerabilities is safe and not a weakness. I find it interesting because the sort of personality assessment thing is quite deliberately not looking at a right or a wrong or a good or a bad. All of those colors have strengths and all of those colors have weaknesses. And equally, all of our strengths can be weaknesses in different contexts. And so one of the things that I've really liked about being part of a great team. So the question that we asked you all during the virtual networking at the start, for me, as well as just from a personal selfish point of view, I tend to learn stuff and I tend to get more stuff done when I'm part of a really good team. The other thing is I feel safe to have my weaknesses. I don't have to pretend to be perfect when I'm part of a great team. And I think that sense of it does require someone to go first, but equally trust and vulnerability is not binary. It's not, I have to be vulnerable or I'm not. I have to trust you or I don't. We can build this up over time so we can be a little bit vulnerable and we can prove to ourselves and each other that we're not going to exploit that vulnerability, that it's not going to be used against us, that we're not going to be humiliated. And that gives us the confidence to go a little bit further. So when you say teamwork and trust takes time, it does. It can be accelerated and the safer the environment you can create the better and the quicker things go. But all of our weaknesses can be our strengths as well as our strengths can be our weaknesses. So I think it's about positioning it really, really effectively, but also acknowledging that we're all going to be looking at this through a sort of self-defense lens to begin with. And everybody's going to be a little bit worried. How do you encourage people to present themselves as they are rather than as they would like to project themselves? So encouraging, I think is a good word to use there. Interestingly, even if I agree to present myself as I am, I might not be able to do that because I don't necessarily see me as I am as he's getting quite deep and meta, but I only see me through my lens. And what's interesting, and I didn't mention this during the talk, but when we did those color assessments, well, the team did those color assessments. Quite often when you do things like that and you ask other people their perspective of you, it's often quite different to yours. Now, it doesn't mean that they're right and you're wrong or you're right and they're wrong. It's just we all see the world as we see the world. We don't see the world as it is. So how can I be sure that I'm ever presenting myself as I am? I don't think I can, but the willingness I think is the important thing there. Am I willing to present myself as I am or try? And that again comes with safety. And one of the things that I, so I started, my default is to think of things from the lens of a scrum master because that was my first primary job. And so I tend to always revert back to that and thinking when I was a scrum master, how did I encourage that within my teams? But equally whenever I've been part of a team, whether it's a sports team or on the island, I was always the one that would try and go first because I know how difficult it is to start things. If someone can start the process and set the bar, then everyone else feels more comfortable. And the longer you go before someone starts, the harder it is. So over time, I've gone from being an incredibly sort of introverted, shy, very protective, don't want people to laugh at me kind of person to actually, do you know what? I'm gonna laugh at me because everyone's gonna laugh at me eventually. So let's get it out of the way kind of thing. And I think that helps having someone in the team who's prepared to do that can be really, really helpful. And if you haven't got someone, then be that person. About the user manuals, who has created or written those for you? So the people did them themselves. Everyone wrote their own user manual. And over time, that team that I was talking about in the story, they were able to actually update them as sort of living resource. They kind of had them in their team, in their team space as one of their artifacts. So whenever somebody said, oh, I think you should add this to your user manual. They were little quotes that came up, little traps that they always tend to fall into, they'd add them in there. But there's no reason why if you've been working together as a team before, you're asking your colleagues in a kind of 360 way to collaborate on these things. That could be a really interesting insight. How are we doing on time? Things can get away from me. 12 minutes passed. Okay, is banter a uniquely British thing? How is this translated across cultures and countries? I don't think it is uniquely British. I think the ability to have a laugh with people, to make light of the situation, to look to have fun, to tease one another, to tease yourself. I don't think it is uniquely British. I think it is a big part of British culture. There's no getting past that. But I've had the fortune to work in lots of other different cultures. And I think when you get that sense of team, because it's not like every British team or every British person is gonna be comfortable with banter. I will be comfortable with banter in some situations and not others. And that's why I'm talking about that the great teams do have that. They develop that sense of comfort because they can then take advantage of the informality that they've reached. They've got past that formal nature. They can have a bit of fun. They can poke at it a bit of fun. How important is the team feeling under pressure together in helping to build the team? That's a really interesting question. Because I mentioned at the start that I think right now great teamwork is gonna be more important than ever because we're in a crisis mode and we can't solve problems on our own. I think in some cases, in a lot of cases actually, one of the things that helps form great teams is actually being in a real tough situation. And I say that because I said trust is not binary. There are different degrees and levels and depths of trust. And you can say you trust somebody and I can trust somebody to drive my car or I can trust somebody to something relatively simple. But would I trust them with my life? Now, I might not need to get to that point, but I think you can appreciate there are different levels of trust between me letting you drive my car and with my life. And you don't really know how much you can trust people until you have to trust them. And that's where these sort of crisis things or feeling under pressure is really important to, okay, I thought I could trust you, I kind of thought, yeah, I trust you, but now we've gone through that, I know you've got my back. And the first, so I was joining those breakout rooms in the informal networking that you all were doing, I was in those sessions as well. And I may not be pronouncing your name correctly, Bader, so apologies if I'm not, but Bader said that people have my back and David Weird is again saying that people being part of that together and knowing that you're not on your own was a big part of being part of a great team. And it's a very common response. We don't want to be on our own as human beings. And yeah, there are times when we do and it's nice to come out to your shed and just have a bit of peace and quiet, but when you're in something, when you're faced with something really, really challenging, you want people to have your back, you want to be part of something. And also to be someone's, to have someone's back, it's a nice feeling too. So I think it's a massive part of it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be in a crisis situation to achieve greatness as a team. I just think it can really accelerate the process. It can have the opposite effect, but it can also make a great team. And Carol wants to know when the book launch party is and that's the honest answer is, I haven't got a clue, mate. I haven't got a clue. We'll have to see how this goes. If it carries on for a while, we'll have to get creative. But yeah, I'm hoping that we will have the opportunity to celebrate the launch at some point. I'm going to say that's a pretty good point to cut. We're now then to just three upvotes on those questions. So I'll let people get back to their Wednesday evenings. It is Wednesday, right? We all know what day of the week it is, don't we?