 I'm very pleased to be here. It's my first time in India and I'm from England but I'm living in the Netherlands. This is about the agile mindset. It's in five parts. Is this okay? A bit higher? Can you hear me okay? But I want to ask a few questions about you just before I get started so that I can get a kind of feeling of the situation that you're working in. So are you working if you're working virtually in your team or with other teams put your hand up. Okay if you're in a new team put your hand up. Are you working in cross-functional teams? Anyone? Oh post merger acquisition environment. Going through change, deep change, any kind of change. Okay and then in terms of your relationship with agility welcome please come in. So in terms of where you are with agility who would say that they are just in the position of learning about agile? Okay so what about people who are in the position of transitioning to agile with a team? Okay and then working in an agile team that's actively agile right now. Okay what about working in agile ways with other teams as well? Okay so that's cross-functional team people putting their hands up again and then leading agile. Who's leading agile? Who's consulting coaching agile? Okay all right so there's pretty much a spread in the room. I'm going to start by telling you a story and I'm not from an agile background myself. Last time I said this in a room of agile people everyone went because I used to come from corporate communications. Don't worry I'm out now. And I want to start with a story about when I first graduated. I started working for small businesses and just teams of ten and when you're in a team of ten you can get really really tight on who is working with who, what are we supposed to be doing, how is that going, how are please yeah just come in take a seat. You can get really tight on who is who and what are we doing and how did we do it and what are we then changing. And I worked with two or three organizations and after a while I started getting quite a lot of experience in the marketing side of things and PR and then somebody said to me look you could be a really good communications consultant in an oil and gas consultancy in the Netherlands and so we're going to send you out there and I was like wow you know this is the big league okay so I'm going to join a blue chip international organization they're going to fly me out there put me up in a hotel and I couldn't wait to find out what are they doing so well to be making so much money. So I went out and I was you know completely blown away first couple of months there's massive budgets huge people capabilities governance as job descriptions the strategy processes it's really really awesome but at the same time I'm working in a team the team is 17 people I'm in a communications capacity and it just feels really foggy it's like different people are in different meetings at different times being exposed to different kinds of different documents they've got different ways of looking at things it's almost like you can't get that clarity you can't get that sort of tight feeling as a team where you're really clear on what's happening and what needs to be done and it started bugging me because I sort of felt a responsibility to do something about this I felt I felt really like as a communications person how could I possibly assist this team if I'm not myself clear on the perspectives going on in the team and I found that it was really the word that I kind of used was ambiguous so it actually took me two years of thinking by this time I joined this organization as a member of staff I was working in the global learning organization and it took me two years of thinking is this just me something that I need to learn because I've never worked in a big massive organization before and after a while the word ambiguity came up it's ambiguous it's difficult to really to really know what's going on so I went to somebody senior in the learning organization an approachable guy and I said look you know what is this with this sort of unclearity it really doesn't feel like everyone is on the same page he said yes it is ambiguity and I was like yes it is ambiguity and he said you know what we feel that ambiguity is something that is um if you can tolerate ambiguity it's like a leadership strength so I kind of said thank you and walked away and thought all right so does that mean I'm never going to be a leader because I finding it difficult to tolerate ambiguity so I left it and I carried on and as I carried on I got to learn more about other people in communications and other people in projects realizing it's not just me and I thought you know what there is unavoidable ambiguity for sure we're in a VUCA world it's all very complex unavoidable ambiguity is always out there but there's a lot of avoidable ambiguity that people are just being you could say lazy about or they're using as an excuse or maybe they don't even see it but it's there and everybody's making masses of micro decisions every day and taking actions every day and the ambiguity isn't helping with that it's frustrating people it's making people work in different directions and it's costing a lot of money so what is this and why is nobody seem to be acknowledging this so let's look at the current situation so we know that the world is getting more complex that's not news there is more to align on so as teams are in situations where they're in merger situations cross-team situations things are changing rapidly there's more things for people to actually look at and and and be on the same page about you've probably heard the stats about disengagement or employer disengagement where the owners of responsibility is on the manager but they don't seem to be doing much about it and more and more people are becoming less engaged with their organization so that's an issue that's just there and then at the same time companies are putting in SharePoint Yammer all of these kind of information sharing platforms and hoping that gets that fixes it and I'd say that that helps people connect with other people it helps people share information but it doesn't fix ambiguity okay now I'm going to show you a fairly wordy slide and I'm going to read everything on this slide because it's really good at explaining this problem so this is a piece of research from 2005 it's from a business process management journal and it says that problems caused by misalignment include confusion waste of time money and opportunity diminished productivity demotivation of individuals and teams so that's I think we kind of recognize when that happens but it's about internal conflicts power struggles and project failure but this is it as well as resulting in time and energy spent doubting conspiring guessing or gossiping that's what happens when people are in situations that they can't make sense of when that same energy could be deployed in moving an organization forward and this is the sort of problem statement that I'm going to put out there about what we're calling it the fog that I think a lot of people recognize but a lot of people call it just life okay I'm going to move on let's look at the future more diverse teams more cross-functional teams more virtual more more people working in different places short-term staff freelance staff this is the way it's all going people aren't even going to be given the opportunity to meet or get to know each other or actually figure out what gender of somebody they're they're talking to potentially while at the same time the need for niche and tailored product products and the need for accelerated learning and innovation of performance is only going to increase so that kind of invisible misalignment is going to be more and more important and more and more relevant so this kind of stuff isn't just about you know the employee experience and helping people to feel better at work and sort of the soft stuff that's that inevitably becomes deprioritized it's actually getting alignment right is more about a source of competitive advantage in terms of performance in terms of innovation in terms of reputation and sustainability so people in internal communications and HR groups and learning groups are kind of talking about the needs to get better at this generally people in projects people in management positions they're talking about how to be more agile how people can get better on the same page but it's still not on the map really is it misalignment is just a word it's just like yeah we're they weren't very misaligned so what is going on and I would say the reason for this is it's like dark matter okay misalignment is sort of invisible it's everywhere and it's ever so important and ever so powerful but we don't really understand it yet so when I start talking to leaders and managers and by this time I've moved on to a role in a global telecoms company when I start talking to leaders and managers about looking at this recognizing it and doing something about it the sort of responses I get are well yeah this is impossible to manage you know it's just life we're busy with other priorities you know we just got to get on with it and we don't have the capability well I say that's rubbish because if we can drill oil out of the ground in hostile environments and if we can figure out what our customers and thinking and feeling and wanting and if we can organize ourselves the way that we are being organized today surely we can get on top of this challenge right and I'm starting to get annoyed about it because it's getting in my in my way as a communicator and it's making the communications work or the work of everybody else less efficient it's boring it's frustrating so I want to get under the skin of this like really get under the skin of this and talk to you about this today and it's going to be a kind of little bit interactive as we go along so how do we see things differently why does this even happen where does alignment even come from why don't we just have concepts that match and then we get it why isn't it more transactional well here's a phrase that occurred in another company I worked in this actually came down from the top we're going to go digital okay somebody says all right there's a change coming up somebody else is thinking well this has got to be a marketing thing somebody else is saying well this has got to be about a new platform for customers or something somebody else is saying well it must be an acquisition or merger because we don't have any capabilities like this right now so everybody's looking at this from a different point and actually the interesting thing about it is that all of those people looking at it are completely disabled because they don't have the clarity on what's necessary or how this affects their job or how it's relevant to them as a person they just know that something's happening so they're completely disempowered from taking any action so in terms of the way that people look at things differently what I want you to do is turn to somebody next to you so I'm going to ask you to get into pairs this is just going to take a couple of minutes so find somebody next to you look somebody in the eye that's going to somebody's going to be a somebody's going to be b and I'm going to ask person a to turn around and put their back to the screen okay so we're going to do that right now so please can person a not to see the screen I want to see half of you with backs to the screen so do not look at the screen person a do not look at the screen person b I'm going to give you I'm going to put an image onto the screen and I'm going to ask you to describe the image to the person who cannot see the screen and I'm going to give you one minute so when you when you do this I want the other person to see exactly what you're telling them to see so are you ready okay so starting three two one you've got one minute okay you got 30 seconds 15 seconds five four three two one stop all right okay so the person who had their back to the screen can now look at the screen you can't see the screen okay so you know it's a fairly complicated image did the person b say that there were three parts to the image good that's the easy bit did they describe the dimensions of those parts when you turned around did you have this image in mind of course it's impossible but you know in non-transactual environments where it's not circle equals circle where things are complex and more conceptual it's almost impossible to be able to describe something to somebody and have them see it exactly the way you see it or exactly the way that you verbalize it because of the limits of language okay any other insights or things that happened during that little exercise no okay so the reason why people see things differently and what's behind what we're now referring to as the fog so this this ambiguity I'm talking about is these things because we're all so human we all have our biases we all have our assumptions we all have diversity and diversity is a strength of course but mostly it's a weakness it's difficult to manage diversity diversity means that we just interpret the world differently we have a different set of rules we actually understand things differently and we misunderstand things and we have environmental influences when's the last time somebody said to you well we're not going to go to that meeting and then you thought well I'm going to go anyway well maybe you do or you don't but either way you're being influenced by people around you all the time and let me put it differently then just a quick visual explanation we have a radar let's say your radar starts with facts that you know sorry if you can't see the screen maybe you have to move a little bit and then there's interpretations that you make and then there's assumptions that you make and then things that you know you don't know and maybe your radar looks like this where you're very knowledgeable so you have this sort of view on the world and maybe you're working with somebody and they have their view on the world and so does the other other person and the other person again so here's your whole reality say as a team of just four people you have this whole reality together but the bit that you share is only that big so what's in the middle what's between it this is just a way of explaining it it's that fog that we're talking about all of these assumptions and things that may not be clear now you don't need to clear all the fog of course but let me give you some examples so perhaps this person is saying well we need to improve quality why isn't this a higher priority well if that person doesn't say anything they'll be making decisions and they'll be taking actions based on their belief that quality should be a high priority even though maybe they're trying not to and their teammates won't benefit from their view as to why quality should be a high priority and that person won't benefit from the view that he's explaining why there is a different priority in place it's just a gap that's fine there's a gap but if you add up other gaps we need way more data to know we're making the right decision so there is actually a profile of a group of people who prefer to have more data before making decisions now if that person that person could be managing a team of 20 people and they might send them off for two months going to gather data about something at the worst case scenario when perhaps the rest of the team but they're in feel that that's not necessary it's holding them up that's that's potentially a huge gap he isn't taking the time to listen so he's obviously not interested in my views or doesn't think they're worth much well this is a bit more difficult because it's a bit more potentially political a bit more social maybe he doesn't want to listen to our views now that's a gap that's difficult to fix maybe he does think they're worth much but he's just too busy but again it's a gap so she might say well there's no point in me telling him then so she's going then going to hold back what she's thinking because she doesn't think he wants to know etc etc etc so yeah this is difficult to get on top of but that's what this is all about and I want to now come to some research about what's behind the fog and what's going on with it to explain a little bit more about how we how we get to unravel it yes they will be so there's a piece of research right back from 1972 in the social sciences I've been working with the technical university of delft to to look at all of this literature and the most interesting piece I mean there's tons of it of course but the most interesting piece is this called social constructionism all right it basically means that the way that people create their understanding of reality is through language with people I mean obviously the written language is another way that they soak up information but it's meaning is constructed between people the second bit of research is about learning behavior is much more recent 2010 researcher from Bindhoven University now moved to Antwerp University talks about how learning behaviors in four categories help people to forge a better shared understanding what I mean by that is so we've all seen you've probably heard a lot about psychological safety so for example if if psychological safety is present in the room here I will feel safe being myself and saying something without feel of being reprimanded for it or punished for for what I'm thinking or saying therefore I feel more comfortable in the room I'm more likely to listen to other people who also feel safe therefore we're more likely if we were talking we'd be more likely to build a better shared understanding because our our communication is open and respectful so psychological safety is about trust effectively task cohesion is about how much people are committed to working together as a team group potency is how much confidence people feel in achieving their shared goals and then interdependence is how much you can rely on each other to deliver to each other and you know Google did a lot of research about this and they found that trust was in fact the number one factor behind effective teams so you could say that effective teams is about the right learning behaviors that lead to a better shared understanding that allow people to take actions and decisions which make them together more effective so it's all quite logical but it's nice to know that the behaviors and the understanding piece are the same but there's one more piece so the piece that most teams can't control for themselves is the support from the organization that they're in like the culture of the wider organization the extent to which people feel rewarded and recognized for good work the extent to which stakeholders who relate to their teams do that effectively so there's a whole load of things outside of the influence between themselves that will affect how effective they are so this is the actual model now let me come back to the problem at hand and it was articulated really well in one of these research papers that summarized and says teams are more effective than individuals we know this but effective collaboration isn't the case of putting the right people together with the right skills bunging them all in a room virtual or not and then expecting them to be effective because people face the challenge of integrating their perspectives and collaborating because of all of the things we're talking about the diversity the assumptions that the the way that people and interpret things the way that their biases actually integrating as a single unit is a challenge and I'm going to unpack this a little bit more I'm not going to go back to 1972 I'm really going to unpack this now and I'm going to go back to 8 000 vc bear with me there is a book and it's a very good book by Frederick Lou who talks about the evolution of organizations and this will speak a lot to where agile has why agile has evolved but right back to 8 000 bc communities of say hundreds or just a thousand people were managed by a hero ruler so it was egocentric individualistic power to one person and that one person would dictate what he needed to happen and when it was to enforce social order and protect people from wars or invasion from other communities and it worked let me fast forward now to 1000 bc and you have more of an organized machine you've got stratified social classes you've got the beliefs of right or wrong think about the catholic church think about the army people were split into doing different tasks which meant that you had to have different levels of managers manage them and there were replicable replicable processes and hierarchies in place that meant that this organized machine protected people again from threats at that time the lines of power and the lines of communication are coming top down fast forward now to 1000 to 1950 think about General Motors in the US it's a cog it's a machine it's massive and it's magnified this lots of different tasks are managed by lots of different managers and this time it's a meritocracy because they need more people to manage more people and so now you are rewarding special effort you've got an achievement based system and the lines of power and hierarchy are absolutely colossal so this is on a major thing but then what happened we were talking about this in the holocracy piece before what happens you've got control versus complexity managers and leaders cannot see the whole picture they cannot manage and be competitive because it's too complex there are people at the far end of the organization but actual workers who have got a better view on what's happening than the leaders themselves so Frederick Lalloux's response to this is right in the year 2000 now we have this we have recognition of the individual people enabling and sharing skills and we've got lines of power and communication for the first time after millennia for the first time have changed and this is where agile comes in of course so agile doesn't work with top down power because you have to empower people so NGOs non-profits servant leadership is happening it's all about innovation it's all about agility our problems are solved but they're not are they and they're not in many organizations that you might be working in today because let's go back to social constructivism where people are making sense of their reality based on their understanding of the world on the left hand side we have leaders who are making sense of their world at work to meet stakeholder expectations leaders are saying i am in charge and i will make sure we deliver because that's what they think their job is and that's what other people think their job is so they're still being top down then you have an employee communications that's delegated the responsibility of communications to a group of people who are also meeting their stakeholder expectations they're saying leadership messages are our bible and we make employees fit in with that so they are perpetuating this top down thing does that make sense okay so the role of internal communications is about internal marketing channel management strategic advice that's what they are doing to deliver on their job as best as they know how that's still happening even though that's a definition of that role from 1975 and we talked about employee engagement employee engagement apparently according to aon in 2017 was 65 percent doesn't sound too bad does it but that's the number of employees who said they were even partially engaged now if you're not even partially engaged you're not probably there anymore or not for much longer if you take the number of people excuse me who said that they are fully engaged that number is only 27 percent so in any given organization you ask people who is fully engaged with this job only 27 percent of them will go i am which isn't that high now i'm going to run another exercise very quick one i want you to all stand up there's a reason for this please all stand up people are going oh god yeah well it's a top down this is top down order all right i want you to stay standing if you agree with this statement do you have ideas and views about the organization you work for if you really don't and you're not engaged just sit down it's fine stay standing are you able to share these ideas with your boss and other leaders in the organization be truthful help me make my point and sit down now do you think your inputs are making a difference okay well you're in an agile world so i would have thought that it would be quite positive like this thank you very much you can sit down now this is um really about the fact that if you sat down so people basically go at work to work to feel understood and connected and valued let's face it that's why they go to work they want to make a difference and feel valuable if that's not happening they'll be on this side of the screen if that is happening they're more likely to be on the other side of the screen so i just want you to reflect on whether you stood up and whether you sat down and where you are how far you are over there on on that continuum okay so now i'm going to go into um a part about how to clear the fog but first of all i'm going to clear up a misalignment a lot of people thinking about think about alignment as being the extent to which employee goals match up with organization goals and if that's the case everybody's aligned but that doesn't really address the problem that we're talking about because you can still have that on paper but yeah so this other kind of alignment we could call social alignment i mean that's a term that's not official but we could call it that and that's when people have a compatible outlook on their shared challenges they don't need to agree or say the same things in fact the definition of social alignment that we could pick up from the literature is that it's about appreciating other people's views being aware of other people's views finding the compatibility towards the shared goals and not necessarily agreeing you don't get much innovation if you all agree but the misalignment again is about whose role is that so what's the point of that a lot of people say well you know that's the role of the line manager that's the role of the team leader but here's the thing they have got a role to frame up the objectives what are our KPIs all of those things that we were hearing about in the keynote earlier um what are we here to do whose job is what etc etc and that's very much a briefing role but alignment is different you can't tell people to align you can't brief them on alignment so here's the situation i'd like to now brief you and we're all aligned that doesn't happen alignment is is recognizing that people have different ways of looking at things and need to communicate on a two-way basis in order to make sense of things in a compatible way so how can the line manager do that when they've got their own biases and their own views of the world and they've got their own ways of looking at things um and they don't have any tools to do it it's it's almost impossible to ask line managers to just go and get people aligned and we're talking about moving from this old-fashioned alignment to this alignment which is more agile and we move into what's this got to do with agile and if you are aligning people and hearing their views and having them be understood and having them make sense of things on their own terms it's a more open and respectful and inclusive culture so you've got those behaviors available there's more ownership and engagement the team is more effective because their decisions and actions line up there's better performance and there's more feedback going up and down the organization so this is almost a view of the world that doesn't say that says well you know holocracy by the way is totally inspiring but if you don't have a holocracy there's a better way of reframing what is the leadership role which is to be more enabling rather than controlling so that people can make more decisions and align and take more actions themselves so in agile you're already doing this if you already have a team practicing agile you've got all of these different methods at your fingertips to help people stay aligned agile to me is actually just a really advanced two-way set of communication tools that you're using and when i started to read more about this and find out more about it i'm you know really impressed because there's a lot of organizations who say they're doing really well on communications that aren't doing any of this and this is what makes a lot of sense you know retrospective wheel of values refinement revision etc and then even when you are aligned there's all of these stand-ups and retro and shared responsibility and two-day conversation day-to-day conversations with the product owners but let me just start at a really simple level on four things that people can proactively do as individual people to get more aligned with their team and the first one is um actually getting alignment on the map very often teams of people who haven't thought about alignment very much will not be aware of the differences you'll often see somebody walking around in a team very confident because in their minds they're completely aligned with everything so everything's fine but if you're aligned if you're if you feel comfortable with everything everything makes sense to you you're still in a team and you depend on each other to deliver um so it's actually just people being aware that uh the fog can exist even though somebody for one person maybe they feel it really doesn't um the second thing of course is talking to leaders about the balance of leading alignment and agile so these are simple things um that an individual person can do i'm not sure i'm not sure it's it's a starting point put it that way um and again it's about talking about how leadership and empowerment can work together another thing is about looking at those alignment behaviors we're talking about openness respect inclusivity maybe you're having a conversation somebody's not speaking up so what do you think about this bringing them in and then there are a range of tools and interventions and some of the more established ones are you've already got in agile but are about storytelling or conversation cafes huddles interventions and um i'm going to go into a quick exercise before going into one of those interventions which is about that team test that we were talking about and i'm going to put you into the role of the facilitator on some results of a team test but first um i'm going to show you on the screen two sets of behaviors a behavior a and a behavior b and i'm going to ask you to think about which one have you experienced most in your career to date it just gives you a handle on what kind of environments have you been working in okay behavior a on this one people accommodating views they don't agree with everyone every now and again just to win points or people being curious to understand alternative ways of seeing things even when expressed using different words and ideas so really think which one have you seen more of in your world at work so if it's behavior a put your hand up so i'm assuming everybody else is going to say behavior b there is behavior b put your hand up maybe you're not sure now obviously behavior b is a bit more time consuming and a bit more advanced um and it takes a more forward thinking organization to look at that but still here's another one behavior a it's people handling conflict by authority or negotiation or behavior b is people trying to find bridges between different perspectives as a source of innovation so behavior a who's more familiar with that and behavior b see yeah this is really good if i talk to people who are not in agile most of it would be behavior a so i think you know agile is about this openness respect and inclusivity now there's one thing i want to ask you about before we go into it any further and there's eight points i've got around what makes an effective dialogue and i want you to just tell me what you think makes a great dialogue we'll see if we can get to eight but whatever um so that we can because you know if if most of this is about effective communication it is about effective dialogue so what does make an effective dialogue just anyone shout out yep open questions good yes yes sorry joking empathy thinking about what the other person is the feeling intent asking and telling yes very good clear on the objective excellent not letting it wander too much good yes being completely clear and honest and open anything else no okay well the points that i had actually were speaking for yourself not as a representative of other people treating everyone as an equal i think we've pretty much got that being open listening with curiosity even if you disagree to start with searching for assumptions this is difficult it's not easy to to to mindfully apply yourself in this way uh searching for assumptions by asking why and asking the other person why well why do you think that and as soon as you start asking those questions then you start getting assumptions that people weren't really aware of they're just below the level of consciousness that then they can be can be changed immediately if they know about trying not to rush or interrupt remembering no single person has the truth there is no truth it's just a view being brief sticking to the point yet and and then finding areas of compatibility all right so i'm going to give you an example of an intervention around team alignment it's for all functions and sectors so i'm mainly thinking outside of the it function actually the more experienced with we get with this the more we're able to to um compare what alignment looks like in different contexts and context is everything um and it is specifically aligned to just identify and close alignment gaps so the first thing it does is actually captures perception on learning behaviors by asking questions to measure how much of those four learning behaviors are present so the first so for example a question on psychological safety would be we treat everyone as positively and as equals and we ask people to rate that on the scale of one to five and then if you put the group results together and you can get a view of how much of those behaviors exist within the team so we're not looking at individual behaviors we're looking at how the team behaves as a unit and on interdependence the reliability one that would be about it's easy to ask team members for help so we can come up with an actual percentage score on each of the of each statement and in each category as well and then as a whole then we capture perception on context how do you do that well you ask open questions what words do you think your customers and stakeholders would use to describe your team so maybe you could think about that for a second how do other people perceive how do they perceive you so we get words like busy expert proactive disconnected negative even you can get all sorts of words coming up that really does hold up a mirror what do you think is happening within your organization that will have an impact on your team now if everybody says the same thing there's some alignment but is that that slight group thing as well do you want to check that there's usually more than one thing going on if everybody is saying something completely different why is that it's a discussion and then another question for example what's your biggest concern for this team and you would have a key at the side as to what those concerns are in this case this was a small consultants that we did and 43 percent of people on the team said that their biggest concern was viability now they normally wouldn't have said that so asking questions in a very objective way enables the issues to go on the table safely and constructively because when you play the data back to the team you can put that on the table these are the biggest concerns you're not pointing the finger at anybody individually the data is anonymous but isn't that something to put on the table for a team what would have happened if they'd never talked about it that's just not you know it's too big we can't talk about that so this is a way of closing gaps some of which can be very sensitive and like I said when we play that back it's just because we're able to put it all in an organized way into a report that visually shows where the gaps are so you can actually by asking the right questions in the right way you can identify the gaps and then put them on the table to close them or at least get some more awareness around what needs to be done so that gap those that report will include things like summaries of perceived purpose and perceptions of context top five behavioral strengths bottom five bottom five behavioral scores breakdowns of scores feeling about alignment positivity and preparedness so it's really rich data about actually what is going on in this team are there any questions so far okay but the real bit is about not just playing back the date of the tip to the team of course are there any seats at the back over there I think there's a couple over there yeah and there's one there um it's not just about holding up the mirror so the process is called mirror mirror by the way it's not just about holding up the mirror and saying to the team by the way did you know that this is what you're all thinking and feeling which a team normally wouldn't have time to even look at it's about doing something about it and we've I've talked about that it's about what's best practice dialogue how do you get them into a discussion to to close the gaps without it turning into a difficult process and making it as efficient as possible so this whole thing doesn't last very long I mean on one hand you've got a full picture really in-depth version which is about one hour of interviews and survey per person the report a workshop of about four to six hours and then an action plan but you can do a quick version as well which is a 20 minute survey with an overview report and a two to three hour workshop so it's really short alignment and some of the benefits about that so one of the comments on this presentation slot was about benefits and what we ask people about immediately after the workshop is how do you rate the level of positivity in the team afterwards how do you rate the level of clarity in the team and how do you rate the level of preparedness in the team and only one of these is actually really important the only one that counts is the level of preparedness because during the workshop they might have discovered things that they didn't really want to know or that might cause them more work or that might have raised more questions but they're much better off knowing what those questions are and knowing what the shared reality is than being ignorant to it so the level of preparedness in the team is a much more effective one and we've got three results here we've got results from the team we did at Samsung a project team we did at a university and then another one we did at Aon so people are rating these and the reason why they're rating those and this this really the philosophy behind this whole alignment idea is that when people become conscious of their views and assumptions and mental models they've got more flexibility to adapt them because if you're not conscious of what you're thinking you can't possibly change it so it's just bringing things to the level of consciousness and then when people are able to share their thinking with others in the right environment in the respectful open inclusive environment they can reach a better shared current reality together and this is what a lot of organizations are missing they've got the management piece they've got the corporate communications making a lot of noise over a lot of channels but not being really relevant to anyone and then they've got individuals trying to make sense of things so it's this piece in the middle that could that's measurable and repeatable and data driven that could replace other things and then three months later we ask participants in those teams again um do you find that after this exercise you made better decisions and actions and this these are the responses uh this this first column here um do you have a more open respectful culture because when you get people starting to think like that it's difficult you know they can go back again quickly of course but it does set a tone so actually we were quite surprised um does it improve team engagement and this is what we would really call engagement rather than those engagement scores from from the annual employment survey and then does it find provide useful feedback because the rest of the higher up in the organization you can provide this feedback about what's holding what does the team think that the organization is doing to hold them back and that can be shared um one from this university project team and one from Samsung to indicate okay what happens when they start to look at this with just a short intervention or some of those um ways of dealing with alignment that I was talking to you about okay so this is the university of upper Austria it's the um it's applied sciences and a master student project team there are eight of them they're in health care social and public management so this this is agile in a totally different context in a way uh it's a new team a new project they've got six months to deliver um equal number of men and women um balanced ages different levels of work experience so their challenge is to translate a co-living housing concept from Vienna to Linz and you're thinking what's that well actually it's enabling students to share accommodation with elderly people for mutual advantage and it's you know parts of Germany Austria the Netherlands this is starting to happen and the job of these students is to see does it work from one place to another now early on in their project part of the background to this is that in Linz it's difficult for older people to find accommodation and there's more student housing is required so that kind of impacts their project quite critically and when we started when we did the interviews one of the first findings that we came up with was that 80 percent of the students were very positive about their project outlook all team members said that the team is working well together and is aligned or very well aligned and there's there was a 77 average rating for morale so this is like a month into the project and then we asked that question and this is the most important question it's what is the purpose of your team so three of them said to see if elderly people can co-live with younger people another three of them said to develop a new concept for co-living in Linz and two of them said to find out if the concept from Vienna works in upper Austria now they're all talking about the same thing but these are really different aren't they now it'll be very easy for them to have a whole conversation about their project without realizing they actually have a different objective in mind or there are three different purposes going on here they're quite different so this cross purposes ironically conversation can happen all the time because they're using words like yeah but when but how can we do this and how can we make sure that elderly people they're using words that make them feel like they're on the same page but they're really not when we ask the question what do you think your team should do next these kind of diffs connects on the purpose get magnified and so and so all of these things you know communicate with other people we should rethink the plan we should be aware of the facts do more research most 36% said we're not sure and the reason they're not sure is probably because the conversations they're having with other people aren't quite hitting home because everybody's talking about purposes so the simple story is that we discuss the common ground and the differences we put this data in front of them they captured their ideas and they together agreed revised actions and deadlines going forward but they think said things like you know it's important to address these things even though they might not they might already seem clear and mirror mirror helped me reflect on a lot of important tasks from from different points of view okay so i'll now take you to this samson case study which is slightly more complex so you've got 15 teams and three sub teams they've got various generalists and specialist roles they're all delivering logistics services and they're broad diversity in age and education and nationality and longevity you've got some people who've been in the team for like does 12 years or more and other people have just started so this is slightly more complex because the situation was that ongoing change including the recent sale of their printer business meant that the work loan would reduce by 50 percent despite reassurances that there would be no redundancies the team felt deflated they felt like um they would 50 percent of them would lose their jobs because otherwise it doesn't make sense so the HR manager created an innovation day to create a new um so that she can involve staff in place creating a new role and knowing that innovation doesn't happen when team alignment and positivity is low the HR manager decided to do something about it so the situation is that she's saying people are closing down rather than learning and developing and that and the team leader is saying that if the team can grasp the fact that they can take a lead on exciting logistics projects then we're halfway there we need their leadership their drive and their inspiration so interviews took place the data was presented they did a workshop the results again we've got this kind of false positivity from the outset so if you were a leader and you were going to move into this team you would probably see this you know everyone says the team is working well together 90 percent say they've got the resources they need and you know most of them I've got fairly high morale but if you look under the surface of course 88 percent feel the team is not or is somewhat aligned 67 percent thought that redundancies were likely even though they were told again and again that the redundancies were not going to happen and 56 percent felt negative so first insight people are trying to make sense of their situation in the absence of information so we know this happens even in neuroscience they're telling us that so they're they're told nothing will change but they're finding it difficult to believe so there's confusion on the future of the team they're missing a stretch goal they've been in limbo for months they're waiting for these new projects so timing is everything you can't keep teams held in a limbo situation when you when you're not informing about what the future is or giving them more stretch goals so they're waiting for energy they're waiting for inspiration and the energy is just running really low and then finally something that surprised them all so this is an example of an alignment gap that will occur that nobody will have spotted people are saying that knowledge and experience is not being shared which is being seen as a dependency risk as a source of inefficiency and as a blocker to professional development and innovation so again it's the kind of insight that is affecting team but is unless it's surfaced it's just going to keep eroding their performance so after the results and after they were able to just talk about this together they felt better they were more positive and they were better prepared to succeed effectively and they're saying you know it's interesting to see these insights and be honest with each other and it's a real game changer for a lot of teams when they come to actually talk to each other properly for the first time so in terms of clearing the bog we were talking about the team test now the team test is a free online automated tool it's got 26 behaviors it's all questions they're all about behaviors so you can go ahead and and take that test it needs to be initiated first so somebody needs to set up the the test so that we can generate a unique unique link for your team to answer the questions and get the report I'll show you the results of some of the tests that have already been taken but for now I'm going to give you some data on what the report looked like and ask you to step into the role of facilitator in terms of well what do you get from this data and it's it takes a little while to get into okay I'm going to show you some sample report data on the screen I'm going to ask you to look at that data and say well what is it telling us about alignment and then ask and think about then what would what advice would you give so here's the situation we've got a team of seven people it's a US leadership team in HR consulting so it's completely different environment there's a new CEO on seat it's a long established market leader company but things are changing notably in HR specifically AI has got technological advances that mean that a lot of HR processes are moving along and into that and the come the marketplace is way more competitive so this is really critical background information is a traditional HR consultancy and they're moving into change so I've got four slides of data that are about to come on to the screen I hope you can see the screen properly yet I'm going to show you these slides and ask what you notice about the alignment one by one slide at a time and how the data relates to the background because it's amazing what can come up okay so here's the first slide the question was what is the purpose of the team so have a quick read of this and then I'm going to ask you if you can see it what do you get from that no it is a qualitative open-ended question yeah we have to have it like that because it's a discovery question okay yeah there are only two responses that don't talk about the customer yeah so it's fairly customer focused yeah it's quite vague so all of the you know to well the second one specifically to service the needs of our clients I mean anyone could say that so it's really not that context oriented and it doesn't say at all what they do well yeah but that's an assumption so the the whole thing about asking them to articulate the purpose of the team would be to ask them to be specific about it so I mean if you were going to go in to facilitate this team and take this data to them you could use this as a as a reason to iterate this again to be more specific and surface those assumptions because I mean who knows what's behind what's behind the thinking anything else that you're reading from this yeah there's nothing there about employees and orientation there there are two two here that looks like they've been well it looks like they're it's a sort of message that they're just repeating because they've learned it I mean maybe you'd want to see something like to take advantage of technological opportunities and to become more effective more competitive in providing HR services to our clients for example but they don't look like they're really facing up to to a real purpose here yeah yeah to be really specific about what are we here for you have to get quite specific I mean can the words can be too long of course and you've got to make it brief but there there's a lot missing here yeah very vanilla yeah but it's amazing I mean I'm not going to say that we looking at this are above everybody answering this question but you get a lot of teams who you ask this question to and they they will come up with a statement because they're in it all the time and this is the whole point they're in their reality all the time and you can you sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees so it's very easy for people to put down something and to them those words mean something but to read it alone is a very different meaning so you've got to get people to be much more specific yeah really vanilla quite startling if you it's quite startling for a leadership team okay I'm going to go for the next slide this is more complicated takes a bit more reading if you want me to read it out but if you can't read it I'll read it out but these are the top five behavior scores and the low five behavior scores from this team any insights yeah they seem to be really high on really good on process and structure but are they running in the efficiently in the wrong direction is the question bottom half yeah top half seems to be conflicted with the feedback but this is why the discussion is essential because we're committed to each other's success doing what we're committed to all being silos and everybody and we're committed to being clear on how we differentiate our roles and and how much we show up for meetings and put hours in what does commitment mean here so you know it's the ability so let's say take these three these these ones they don't want to make a mistake so it's the US they'll probably get told off they're careful not to they're not very good at accepting different views they can't really bring up difficult issues and questions so maybe they're they're not in the right environment to to change psychological safety yeah there's no psychological safety in the room so even if they were thinking something they probably wouldn't say it if it's different which is preventing them say that again they're not questioning things because they're not allowed to that's their culture in their team so all of these are about appreciation of diversity and inclusiveness and they're not going to be able to change much if that's their low scores and those scores are quite low actually we constantly look out for changing and what that means but how are they translating that into reality so they're probably aware of the opportunities to get into technology they're probably aware of this and that but they're they're really tightly stuck into their roles and responsibilities as they were any other thoughts on this slide by the way this average score for behavior for this team was 66 percent and sometimes you get a score for a team that's like you know 79 percent and they think oh that sounds great we don't need to do any work but that does mean that nearly a quarter of the time they're actually preventing themselves from being effective because they're not the behaviors aren't aren't optimized towards effectiveness so 66 sounds okay but you know I I don't think it's like there's a lot there's a lot that could be done there okay so this slide's a lot easier this is a question that says what do you think needs development in your team yeah exactly exactly so vision and goals if you put those two together they're all saying we need better vision and goals but they don't feel the they don't feel that they so they don't feel they've got that so they're kind of aware of it and like you said processes they don't need any attention to processes because they're already really structured and they already have that down pat right but the relationships one's pretty big that's probably because they feel they can't really talk to each other properly but it's amazing the number of teams who are in this situation okay I'll just give you the last slide now so this is key opinion ratings clarity alignment preparedness pride and positivity this is what we ask people to rate on the scale of one to five any observations yeah yeah and if they're not facing up to that lack of clarity they might individually say yeah we've got clarity in my world in my blinkered world I have clarity so this doesn't necessarily represent the amount of clarity in the team it's what people are saying they feel clarity on as individuals and so it's important to know that difference so 3.3 is higher than I would have thought if they were fully aware of all of their gaps and all of the alignment issues in the team then this this clarity would probably be low because they'd be more aware of it anything else okay well there is right so what we see is that especially with a strong brand and especially with a company that people feel proud to work for pride is something that represents reputation earned from the past so you could be sitting in let's take any name a big top brand that you'd love to work for city group you could be sitting in a leadership team in city group while they're falling over the edge of the cliff feeling really proud to be working in city group so here they've got a history of being the market leader at HR services and their pride is rock solid you know we can't possibly fail we are HSK so they've got a great brand but they're not so positive in reality why aren't they why is their why is their positivity lower than their pride they know some things up this thing about alignment with the organization 4.2 that's really high so either they're deluded or the whole organization is falling off the end of the cliff because they're not the whole organization doesn't have the doesn't isn't giving them the the framework of the vision and the purpose that they can follow so this needs a discussion I mean you can't you can't be completely you can't draw hard and fast conclusions from this data but it can tell a story that opens up a big discussion about where is this team and what does it need to do to succeed right now and quickly is there anything else anybody wants to say about this slide well yeah yeah and there's a new CEO isn't there so this CEO has filled this in is looking at this probably for the first time so it's quite useful tool for a new person to come into to be able to see all of this and then the new CEO will get a will get a lot from this and if they're if they're worth their salt they'll they'll be making quite a lot of changes but yeah this is probably from their legacy legacy data so we've done 41 teams on this particular tool it's quite new so far we've mostly in the private sector mostly at the operational level overall everybody got a 61 percent score so again you know probably they did it because they felt they needed to the average level of preparedness that we found was 54 percent average level of pride was 71 again they're proud to be in the team but it's not right an average level of positivity that we found in all of these teams was 67 percent so again it's the same sort of pattern this slightly lower level of positivity to pride but preparedness really low so how much can they face up to that so you can do the team test at any time and with the team if you want to there's a URL is on the last page of the slide that will be available and I just want to kind of summarize right now because we've been looking at quite a lot of stuff it's probably been much more on the much less about it than you might have thought but we kind of we do see our context differently you've probably seen this slide before who has seen this slide before actually such a good slide I mean everybody's got a different perspective for a good reason not just because they're individually different but they are of course individually different everybody's got these different personalities so this isn't about actually saying everybody needs to know it the personality profile of everybody else we don't believe that that's a necessity unless the team really needs to be close together we just people just need to know that everyone's different and then there's this last one about how we interpret signals I wanted to to look at this because we can easily see that one of these sort of group of circles is concave but this is something from a neuroscience exercise that basically says the only reason why people we perceive one of them as concave sorry because because the sun because we we we're used to believing that the sun comes from above therefore it is there's no sun in this room the light isn't coming from up here in this room we're pre-programmed in so many ways we haven't our brains haven't matured we're all quite familiar with that concept but this is a really good one to illustrate it because even though we're in a room with light from different from the side we still see it in the same way this is the whole flight bite and how we how we operate how our brains operate in the working world so there's a couple of quotes I've got here one is from the execution and the discipline of getting things done execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it and so we think it's really important to expose the gaps in alignment and close them as a critical part of performance and team effectiveness and the learning process starts with an awareness of what is so I can take any questions if you've got some and that's the end of my presentation thanks very much yep I think if you've got a team that is new it's probably best to wait until one or two months later because then they've already just about got their handle on what they think the situation is and it can be changed rather than coming in from refresh if you've got a team that is having performance issues then anytime yeah I mean as long as as long as a team is aware of what is this exercise that's going to happen and how does it work what do they need to do what's their role in it it's just an exercise like everything else and so the process of clearing the fog needs to establish their participation in the dialogue process more than anything else but that starts with what is best practice dialogue you have to participate they do and the more a culture within a team or a wider organization shows them it's okay to say what they want as a personality they may well be quieter that's true but if they want to participate they can't just completely hold back and so it's not something that can happen straight away unless for example they're given permission and they're they're asked to comment on their views and what we do in the workshops is we have small dialogue groups and in those dialogue groups or three or four people it's quite difficult for a quiet person actually just to hold back because they're in a small dialogue group and it's much safer to talk in that environment so it's just kind of working with what is well yeah it's a bit like the holocracy thing in the sense that in that unique team context with that unique team these people are being employed to do their jobs and they have the experience and the competencies to do that they also need the experience and competencies to say okay here we have a problem or here we have a challenge how can we resolve that so because everything's unique it it is up to the team so the person who's coming in to to run this is purely facilitating they're not going to come in like a bunch of consultants normally do and say okay we can see that from this data your team need to do this this this and this yeah well just having them write down what could we do what then shall we agree to do and who's going to do it and by when and create that action plan of actually well we should do this differently because it only leads to actions and decisions so to capture the actions and decisions talk them through and park the ones that can't be resolved and that's again it's a meta process rather than an answer okay well I hope you've enjoyed it you can come and talk to me with any more questions if you want to and thanks very much for listening and for your time